Photo from the Successful Online Plea
Growing up Altricial
There’s the social expectation of how you should live your life and there’s how you’d want to, absent this external pressure. I did not like football and never attempted to look under the girls’ skirts at secondary school.
Growing up an outcast benefited me in this way: I became self-aware as a natural requirement of self-preservation. A friend said that, at age five, she had conversations with herself about how her father was a bad man because of the way he treated her mother. Even after glaring evidence against the idea that my parents were faultless, my brainwashing had been so thorough and complete, that it would be decades before I started to place what was presented to me next to what I observed and come to my own conclusions.
As an adolescent, by paying attention to how I was different from others and how these differences impacted my quality of life, I learned the placement of the boundaries set for me, and began to manoeuvre with relative safety within them. I did this by becoming increasingly invisible, then, one day, by disappearing altogether from the small island of Barbados where I’d grown up.
‘Altricial’ is the term used to describe animals born with their eyes closed. Entering the world helpless, they’re supposed to be afforded greater protection and care than ‘precocial’ species, born wide awake and able to fend for themselves. The advantage is the brains of altricial animals tend to grow larger and they have more time to develop their survival skills. My eyes stayed closed for almost 30 years, and this, despite subjecting myself to inspections, acquiescing to daily schedules I had not created which dictated when I should arrive, eat and was free to leave. Miserable, my eyes stayed closed although the expectation wasn’t only that I allow myself to be exploited, but that I do so with a smile to earn letters of reference.
And the caregivers, also the supposed protectors? Sentinels of the state of pacifism, unquestioning, they imitated the mistakes of their guardians, feeding us, their offspring, the same empty rhetoric that was fed them. Therefore, I stayed in school and attempted, knowing I could not do it, to integrate and differentiate (science would make more money than art); wore a gown and square academic cap and, getting up (while still asleep) got a job as I’d been told that a job is something you must keep for the rest of your life or else you would be a ‘drop out’.
What blind trust in those who had come before and were supposed to have figured it all out. To work for more money—the amount required to live without worry—I would have to stay on the path leading to this blog entry. To leave my small island, I entered into contract with the Devil.
My Student Loan Story
My student loan story is this: I borrowed 25, 000 USD and, owing my soul at the end of ten years, having paid over 50, 000 USD and given away my pride, I created a crowdfunding campaign I shared on Facebook. Of my six hundred and something “Facebook friends”, I got 20 USD. This was my last desperate attempt to escape the emotional exhaustion of being indebted in such a literal way to the government, however, and my expectations were low going in. Understandably, no one is going to give you their key while remaining themselves, fettered in debt. How many people with mortgages, car loans, utilities, cell phone, credit card and medical debts?
The crowdfunding campaign had an unexpected result though. Someone paid the remainder of my debt—almost 7000 USD. The only way out of the debt sentence—the trap with no cap—based on made up numbers seems to be by chance. All my emotions had been, by then, eroded away by fear of what happens when you continue to default. The Barbados Student Loan Revolving Fund was publishing the names of defaulters in the papers, but, accustomed to being shamed for my differences, that wouldn’t have been the worst of it. More impactful was my continuing to live in this state of not belonging to myself, of living to feed the loan which, never satiated, only grew more monstrous.
Me dancing the day I FINALLY paid off my student loan
Payment of the debt didn’t create in me joy, only some relief from anxiety accompanying it. The dominant feeling was of absence…the absence of feeling, apathy. Life didn’t require my participation for it (life) to happen to me. My focus had been so wholly on perhaps ending up in a jail with physical bars that I’d been distracted from knowing I’d always been in one without.
There would be no break from labouring all day, because the rent was due and although able to walk to work, how was I going to continue feeding myself without labouring for money? I woke up the day after my student loan had been paid to realise, for the first time, that I’d been born into debt.
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