I write to you, dear reader, from this labor day. I am trying to avoid laboring today. I mowed the lawn. I toyed with email. I did a little writing. And now I’m at my computer, writing to you, dear reader. Documenting my attempt to avoid labor through the labor of this writing.
It is Monday, September 2nd, 2024. I’m listening to the live set from Glastonbury that R.E.M. just released on Spotify. The concert is from 1999. I’m odd for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is that I prefer late 90’s R.E.M. I bought UP when I was sixteen and it remains one of my favorite albums. This concert has some killer performances of killer songs from that killer album. Killer is a slang adjective that hip youngsters like me use when we’re talking about hip music. Killer.
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I’m one week into a new semester here at THEEE University of Iowa. This is year number three in Iowa City. I’m serving as program coordinator for English Education, Associate Department Chair for the department of Teaching and Learning, and I’m on countless committees. All of that on top of teaching, writing, and trying to have a personal life that is social, creative, and dynamic. That’s too much, kind reader, if I do say so myself.
I’ve spent too many of my forty-four years doing too much. Starting improv theaters, directing plays, writing books, getting advanced degrees. I think I might have an inferiority complex. Always trying to prove my worth through work. Through labor. Prove my worth to who? I have no idea. Maybe my parents. Maybe myself. Maybe you.
I’m rereading one of my favorite academic books for a paper I’m writing. Learning to be White by The Reverend Thandeka is a masterpiece. So much better than anything I’ve written during my last ten years as a professor. Amongst other things, Thandeka makes a strong case for the ways that children learn to repress feelings and desires that might threaten their caretakers and, in so doing, cost them their place in the world.
I’m learning, through the labor of psychoanalytic therapy, that I may have spent much of my life repressing or attempting to erase feelings and desires – namely anger and grief – that might have cost me my place in the world at any given moment in my past. This process began with my parents, continued as I moved through school, and was reified as I became a teacher. It was exacerbated by the many close relationships I’ve had. I’ve spent an enormous amount of unconscious energy repressing thoughts, feelings, and desires so as to fit in. Sometimes I did okay. Other times I didn’t. Ultimately, I think this repression stems from an extremely volatile childhood in which, at any moment, my reality could be and often was undone. A lifetime spent avoiding my feelings and desires has come to a head. I’m a wreck, but in the best of possible ways. I’m doing what Hamlet told his mother she needed to do. Or what Richard Wright attempted to do at the end of his masterpiece Black Boy.
I’m looking at myself in the mirror. I’m looking squarely at my life.
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Talk about labor! On top of the labor of my job. Labor day? I need labor days. A sabbath that goes on for a century would help. Saturday if you’re Jewish, Sunday if you’re Christian, seven-days-a-week if you’re Sam Tanner looking squarely at your life.
Look, I’ll make it through this time and season. I always do. By the skin of my teeth, the grace of God, or whatever. The desires and feelings I’ve long been estranged from are seeping out now. Coming to the surface. It is very unpleasant to encounter them, but encounter them I will. Making peace with ghosts. I’m done being haunted. Ready for a new morning.
And that’s what I’m thinking about on this Labor Day, 2024. Listening to R.E.M. Pretty killer, eh?
Eh.
Samuel Jaye Tanner 