Soulful Strides to Promotion & Tenure (Apr. 2024)
Tax Time
Tax day rolled in last week and with it were long lines at the post office, feelings of trepidation around signing up for payment plans and chatter about the new taxes laws that impact us all. Regardless of if you owe the IRS or anticipate a refund this year, we all pay ‘taxes” as we journey through life. I am not speaking about financial taxes, I am referring to the emotional tax we pay each day - at work and sometimes at play.
Emotional tax refers to the toll that experiences of “feeling othered”, practices of “code switching”, and “delusions of meritocracy”, take on our emotional well-being and psychological health. The emotional tax often manifests as increasing stress, anxiety, and feelings of isolation as well as heightened strategies to reach a level of perfection that simply does not exist.
Because taxes are a part of life - and we each experience the aforementioned experiences at one time or another, how do we pay our emotional tax bill, while still maintaining our mental health? Notice I didn’t say avoid the tax bill, I said pay it..because we all will.
Just like in a game of Monopoly where there are places one pays a tax bill - utility tax or water works tax, so is the same in the game of higher education. Here the emotional tax bill is due at 5 year intervals - assistant to associate and then associate to full. There are additional smaller emotional tax bills due along the academic journey, but these are the large ones and regardless if the tax is large or small, it must be paid.
So, let’s think this through. What if you set up a payment plan for the emotional tax bill - a plan between you and your mental health - and make payments once per week. Simply put, when you feel devalued or invisible, pay the emotional tax bill in the form of a positive affirmation to yourself. When you feel overworked and exhausted, pay the emotional tax bill in the form of rest - yes, close the door to your office, turn the lights off, and take a nap (perhaps literally, but also figuratively,). A kinda pay as you go payment plan.
The tax man cometh regardless of how much we pretend he doesn’t exist. The best way to deal with him is to realize there is no escape from the bill per se, but you can make provisions so that payment doesn’t bankrupt your well-being. And now that you know tax time in higher education (especially the academic journey) is not specific to April, start your pay as you go plan now, so when the time comes to pay the tax bill (large or small), you can pay it without losing your mind, soul, and spirit.
“We are socialized into systems that cause us to conform and believe our worth is connected to how much we can produce. Our constant labor becomes a prison that allows us to be disembodied. We become easy for the systems to manipulate, disconnected from our power as divine beings and hopeless. We forget how to dream. This is how grind culture continues. We internalize the lies and in turn become agents of an unsustainable way of living”