A 'Real' Job

“When are you going to get a real job?” they ask. “You know, something to do with your degree.” I can read between the lines, too, and know how they finish the sentence under their breaths, “what was the point in going to uni if you were just going to go back to The Cellar.”

I’m having a really fucking bad day today, that’s why I’ve felt the need to sit down with my piece of shit laptop (which I shouldn’t complain about too much because it cost me £30 quid at the beginning of undergrad and has lasted 4 years and got me a 1^st and a Distinction) and write. I felt a million times worse this morning, but I took grandad shopping and we ended up trying a new café on Worle High Street where a woman asked grandad to be her boyfriend. I feel a bit less stressed after decent banter and half a lemon meringue pie, as a general rule.

Might as well get it out of the way - I’ve just come out of an intense six-year relationship full of love and life changing experiences, as well as many tears and some of the most gutting heartache I’ve ever felt. I know it’ll save us both, but it still stings like a bitch. One day I’ll be able to write incredible things about those years, but this short paragraph will suffice until the scars have been left alone to knit together a little tighter. As a final note, before our names take shape in your mouths, please respect that only me and him will ever know our story in full.

On a happier note, I passed my Master’s degree with flying colours off the back of a year from hell! I’ll graduate with a Distinction in MA English at the winter ceremony in December. For what it’s fucking worth. (I told you I’m having a bad day). If another person says to me “so what you gonna do with it?” I’m going to lose my nut.

Its been just over a month since I handed in my last piece of work… I think you need to calm the fuck down if you think I should’ve sorted my career out by now… Ah, who am I kidding? These kinds of questions frighten me; they make me worry that I’ve done something wrong or that I’m letting people down. That’s why I’ve been bothered enough to write this.

For example, I gave my stepdad a lift in to Weston this morning and he spent the whole journey reeling off places I should apply for and careers I should look in to. He even said, “I thought you did English so you could be a teacher, I thought that was your dream.” I don’t think I have ever expressed that. That said, when you study English, plenty of people assume you’ll become a teacher.

Teaching wasn’t my dream at all. English itself was my dream. When I was 17 and applying to university, I loved to read. I had fallen in love with the magic of the written word, with poetry and metaphor and hopeless romance... All I knew for sure is that I wanted to carry on talking about it forever. I didn’t care if it translated in to a career, and between you and me, I still don’t. I’ve had some moments of true passion during the past four years, moments in which words closed my throat, forcing tears from my eyes. I would study ‘pointless’, enchanting, beautiful language and literature all over again given the chance. In fact, I’d fucking LOVE to.

I know he and my mum love me, and I know they want me to do well, but I also know that they measure success in accordance with money. They want me to go and get a ‘good job’ and buy a big house and find a respectable husband and have two kids (one boy one girl) and go on package holidays twice a year.

That’s nice. It could certainly be worse. I just don’t want it. I’m starting to worry now that I’m convincing myself that I want things I don’t really want at all just because that is what they’re telling me I should want. Applying for jobs I know I would find ridiculously unfulfilling. My head’s a mess. I’m tired from working 40 hours a week just to try to accumulate some money and my family’s attitude is making me feel like I might as well be unemployed.

I also want to address those people who have said to me, “you haven’t been away for a while. That’s not like you. I thought you loved to travel.” I used all of my money getting my Master’s. The loan barely covered my course fees never mind my half of the rent, bills and food. I waitressed for 20-30 hours a week on top of my studies and keeping house just to afford my supposedly ‘pointless’ qualification.

In response to that comment, not being able to go away is destroying my mind. I feel trapped, lonely and sad. I feel… Grey. Like there’s a thunder cloud following me around.

This is transient. I say that to myself a hundred times a day. I’ll be somewhere else in a year. A different person once again. Maybe I’ll have a ‘good job’, maybe I’ll have enough money, maybe I’ll have found somewhere I can call home, because I haven’t really felt at home since we left Ash Close.

I don’t give a fuck about any of those things, as long as I’m happy. I don’t know quite what that happiness will look like yet, but I’m starting to think it looks like a one-way ticket, just as it did all those years ago in the darkest part of Winter when we were 17 and 19.

A Great Taste in Lipstick and a 1st Class Degree

Once, I was discussing my intention to become a university lecturer with a colleague at an office job. She was telling me how her daughter had gone in to accounting, and that ‘she used to have blonde hair, but she started dying it dark because you can’t be taken seriously in business with blonde hair’. I was gobsmacked, not only because I was surprised by the sheer stupidity of what she’d said but also because my hair was down to my hips and shiny, beachy blonde... The fucking CHEEK.

As a heteronormative white female, I can only speculate that the everyday interactions people of colour and/or none-cis individuals are underpinned by their identities as black, gay, trans etc. I hypothesise that this is the case based upon the fact that I experience something similar as a result of my gender. Specifically, in the context of academia.

Heads up – this is an account based solely on my personal experiences over the past 4 years; I’m not laying claim to some sort of objective truth here.

As you may well know from previous posts, I am an MA English student at the University of Nottingham. During my time in higher education, I have received some very sociologically interesting feedback.

Just as my old office job colleague demonstrated, many people in the context of university and beyond have blatantly taken one look at me (I’m tall, slim, wear make-up and have long blonde hair) and decided that I ‘don’t look clever’. Of course, nobody has ever SAID that to me. Rather, they start meticulously explaining things I learned at A Level even though I’m now a master’s student, or make ‘dumb blonde’ jokes, or suggest I look at the ‘more straightforward’ essay questions.

I actually don’t mind this. It makes their thinly-veiled surprise when they read my transcript or speak to me for a few shifts much funnier. Guess what? People don’t have to be just one kind of person. We aren’t stereotypes. We’re 3 dimensional. So what if I’m a clumsy slut-dropper with great taste in lipstick and a 1^st class degree?

Most poignantly, however, is the response I’ve gotten from female lecturers compared with males. On numerous occasions, female lecturers have been curt with me, taken a general disliking to me or been actively unhelpful.

Bear with me; I know this is a controversial statement, so I’ll back it up. One gave me 69 in an essay (one mark below a 1^st) and when I asked her why I didn’t get 70, she said ‘because I didn’t get a first when I was in second year’. Logic.

Another wrote me a bad reference because I forgot to ask permission to include her as a referee. Despite the fact that it was essentially my mistake, I think it was uncalled for and unprofessional. I was a 19-year-old undergrad, for god’s sake.

I have to be especially vague about this last one because it happened very recently. I sent the same email to two lecturers from the same module, one male and one female, and the female replied succinctly (almost robotically), while the male teacher engaged with my comments and proceeded to offer further advice and support. Weird.

So here’s what I’ve surmised. This pattern is less to do with MY social position as a woman and more to do with THEIRS. Based upon my own experiences, I think in the context of academia, women feel like they are on a back foot. It seems that especially high intelligence is not indexical of femininity. Therefore, there is some tension between their identity as a woman and their identity as an academic.

Perhaps female academics feel the need to be assertive because they had to work far harder to achieve the same positions as their male counterparts. I don’t know, but what I do know is that my role as a woman seems to become more and more relevant as I move through the education system.