The Diary of a Superfluous Bugbear

On Losing my Best Gig Ever, and Finding the Strength to Keep Going

Announcements

I am heading to Arizona State University to present at Genocide Awareness Week events next week, so there may not be a new weekly essay here, depending on how tired I am when I get back. If not, things will continue with a free post the following week.

Meanwhile, The Bugbear Dispatch’s spring sale continues, with paid monthly and annual subscription prices slashed by over 25% to $5 and $55, respectively. If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, why not take advantage of these prices, which are the lowest I’ll be offering all year?

From Impossible to Superfluous: A Modern American Bugbear’s Story

As regular readers of The Bugbear Dispatch will know, I’ve spent much of my life living in my head. An introvert, a bookish and highly sensitive child, a weird kid, my rich inner life and my tendency to intellectualize everything became my coping mechanism for growing up “different” without having a clear sense of why I felt that way. Evangelical indoctrination meant much delayed recognition of my queerness, which lurked for many years beneath a crisis of faith. I know I’ve written this somewhere before—I can’t be arsed to remember exactly where just at the moment—but I once quipped to a new friend in grad school that having existential crises was my hobby. (Note to self: get better hobbies.)

Inherently cruel systems have a tendency to make people hate themselves. By the time I was 16 or so, I was already feeling like, as I put it to myself inside my own head, “an impossible person who shouldn’t exist.” People like me aren’t supposed to come from evangelical families. I’m not the only one who’s observed that, either. I’ve been straight up asked how, growing up the way I did, I became a non-believing lefty, but in fairness to the people who asked, that was before I was out as trans, even to myself.

That sense of being “impossible” used to be a source of great stress to me. There was a core part of my sense of self that was simply incompatible with evangelical Christianity, and until I was able to accept myself and assert myself to my family, that situation was tearing me apart. Again, inherently cruel systems have a tendency to make people hate themselves. If the social mechanisms to produce those feelings weren’t in place, after all, how would those systems survive?

Capitalism is one such system, and earlier this week it dealt me a blow. The steadiest, best-paying gig I’ve ever had as a writer—one that was, all in all, quite functional and even nice—was suddenly ripped away from me. I was proud of being a columnist for openDemocracy, and I’m very proud of the body of work I’ve published there. My weekly columns, I am told, always did well with the core UK audience. My editors didn’t want my contract to be terminated, but here I am. The mediapocalypse continues. And because I was a contract worker—half-time, which was great for me, but still not an official employee—I only get paid for the thirty days after being let go, not any other kind of severance.