This marks the post over the middle point. I made it half a year. Crazy, right?
And to mark this auspicious occasion, I’m going to write about something I’ve been batting around in the back of my mind for a while. I’ve been fairly transparent about my fears for the world, for politics, for the future of everything on this blog. I’ve also tried to share my optimism and my forward-thinking sense of potential.
Today, I want to give my version of the “the inches you need are all around you” speech, one of my favorite movie scenes that is overused by my students who are learning rhetorical analysis, but I love Pacino, so I get a good chuckle from it every time.
That speech is about football, but sports metaphors (game metaphors) are perfect for considering life in general. It’s a pretty good speech, honestly, but this is the part I want to start from today:
On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone around us to pieces for that inch. We CLAW with our finger nails for that inch.
Cause we know, when we add up all those inches, that’s going to make the fucking difference, between WINNING and LOSING, between LIVING and DYING.
I’ll tell you this, in any fight, it is the guy who is willing to die who is going to win that inch. And I know if I am going to have any life anymore it is because, I am still willing to fight, and die for that inch because that is what LIVING is.
The six inches in front of your face.
It’s either a sad commentary on life or, as I choose to see it, the very essence of who and what we are.
I made a post a while back– it’s buried in here– about a talk that I had with one of my mentors while I was nearing the end of my PhD. He told me, months before when I asked him for some moral support, that he “couldn’t help me” and that “we aren’t sure you’ll make it.” This was, objectively, some weird coaching attempt to motivate me. I was ahead of schedule, my research was better received by the field than some, and I’d done far more complex person-based research and writing than my peers. So all he served to do was offend me and piss me off, which I guess might have been his plan all along.
But the last time he and I spoke, and he was offering me actual advice, he offered me a pair of great nuggets of wisdom and one thing that illustrated a cultural gap between us.
The first good piece of advice he offered me was about handling adversity, and I’ve said it to other people since. I was having serious problems with another member of the faculty (this faculty member was a trainwreck, and I was watching said faculty member harm other people emotionally and sour them on the field). I wanted out of this person’s way, but I had a semester left of working with said person. This mentor told me “you can stand on your head for 14 weeks if you know it’ll be over.” I think he was literally wrong; if I stood on my head for 14 weeks I’m pretty sure I’d die. But the point was right. And I made it through that semester and have never had to deal with that issue again.
The other thing he told me that was useful– though also a little hard to hear– is that I’ve been viewed by others as having an unrealistic sense of justice and that I need to pick my hills to die on. The latter part is really good advice, and I’ve heard it again and again in my career, and I think I’ve gotten better at it. I refuse to accept that my sense of justice is unrealistic, though. I prefer to think that other people settle. It’s not unrealistic to expect people to be the best version of themselves, but it is certainly self-serving to think that expecting people to do their best is unrealistic.
The last thing he told me that day that stuck with me was a response to something I said. I told him that as a first generation student, a working class poor kid, a mixed-blood Cherokee who isn’t enrolled but lives a Cherokee life, I feel like I spend a great deal of my time in battle. I used a lot of shield/sword metaphors because my research was on World of Warcraft, so they fit well. He told me “I know you feel that way. But you need to put down the sword and stop fighting.”
All due respect to that man– and I mean that, I’m not going to name names here, but if he ever reads this he knows who he is, and I respect him more than I respect most people I’ve met in this world, and I would take up my sword to go defend him if someone came at his integrity– but that’s something a white man from a well-off family can say to a poor person of color that fails to grasp the situation.
Because you know what? Every second of my professional life is a fight.
That’s not to say that I dislike or don’t trust people, or that I’m always under direct attack. That’s not true at all. I love my coworkers (I feel like after growing up with no family but my mom in the last few years, marrying Julie and finding my job in AIMS, I finally HAVE a family). And I don’t get more general frustration than the next academic. It’s a job that is filled with red tape and moments where if you’re a logical person you just think “what in the world?” but it’s also a job where I get to work with intelligent people and help shape the next generations. I get to do cool stuff. I get to think for a living. It’s awesome.
But it’s still a fight every day because of a sad fact that I keep having to point out to people as much as sometimes they want me to stop. I am not SUPPOSED to be where I am.
