I wrote this after I applied to at least 60 different places in the hopes of finding a better job and heard nothing in response. My spirit was dwindling because I had believed the hype that the more degreed you were, the better your chances of finding respectable employment would be - a position that would allow you to live and still pay off your student debt. But the shittiest economy I had known since 2009 taught me that degrees or not, if the economy is bad - EVERYONE is doing bad, albeit some probably worse than others. So when I was teaching on a salary of about 20K a year, I couldn't stop asking myself: what was the point of getting those degrees anyway? 

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I keep waiting for someone to save me.
 
Tell me that all those years of work and perfecting my knowledge was worth the lack of friendships and personal hell.
 
Anger turned into bitterness – I hate – downsized corporate gloominess stifles the ability to laugh, turning dreams into blackened smoked licorice
 
Gutting my heart I breathe, resentful of the breath that keeps me alive
 
Scissors to my soul my patience is waning
 
Slavery inside my mind
 
Open door, close another, never seeing, always following glimpses of shadows that fade into night I run like the slave dog chasing a scent
 
Nothing but stars and open fields
 
Where is my heart
 
I left it lying in a field, dancing under the moonlit sky
 
Graves nearby, what is that smell?
 
Hopes buried by economic doom I’m in a dungeon
 
60 tries to escape but rejected every time, why does the rain piss on my clothes
 
I can’t stand the stench of fecal matter inside my brain this is SHIT!
 
Two two-hundred-thousand dollar degrees should be worth more than footprints of promise dissipated by sand
 
Dream or drown
 
It’s the same fuckin funk
 
Fat free fix forever fine fake feminine feast
 
I keep waiting for someone to save me.
 
To rescue me, to tell me that I’m worthy.
 
I keep waiting for the chance to reap the fruits of my labor, and the opportunity that will make me say that the blood, sweat and tears of a $200,000 education were worth it.
 
I’m waiting.
 
And in the meantime I doubt, I fear, and I second-guess.  My soul, my future, my worth.
 
Unhappy, I live.

​When I wrote this I was in a very dark place, desperately seeking transition that I thought would never come.  And then it did.  Literally after I wrote this piece, the Lord sent me a dove carrying an olive leaf. And shortly after that, I was free. 

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