Earlier today, I was watching a movie. It was one of those feel-good things that just hit the right spot. I needed to feel good. Then, it said what they always say — it’s never too late. Instead of feeling good, I felt something tighten. I followed that feeling back, the way you sometimes do, involuntarily. The way the mind moves when it knows something the surface hasn’t caught up to yet.
I was led to a memory of a professor I once knew, smiling warmly, proud of her department, for admitting a sixty-year-old into their doctoral program. She was trying to make a point to me about the detour I took away from a scholarly career. Her pride was genuine. The welcome she talked about was real. Then I heard myself ask her: would you hire her when she’s done?
The smile dropped. The silence answered.
Internally, I felt and said it. Yeah, I thought so.
There is a particular kind of being pushed out that you cannot point to.
I have tried. I have sat with it, turned it over, looked for the edges of it. And what I keep coming back to is this: it doesn’t leave marks you can show anyone. No incident report. No smoking gun. No moment where someone said the thing that would make it legible to a witness. Just the slow, persistent pull of a structure moving in a direction that was never quite built for you.
A current. That’s the closest I can get. It doesn’t know your name. It doesn’t care to, either. It doesn’t need to. It just moves.
I’ve been in institutional life long enough to know the difference between struggling and being shoved. I’ve sat in rooms where someone smiled warmly about access and inclusion while the math of the actual labor market sat quietly in the corner, unaddressed. I’ve watched institutions take credit for opening doors while having no accountability whatsoever for what happens on the other side of them. I’ve learned to read the gap between what gets said and what is actually true.
What I have a harder time doing is holding onto my own read on things. This is, I now think, part of how it works. It’s not by conspiracy. Just by structure. When there’s no hand you can point to, no will of intention, your mind will reach for other explanations. You start to wonder if the current was ever really there. If maybe you’re just a weak swimmer.
Am I? No. I am not a weak swimmer. But is it that? No, it can’t be. It isn’t.
I am here mostly by force of will and luck. Some days it’s more luck. Some days it’s more will. Some days I’m not sure how I’m still upright. But I know what I’ve been swimming against, I feel it, even when I can’t name it out loud, even when the words dissolve before I can get them into a sentence that anyone else would believe.
The knowing and caring fall to me. I know because I’ve tried to speak about it. And have faced others who can’t believe me. There are times when I don’t even believe myself.
The institution doesn’t owe me witness. But I am keeping my own record.
And I am still here.
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