I’m Grateful, But I’m Pissed

Dana Gainey

I didn’t want to go to college when my parents told me I had to. By the time I realized how much debt I was in, it was already too late to turn back. It’s tempting to wash my hands of the whole situation and write college off as a scam, but that wouldn’t be entirely true—in a certain sense. I really liked – even needed – college. The biggest challenge in going to college wasn’t the academic part at all, but living through it. It was a series of mental health crises punctuated by anxious periods of financial insecurity. 

But being chronically broke and grappling in therapy through the anxieties, depressions, low self-esteem and sexual trauma that seem to be the hallmarks of the modern collegiate experience, along with coming to understand my own queerness, became central to my education. Figuring out how to lift myself up when no one else would was the lesson that I wouldn’t stop learning. So I’m grateful, but I’m pissed.

I was too young and too trusting of my parents and my high school teachers telling me I needed to go to college to get a good job when I took on the debt. I didn’t understand the implications of it until my own debt exceeded forty grand. Compared to a lot of people, I got off easy. You could argue that I agreed to this, but how could I, at eighteen, with every authority figure telling me that this was the right thing to do, possibly have been capable of providing informed consent.

I feel like I was sold to Ursula the sea witch and left for dead. Dramatic, I know. At the same time, I love my new human legs. And on top of that I loathe not having my lovely singing voice. Just like King Trident, my parents didn’t even know I was involved with a sea witch. They just thought I was doing as mermaids do. The education I got was necessary and personally valuable, but I feel woefully unprepared to manage the consequences of that education. Everyone around me kept pushing me to go to college. And damn it, I went. But did I have a choice? If coercion is assault, what is financial coercion?

I love my professors and my friends and the experiences I’ve had, but that doesn’t make the position I’m in alright. The way that student debt works is predatory, and college students are paying to preserve the status quo. I’m reminded of Kids These Days, a book by Malcom Harris, which discusses the way in which the education system functions to make workers, acclimating kids to a labor environment all so that our economy and way of life can remain the same—not for the kids, but for the older people relying on them.

I hadn’t realized how indignant I felt until I sat here in four and a half minutes of silence and arrived at this feeling. Now I’m here, and I like who I am here, but I find my current position, and this current state of affairs, as unconscionable, if not criminal. I hate that I felt like I had no choices. But I’m stronger than I thought I was and I know how to advocate for myself, so at least now I won’t feel bad about making other people feel bad about being complicit.

Dana Gainey (they/them) is an artist living in New Orleans. They otherwise keep occupied with podcasts, yoga, and trying to be a comedian around their friends. Their art can be found on instagram at @seaaa.hag.