Fear and Desire

“Fear and Desire” is a graduate school essay that reflected my struggle to reconcile what I wanted out of life to what life seemed to want out of me. Though my life has changed a lot since I wrote this, the basic message of it is still true.

How are you going to feed yourself while the rejection letters come in?

What kind of job can you get with a Bachelor’s degree in English?

I once had a film professor who took me under his wing because he appreciated my writing talent and academic drive. He was one of the first of many undergraduate professors who told me that I needed to go to graduate school and become one of their kind. “You get at least $30,000 a year for nine months work, and you get time to write books,” the film professor told me.

You’re going to have to get your Master’s, and your Ph.D., and become a professor if you want a guaranteed living. All these other famous writers, like Toni Morrison and bell hooks, got professorships as their day jobs. That’s what you need to do.

I once crashed at the home of a couple of artists for about a month before I went to grad school. Their house was the family home of one of the artists, and they were lucky to have it because they didn’t make enough money to pay rent. Their telephone was disconnected, their car sat in the driveway with no funds to get it running again. Part-time jobs at the local women’s bookstore gave them their only steady income. They were too proud to accept more than $50 a month from me as rent.

Well, there’s the starving artist life for you. You sure as hell don’t want to go out like that. You don’t want to be 30, 40 or 50 years old with no money like them. You got enough po’ in your life, you don’t need no mo’. You better go to grad school year-round and take 12 credit hours a semester during the regular year, just like you did in undergrad. You ain’t gettin’ any younger your damn self.

I dropped out of grad school depressed and demoralized. I let my undergrad professors and my ignorance guide me into taking a teaching assistantship in Rhetoric and Composition (don’t ask me what that field is about; I don’t know, either). One class into the program, a shocking realization hit me: I DON’T WANT TO TEACH!!!!

Oh shit! Now, how you gon’t be a professor and you don’t wanna teach classes? You could grin and bear it, and become one of those professors that students can’t stand, but damn! This junk is a lot of work! You have to study about teaching theory and teaching practice all this other shit in this program. Now, what you gon’t do?

I moved to Minneapolis and fell in love. With the Twin Cities. With the job market for writers, editors, and desktop publishers. With a woman who found her own pot of gold here personally and financially. I’ve edited a book, had articles published in three local periodicals and a Black lesbian magazine. I write and consult on grants for struggling nonprofit organizations. I’m working on a nonfiction book. I’m getting published a lot, though I’m getting paid very little.

Now, what the fuck are you doing? You’re living in this woman’s house, you got no steady income. Sure, you can write, but it all depends on her!  She dies, she kicks you out in the street, then what? You need to look for a steady job. You know there’s plenty here. You got a job as a copy editor at a newspaper with NO experience when you first came here! You’re 30 now, you got no money, no retirement plan, and plenty of debt.

Now, what you gon’t do?

I’m going to write as I desire, and I’m going to live in fear.

Living with fear and desire began for me a long time ago. I wrote my first poem when I was in the fourth grade. At that time, I was living in a public housing project. As my childhood and young adulthood writing career continued with more poetry, stories, essays and journaling, my living situation twisted and turned with poverty and personal strife. Living my mother and siblings in “the projects” changed to living with them in “the hood,” and then to living by myself in the streets and sleeping in homeless shelters. My struggle to live continued with a period trying to keep a roof over my head on minimum wage jobs, then an attempt at staying with my alcoholic father, which led me to rooming with elderly people for low rent as a struggling college student.

Going to college was both the only way I knew of becoming a “great writer” and the means through which I would become able to take care of myself financially. I was at the bottom, and I alone had to claw my way up. I had to come out of college a “great writer.” I had to get money so taking care of myself wouldn’t be such a struggle anymore. I had to get the top grades so I could get the scholarships and acceptance into the best graduate schools. It was either that or starve, be homeless, be nobody, be dead.

Fear and desire drove me through undergraduate school and pushed me out with a transcript with no grades below a B. Fear and desire drove me into and then out of graduate school. They drove me to Minneapolis. Now I’m trying to keep them from driving me crazy.

