CW: Suicide, addiction, poverty
This week I was listening to Terry Gross interview journalist and author Will Bunch when he used the phrase "deaths of despair." I immediately paused the podcast and began reading. I hadn’t heard the phrase before and was particularly intrigued because Bunch was referencing the lives we’re losing as a result of the despair those who are deeply indebted experience due to the burden of student loans.
If you’re someone who’s already familiar with some of my writing, you might know that while I was in grad school, an essay of mine called "Another Year Older and Deeper in Debt" was anthologized in Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class. Since this essay was published, I no longer publish under my birth name or understand myself as female along with the likes of Eileen Myles who was also published in the anthology and has since come out as nonbinary.
I wrote this small essay about my experience with debt in a time of my life where I had some financial relief for the first time in a handful of years after college, but the debt still loomed. Though I didn’t need to pay my student loans while in grad school nor take out more debt since I was in a fully-funded MFA program, I was aware that going back to school was putting me more deeply in debt as every day passed and most of my loans continued to accrue interest as they were in forbearance.
For all of my 20s, I felt depressed and incredibly anxious in large part due to the burden of my school debt. I stole from workplaces and took home extra food from meetings that were sometimes my one meal of the day. I relied on boyfriends and friends to share extra food they had. I lost friends who didn’t understand that I couldn’t go out and do things that cost money. I sold the clothes a boyfriend stole for me from American Apparel so I could eat or cover my rent for the month in addition to my student loans. I worked at least two or three jobs since graduating in order to barely keep my head above water, knowing that I was crushing myself in order to continue living inside a house of cards. I had no safety net or place to go for more than a few days or weeks at a time if I could no longer afford housing. Social services were not available to me because I made $30k a year as an editorial assistant in San Francisco, which was above the poverty line, but the law didn’t account for the fact that after my student loans, I had $100, sometimes $50 if I had to go to the doctor or had an unexpected cost, to live off of for the month. I stopped buying shampoo and conditioner or toothpaste or getting haircuts. I learned to cut my hair on my own and I cleaned myself and everything else with a large bottle of Dr. Bronner’s. When my grandmother sent me $20 in the mail every few months, I cried and called her immediately to thank her while ensuring I sounded better than I felt. It was one of the most creative times of my life, purely out of stubbornness and desperation. It was also a period in which I considered taking my life or hoped I would get hit by a bus or severely injured so someone would help me. I’m embarrassed and ashamed to admit this, but it’s true. My journals from the time prove it.
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