http://freudian-slip.org

I keep meaning to blog, but every time I sit down, something more fucked up and horrible happens, leaving me in a state of shock and sadness so great that I just wander away. Instead of saying something, I tweet incomprehensible ramblings from my friends. Sometimes I retweet feminist things, but mostly I am tired.

These are all highly triggering.

A So. Cal derby girl was shot by her husband before he turned the gun on himself.
A Florida derby girl was beaten by her partner so badly he did $500,000 dollars of damage to her, and she is still recovering.
A Canadian derby girl is missing, and has been for weeks
There’s Penn State. That doesn’t need a link.
There’s ESPN covering up molestation.
Oh, and police pepper sprayed…all of Seattle.
A white man puts himself in the place a of “poor black kid” and by doing so illustrates the gross misunderstanding people have of poverty and race and debt.
Paypal refers to charity for poor children as “not a worthy cause,” though in the wake of a PR nightmare and what was probably the worst day on earth for whatever poor intern is stuck with the Paypal facebook, Paypal fixed the issue.

I think about Occupy a lot. I think about class. Narratives. What we’ve done.

Here goes nothing. I’m going to share my story first and preface it by saying that I am incredibly fortunate, and it’s sad that my situation falls under the heading of Incrediby Fortunate.

People say that Occupy is lead by spoiled kids with too much time and too many lattes, but I know this is a lie. Occupy is desperation at its absolute purest; it’s a generation realizing that terrible mistakes were made with us and we now have to adjust to living with these mistakes while simultaneously being judged for them.

My mother groomed me for college since I was five. I was given the speech, of course. If I go to college, I will somehow escape my mother’s fate by virtue of being educated. My mother didn’t want me to flip burgers, or strip, or take an administrative position with no mobility. My mother wanted what most parents want—for her kid to do better than she did. When I asked my high school career counselor how people pay for college, she said that loans are available for college, and the education will enable me to get a job that pays me enough to pay off the loans plus some interest to ensure that another person can have a loan. I was 16 and I wasn’t fiscally worldly. I trusted adults. I went to college.

I left school with a mountain of debt. I believed that if I was educated and tenacious and honorable, there would be a job for me (this is a continuation of “if you get good grades, you can go to college,” which is also a lie). I do have degrees people decry as useless, but I find it funny when people look down on the humanities. I am an editor now. Many people couldn’t conjugate a verb if it wore revealing lingerie and came with a map. The fellow from Forbes magazine could have used an editor with a background in class and race issues. That nonsense with Paypal would have never happened if they hired anyone who was adept at social issues and communication at the same time. I am useful.

Anyway, I won’t go into how much student debt I had upon graduation, but the payments are often more than I actually take home (I pay almost 1/3 of my paycheck in taxes, and could not afford both loan payments and retirement savings). This debt was acrued on top of various scholarships, a grant, and payments made while in school. It was a staggering number that I was told would be paid off with the money I’d make for being educated a cut above the rest. Indeed, as scary as this is, in school I was among the best and the brightest. I’m supposed to be some kind of creepy genius, and I might be one. I haven’t thought about it much and I won’t go into my qualifications, but suffice to say they are numerous. Unfortunately, there is nothing called summa cum debt forgiveness.

Upon graduation from college, when I realized the gravity of my student debt and employment prospects, I reconciled myself to the fact that I would not do better than my mother. I only tread water when the loans are paid. I accepted long ago that I would never be able to afford a house or could never have a wedding if I wanted one. I have a skilled job that makes use of my talents and education and I live paycheck to paycheck. I do not have much credit card debt, because I used my credit cards for emergencies only (I am incredibly lucky, because credit card companies prey on college students, hoping they rack up a $10,000 balance before they even have a job. I escaped this through sheer dumb luck). I have a small, shared apartment that is cheap for the area. I have a little car that I use to get to my job. I live slightly worse than I did when I was actually in college.

