It’s been helpful to think about the student loan as an advance against royalties, as a business loan of sorts…for big ticket type adulting.

December 30, 2019

Indicative of a whole strain of throat-clearing, the is excerpt lives in an ecosystem of economic strain and financial stress that threatens to enter the diary during every session.

The practical is as merciless on my writing mind as is the psychological (hello, Doubt), the physiological (my dear crip brain). My thinking on disability confronts the above-the-shoulders barriers. My work with creative writing tries to clear the below-the-shoulders hurdles. It’s the practical that I don’t know how to separate from the work at hand. It’s not above or below the shoulders. No, the practical is a threat that comes from beyond-the-shoulders–or maybe originates right-on-top.

This intrusion of the material world, its costs and its threats, shapes the language of my diaries indelibly. In this fossil record, it’s the dominant predator. In this parade, it’s the rain.

So what to do about that?

Jury is still out. (Thank you, COVID-19). The pandemic hit at an especially tough moment in the turn from the creative to the commercial for the memoir. To be back in school was surely strange there, but the return to school wasn’t an absurd shift for someone engaged in disability activism and producing disability literature and enmeshed in teaching in a radically universally designed way. As an outside-the-pages end to the story that gets told in The Intimate Register, it made a kind of sense. School is enough of a continuation of that momentum to seem logical. But then COVID-19 came along and reshuffled everything. From Texas, maybe, I can figure how to play this hand best.

If it seems especially hard to do literary business from the Zoom box of PhD-land, then I have to take some comfort that the fruits of this particular business–#becomingdoctors, as my peers put it, with nary an eyeroll–have quieted some of that distracting uncertainty. If any given day has 40 minutes worth of writing in it, and I spend 25 of those minutes thinking about grocery budgets or utility bills or pick-up/drop-off logistics or when to grade the next set of papers–well, there goes the time you’ve worked so hard to create. There goes the space in your mind you’ve worked so hard to create. There it all goes.

And of course, the business of adult life is not all transactional. Maybe one reason the words get that way sometimes is because I have to clear that space out to realize that there’s more going on beneath this littered surface. Once that surface is visible, tidied, I can see more easily that the core of “big ticket type adulting” is care. Care work. Communities of care. The ethical approach to care, and the fight to make care visible in 21st century U.S. life and culture. In the original entry I got specific there, listing some very practical things there (“retirement and 529 contributions”) before correcting myself (“OK, but I also don’t want this to turn into a to do list”). But really those concerns, those ‘to dos’ are about care: about making sure you’re not a burden on others in the future, about making sure the kids have choices when it comes time for them to their own adulting in a world that could be even less hospitable.

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