On loving monsters
Mar. 7th, 2024 10:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingAs I’m pushing forty, I wish there were advice I could offer younger people, but I feel like my life has been a series of grand attempts that have all resulted in failure. I worked hard and took meritocracy as far as it could go, but it can only go so far. Really, the only advice I can give is to be born with money and to have parents who have connections.
I am no one who comes from nowhere and has no money. I worked hard and was awarded all sorts of prestigious scholarships to go to fancy universities, but getting a degree was as far as that went. While I was in school, I spent all my time working minimum-wage jobs to pay the rent, and it showed. Nobody could see my writing or test scores; all they could see was that I didn’t have the money to dress well. And nobody was mean to me, but no one was going out of their way to offer me a job either.
To give an example of what this looks like, my undergraduate students this semester have asked for extensions on their midterm assignments because they are spending their spring break in: Paris, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Madrid, Cancun, Hawai’i, and the Swiss Alps. Kids like this aren’t bad kids, they just live in a different world than the rest of us. Even without their wealth, their social and cultural capital is immense. Their good breeding shows in every aspect of their beings, and doors open for them.
As you get older, the relative lack of opportunity becomes cumulative. People who are given opportunities are put in a position to be given even more opportunities, while people who are passed over fall more behind with each passing year. By the time you’re forty, this gap in achievement is hugely noticeable. There’s no such thing as “an up-and-coming forty-year-old.” No one is going to take a chance on you if you’re not already established in your field.
What’s understandable is the idea that “if this person hasn’t been successful, there must be something wrong with them.” To a certain extent, that’s true. If you have serious goals that you’ve devoted your life to accomplishing and have been met with consistent failure, the trauma does in fact twist your personality. Not only does it become harder to present yourself as positive and energetic, you start to question why anyone would want you to attempt to manifest the attitude of someone half your age in the first place.
Of course there are people who we in academia call “unicorns.” Sometimes, someone comes from nowhere with no connections, but they’re so precious and perfect and special that everyone feels compelled to give them opportunities. I’m sure every field has its unicorns, and I’m not saying that unicorns are bad. Rather, it’s just that no amount of hard work and talent is going to make you a unicorn. You have to be the right person at the right time in the right place, and your “specialness” has to be attractive to the people in a position to promote you.
Personally speaking, I did my best to be a unicorn. The reason that I’m not as bitter about my failures as perhaps I should be is that I always knew this was a long shot, and that my odds of success were extremely low. Gambling on becoming a unicorn was a chance I took because I believed so strongly in the goals I wanted to accomplish. If I failed, what can you do. But if I succeeded, wouldn’t that be amazing?
What I naively didn’t count on was that, if your “specialness” isn’t attractive, then you’ll be perceived as anomalous and undesirable to a disproportionate degree. Basically, if you’re not normal, and you’re not a unicorn, then you become a monster. And, as a monster, you serve as the scapegoat who symbolizes everything that people in your field don’t like.
To give an example from my own experience, a lot of my graduate work focused on queer writing by female(ish) Asian authors and artists. For a brief moment in the early 2010s, there was a widespread interest in that sort of thing, as well as a certain solidarity between people of all races and ethnicities who identified as “queer” without having a more narrowly defined LGBTQ+ identity. Ironically, the developments of social media over the past decade have destroyed that inclusive solidarity. So now it’s like, “You don’t look Asian or have an Asian name, why are you studying non-Western fiction”; and “you’re not a 100% homosexual cisgender woman, what right do you have to study the work of queer female writers.”
So instead of being special in an attractive way – being a pioneer in writing about something that a lot of people wanted to know more about – I ended up being a caricature of… I don’t even know what. I guess the anxieties that both older and younger people in academia have about identity and how the traditional canon is being shifted and displaced.
And on top of that is the actual queerness of being queer, multiplied by the hybrid strangeness of not coming from a dominant culture (or a culture that can be easily marketed as “a minority culture”). Then, on top of that, I still don’t have any goddamn money, which precludes a lot of “opportunities” that assume someone else will be providing me with a large enough salary to live on. None of that is attractive, and there’s nothing I can do about it through my own power.
I haven’t given up because I’m a cockroach. A kind and gentle cockroach who is supportive of friends and colleagues, hopefully, but still someone who lives on what other people throw away. Meanwhile, during the past ten years, I’ve seen countless other people quit. Quit academia, sure, but also quit writing and quit making art. Quit making zines, and quit making comics. Quit translating, and quit programming.
Even putting the issues of social media numbers aside, it’s difficult to be rejected, and to feel rejected. It’s difficult to not be supported, and to not feel supported. It’s difficult to be made to feel like you’re a gross little fuckup who’s inconveniencing the “real” and “important” people in your field by being delusional and creating stupid and inconsequential work that no one cares about.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not much interested in stories about heroes these days. All things considered, I’d much rather write stories about monsters.