Let me contextualize that. America is built on a dream of upward mobility, but it’s largely a farce. This generation, in fact, is projected to do worse than its parents. My father was a Cherokee whose family fled relocation and had spent 2-3 generations hiding among the Mexican immigrant population of a small Midwestern town who couldn’t tell the difference. He didn’t graduate from high school and got a GED after his time as a Marine. He probably would have died in Vietnam, but he had a small hole in his heart (a birth defect) which disqualified him from going, so he ended up being an MP in the states protecting VIPs when they visited the base. My mother graduated at mid-term her senior year and didn’t go to college because she wanted to go be with my father. He ended up being a police officer, then sort of a nomadic driver. My mom worked any and every job she could, but she never got the education she deserved until she was disabled and could go back to college (after I’d gone).
I was supposed to grow up and do a menial minimum wage job. No one expected me to be anything. But I was smart. Am I smart? I guess I am smart. I have degrees. I’m a doctor (of Rhetoric, but it counts). I rose above.
Sort of.
Julie and I still live paycheck-to-paycheck and dodge bill collectors during the thin pay summer months. People still act as if my not wearing expensive clothes or speaking in colloquial language indicates that I’m not sophisticated enough.
Think of it this way: I’m a beneficial virus. My presence in academia makes it better for everyone. I bring a different perspective, I’m good at my job so there’s no loss, and I illustrate what could be. But the system itself, the structure of academia doesn’t want me. It wants the idea of me– the idea of diversity, of the self-made person– but it doesn’t really want someone who is so different. Someone who is so challenging.
Every day it’s a fight, to some degree, because the very nature of the academy is meant to wash people like me out. It’s trying hard to push my friends and loved ones to leave (those who haven’t already). It’s a machine built to perpetuate itself in many ways.
And again, I don’t mean that it’s bad. I have plenty of support these days. I’m happy. I work hard, and sometimes people really frustrate me when they don’t realize things like that I drive a crappy car with a dent in it because I’m poor and not to offend them, but I generally have it good.
But this… this is my hill.
And so that’s my motivational speech to anyone reading this. Find your hill to die on, but then flip the script. It needs to be the thing you’d die for, but instead, you need to live for it. You need to live through it.
For anyone who has been told they can’t do something, who feels like it’s too hard or too insurmountable, that the damage you’d incur is too painful or too overwhelming, I’m right here to show you that it’s not. If you want something enough, if you need something enough, you can do anything. We live in an American society where the motto is to do less, get by on what you can. That’s what a loser does. That’s how you slide into the rut of mediocrity and lose the things you love. Because just like Al Pacino said in the chunk of his speech I quoted above, people will take things from you. They’ll take every last thing from you if you let them.
You have to be willing to die for it, though. And I don’t mean metaphorically. You have to literally be willing to offer up your life. You can’t go through life with one foot out the door, always glancing over your shoulder. You have to square up and take the fight to them.
Once you’re willing to die for something, once you stand at the top of the hill and you growl and you look down, once you taste your own blood and feel the deep, bone-penetrating ache of the battle to get to the top of that hill in the first place, it’s not so hard to understand how it all works.
What holds human beings– particularly Americans–back is the fear of what you could lose, what could happen to you if you try and fail. What might people think? What might people say? I might lose my job! My credit might get ruined! I might not make the list at the club.
Life is easier than that. Really, it is.
There’s you.
There’s a dragon.
That dragon could be any of a number of things. But it’s the thing you want to slay, the battle you want to win.
So you go fight it.
You will win. Or you will die.
You can really remove any other potential ending from the equation if you want to be real. If you’re not dead, you can still fight. When you’re dead, it’s over.
But all that matters is that you fight like there’s no reason to look back.
That’s the whole secret to life, people. 40 years on earth and the secret to survival was in my favorite games and stories all along. And I’m handing it to you, halfway through a year of blogging every day.
To live a life worth living, you have to slay dragons. And to slay a dragon, you have to accept that the dragon might kill you. It might eat you. It might burn you to ashes.
And you have to be okay with the idea that you could end up being that pile of ash (because some day, you will be ashes. You just will. I wish I could tell you that you’ll live forever, but we all know better). You have to on some level make peace with that idea and accept that if everything goes the worst possible way it’ll be okay. You’ll feel like you got your reward anyway.
You have to accept that you might not win.
But you could.
And if you do… THAT is what it means to be alive.
My name is Phill Alexander and I slay dragons for a living. You should give it a shot.
Tomorrow I’ll hop off my high horse and get back to being sarcastic. Thanks for reading, both of you. 🙂