I have the education needed for my position; I would be unable to have this job without going to college. Most of my paycheck is used to pay the loans I ran up to get the job. Isn’t that a trick? Isn’t that amazing? I have a friend who wanted to be a teacher, and chose the profession thinking that teachers are always needed and she would have a job. She needed her certification and her M.Ed. to become a teacher in her state. The salary for a teacher in her state is not enough money for her to pay off the loan she needed to become a teacher. If she could even find a job, which is an entirely different problem.

How does that sound reasonable and logical to anyone? How? Explain it to me.

This doesn’t even make sense when you’re stoned, let alone when you’re a thinking human being.

I wanted to pay my student debt. I wanted to pay the universities I went to for the education I recieved. I had some truly amazing teachers and professors, and I wanted to pay for their time. I wanted to pay for the time of everyone who made the universities run for me, from the registrars to the professors to the custodians. I do not want to have to pay 50 times the cost of my education for the rest of my life, when I could have paid off what I owe with reasonable interest already. When people graduate with $30,000 in college loans, and pay $400 a month faithfully for 20 years (when $400 monthly would pay that debt in 7 years) and still have $20,000 left to pay, they are no longer paying for college. They are paying Sallie Mae for having been born poor. I don’t want something for nothing and neither does Occupy. I only want to stop being punished.

The root of the Occupy movement is desperation; a generation realized that it is the proletariat in the worst way. We paid to get a job, and can never do anything else except pay that money back. We are not even producing things we can’t afford, we paid for the privilege of coming to work (for people who then spit on us and call us whiners looking for a handout).

So please, let’s not start with the latte talk, vicious classists. I can see the sadness and fear driving Occupy. This is not hard.

It’s not just this lie that my generation has to contend with. There is a whole social order of necessity that we can not buy into because we went to school instead, and we are punished for this, though mentally instead of fiscally.

As I said, I can not have that student debt and buy a house or have a wedding. I also cannot afford children, but I am lucky to have access to health care so that I will not accidentally have a child and we all starve to death. In truth, I would like a house, and I am undecided on marriage and children. I think I could make a decision like that if I knew I could handle the fiscal issues that go along with children. I don’t know that, so I opt to keep the damage contained. I made a mistake by believing that boot straps and hard work were all it would take to give me a modest life.

I am often asked why I am not married and why I do not have children. Almost everyone asks me this, especially people I haven’t seen in many years (thanks, facebook!). This is socially acceptable—to ask a woman what exactly she’s up to with her own vagina, since she’s clearly not using it in a way that is expected. No one asks me why I didn’t make other choices, like why I am not an astronaut or a NASCAR fan. They ask me about what’s been taking up residence inside my body, and how socially sanctioned is that residence.

They are not asking for a concrete answer. When people say, “Oh, you didn’t have a family? Why not?” they are asking, “Why did you not uphold your part of the social order? How did you screw that up? What deviant lifestyle are you living?” Yet if I had a child, I would need assistance to feed them and would be socially derided for not knowing how to keep my legs closed. Truthfully, I am living the life of the educated poor, with the added derision heaped upon women who side-stepped the burden of having a family, either by choice or by necessity.

What the current system does is destroy the entire social order, not just the class order. The protests against the 99% seem to come from people who want to cling to the concept of hard work as a bottom line. They probably want to believe, like my mother did, that their children will be able to do better than they can.

Yet the reality is that if you go to college and work hard and apply yourself, you can have three jobs and no health insurance? Eighty-hour work weeks? The inability to have children? Small, cold apartments? If you do not go to college, you may have the exact same thing, only with extra derision for not having the grit and determination to…buy into a broken and unsustainable system, I guess.

Unless you have privilege or incredible luck, the top of the game now is the total inability to thrive. Basic survival is incredible good fortune. That is horrible.

And there is no way out. We have created an entire generation of people who ruined their lives by believing in bootstraps. Yet the next generation just can’t skip college, because the job market demands university for everyone.

Occupy isn’t spoiled. They are trapped and they are scared, and so are the rest of us.

And the very least you could do is stop lying.