I am no one who comes from nowhere and has no money. I worked hard and was awarded all sorts of prestigious scholarships to go to fancy universities, but getting a degree was as far as that went. While I was in school, I spent all my time working minimum-wage jobs to pay the rent, and it showed. Nobody could see my writing or test scores; all they could see was that I didn’t have the money to dress well. And nobody was mean to me, but no one was going out of their way to offer me a job either.
To give an example of what this looks like, my undergraduate students this semester have asked for extensions on their midterm assignments because they are spending their spring break in: Paris, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Madrid, Cancun, Hawai’i, and the Swiss Alps. Kids like this aren’t bad kids, they just live in a different world than the rest of us. Even without their wealth, their social and cultural capital is immense. Their good breeding shows in every aspect of their beings, and doors open for them.
As you get older, the relative lack of opportunity becomes cumulative. People who are given opportunities are put in a position to be given even more opportunities, while people who are passed over fall more behind with each passing year. By the time you’re forty, this gap in achievement is hugely noticeable. There’s no such thing as “an up-and-coming forty-year-old.” No one is going to take a chance on you if you’re not already established in your field.
What’s understandable is the idea that “if this person hasn’t been successful, there must be something wrong with them.” To a certain extent, that’s true. If you have serious goals that you’ve devoted your life to accomplishing and have been met with consistent failure, the trauma does in fact twist your personality. Not only does it become harder to present yourself as positive and energetic, you start to question why anyone would want you to attempt to manifest the attitude of someone half your age in the first place.
Of course there are people who we in academia call “unicorns.” Sometimes, someone comes from nowhere with no connections, but they’re so precious and perfect and special that everyone feels compelled to give them opportunities. I’m sure every field has its unicorns, and I’m not saying that unicorns are bad. Rather, it’s just that no amount of hard work and talent is going to make you a unicorn. You have to be the right person at the right time in the right place, and your “specialness” has to be attractive to the people in a position to promote you.
Personally speaking, I did my best to be a unicorn. The reason that I’m not as bitter about my failures as perhaps I should be is that I always knew this was a long shot, and that my odds of success were extremely low. Gambling on becoming a unicorn was a chance I took because I believed so strongly in the goals I wanted to accomplish. If I failed, what can you do. But if I succeeded, wouldn’t that be amazing?
What I naively didn’t count on was that, if your “specialness” isn’t attractive, then you’ll be perceived as anomalous and undesirable to a disproportionate degree. Basically, if you’re not normal, and you’re not a unicorn, then you become a monster. And, as a monster, you serve as the scapegoat who symbolizes everything that people in your field don’t like.
To give an example from my own experience, a lot of my graduate work focused on queer writing by female(ish) Asian authors and artists. For a brief moment in the early 2010s, there was a widespread interest in that sort of thing, as well as a certain solidarity between people of all races and ethnicities who identified as “queer” without having a more narrowly defined LGBTQ+ identity. Ironically, the developments of social media over the past decade have destroyed that inclusive solidarity. So now it’s like, “You don’t look Asian or have an Asian name, why are you studying non-Western fiction”; and “you’re not a 100% homosexual cisgender woman, what right do you have to study the work of queer female writers.”
So instead of being special in an attractive way – being a pioneer in writing about something that a lot of people wanted to know more about – I ended up being a caricature of… I don’t even know what. I guess the anxieties that both older and younger people in academia have about identity and how the traditional canon is being shifted and displaced.
And on top of that is the actual queerness of being queer, multiplied by the hybrid strangeness of not coming from a dominant culture (or a culture that can be easily marketed as “a minority culture”). Then, on top of that, I still don’t have any goddamn money, which precludes a lot of “opportunities” that assume someone else will be providing me with a large enough salary to live on. None of that is attractive, and there’s nothing I can do about it through my own power.
I haven’t given up because I’m a cockroach. A kind and gentle cockroach who is supportive of friends and colleagues, hopefully, but still someone who lives on what other people throw away. Meanwhile, during the past ten years, I’ve seen countless other people quit. Quit academia, sure, but also quit writing and quit making art. Quit making zines, and quit making comics. Quit translating, and quit programming.
Even putting the issues of social media numbers aside, it’s difficult to be rejected, and to feel rejected. It’s difficult to not be supported, and to not feel supported. It’s difficult to be made to feel like you’re a gross little fuckup who’s inconveniencing the “real” and “important” people in your field by being delusional and creating stupid and inconsequential work that no one cares about.
So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not much interested in stories about heroes these days. All things considered, I’d much rather write stories about monsters.