I’m sure most creative people in a capitalist society live with fear nagging in one ear and desire imploring in the other. Fear tells us how you’ve got a nerve to think that you should have food, clothing, and shelter for doing what you want to do; you do what the market tells you to do, then you get the money you need to take care of yourself. Fear tells us that you got just as much chances to make a living as a writer as painters and actors do for their work. And aren’t most “fine” artists broke and hungry for patrons? Aren’t most actors unemployed?

Fear really bitches at you when you’re born po’, female, and with color on your face. It tells you that Walker, Morrison, and MacMillan were the lucky ones. Color, female, po’, queer, we’re the in thang now, but we’ll be out of style to the publishers by the time you come dragging out your magnum opus, fear hisses in your ear.

If you can find that room of your own that Virginia Woolf wrote about (a privilege for white women, a lucky break for the rest of us), fear won’t let you enjoy it. If you have an understanding partner or family member with a steady income, fear calls you dependent and helpless, foolish to trust anyone to “take care” of you. Don’t you know you’ve got to take care of your damn self, ain’t nobody gonna give you a thang, fear argues for capitalistic selfishness.

With fear ranting in the one ear, how the hell do you even hear desire whispering in the other?

You hear her, though. Desire pressures you as strongly as fear does. Fear wants you to worry about getting fed, clothed, housed, and paid. Desire worries you with other things:

All I want to do is write. That’s all I ever wanted to do since fourth grade. I want to be better at that than anything else I could ever learn to do.

But how you gonna eat? How you gon’t put a roof over your head? Being good or even great don’t guarantee you shit. You ever heard of Van Gogh? Zora Neale Hurston died broke, too.

I want to be famous. I don’t have to be a literary superstar like Morrison or Walker. But I want my name and my words to live in the minds of many long after I’m gone, like Lorde or Hurston. I don’t want to die anonymous and forgotten.

And what makes you so damn special? What makes you think you write so good that people are going to pay for it? It’s easy to get published these days, but it’s hard to get paid. And gettin’ paid is what it’s all about! Cash Rules Everything Around Me, CREAM get the money!

I would like to finish my Master’s degree, this time in a program for writers.

Now you want to go back to grad school. And not teach? You know that means loans. You want more debt? You got this far without one single loan.

Now what you gon’t do?

A fellow African American female friend of mine once told me, “If it were up to me, we’d all be living together.” Cooperative economics based on sharing instead of capitalism based on selfishness was the way to go, for her. We think of the people who don’t earn a wage as people without worth. Like children. Like elderly people.

Those people get abused and dismissed because they have to be “taken care of.” The necessities that children and elderly people give us aren’t quantified in the dollars and cents that this society values, but the monetary “costs” of “taking care” of them are always highlighted in the media.

Creative people also give our society necessities, but again, there’s no price tag to be placed on intellectual stimulation, spiritual enlightenment, emotional catharsis.

When you’re po’, black, and female in a racist, sexist and capitalist society, you have to fight very hard to assert your value as a human being, because this society already ranks you pretty low. Add to that a vocation that’s devalued, like writing or painting, then you end up literally struggling for your life.

We creative women and people of color have a right to live. To not have to starve or be homeless or be in debt because we are doing what mythologist Joseph Campbell called “following your bliss.” It’s a right we all have to fight for or die, point blank.

Having supportive families and partners is important for surviving as creative people in a capitalist society, but that takes a lot of trust and luck, since so many people have absorbed the idea that creative vocations aren’t “real” jobs.

As my friend implied, it will take a real revolution in economics and values to guarantee the right of creative people to live and create. We all need to get together on this; for my part, I’m trying to form an African-American writers’ group in which we share our work and our aspirations. I’m also a member of a small writers’ group on the Internet. I want to take the purpose of these groups beyond the “we-live-in-oppression-but-we-can-still-feel-good-about-ourselves” level of support groups to awareness and activism to assert our right to live.

I don’t want to fight alone. I know I’m not alone in being tired of fear beating up on me and making it hard to live with my desire. Capitalism says that people are lazy bums who will do nothing if they’re not compelled by fear. What the upholders of capitalism is really afraid of is people not doing what the market tells them to do.

Now, what you gon’t do?