Ugly Cry Face
This Valentines our kitchen became a cottage industry producing cards for the beloved people in our lives. As someone who has never actually had a valentine’s card I’m a bit ambivalent on public display but another year of systemic devaluing of the people I care about pushed me and my child into intensive production.
Card 24 of paper glue and dinosaur stickers and I realised that I was writing one for ‘mum’, yup actually sending myself a Valentines underlining in psychic neon why I’m not on any dating apps. Ah me as I feel an existential shiver, an internal voice of a school teacher whose name I have forgotten gently says just because you didn’t get a card doesn’t mean you’re not loveable. Put the self-destructive script down, mummy.
I guess the same can be said of most public service workers, just because it feels like you’re being set up for failure buckling under the Utopian targets and an appreciation-deficit, doesn’t mean you don’t deserve better.
The requirement to distinguish your work from that of the system you work within is a survival skill for most of us working in the public service. Nothing new in that. But the tension between our duty of care to our students/patients and, maybe more realistically clients, and our duty of care to ourselves is the reason why so many of us get split off from what we should be feeling. Anger. Instead internalized and transformed into a workforce mental health crisis. In Higher Education, last year’s UCU survey linked 79% work intensification with 53% experiencing depression and 29% saying they are emotionally drained every single day of their working lives. The brave research of Dr Liz Morrish making the clear-to-anyone-actually-working-in-education link between commodification, work intensification and performance management and the visible mental distress of the workforce.
It took me a decade of therapeutic slog to be able to articulate how angry I am about some things and in general, and not expect the walls to cave in so believe me when I say that I don’t underestimate how hard this is to do. But when public sector workers can’t bear to feel anger about the abuse of our service we are at risk of a political blindness that denies us the possibility of resistance and change.
I heard the journalist Dorothy Byrne on the radio describe self-pity as an essential survival skill. To show yourself with real feeling some appreciation when you’re in a system that doesn’t value you.
This is at the heart of the Higher Education strike action taking place right now. If you’re a hot mess in the academy thank you because it is precisely the time to see the ugly-cry-face of our professional status. The demand to keep calm and carry on is not our protection it’s the stuff of coercive control and this, dear colleagues, is our call to action.
To follow UCU’s strike action on social media search for #UCUstrike and #weareatbreakingpoint #OneOfUsAllOfUs.