“Still Valley” belongs to a larger ongoing series of creative-critical essays and short stories written in the aftermath of my diagnosis with Fahr’s syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disease. Each piece takes its title from episodes of The Twilight Zone and Red Shoe Diaries, two series that, in different ways, offer languages for altered realities, desire, repetition, suspension, and the instability of ordinary life. In this project, popular media titles become a way of organizing experiences that otherwise resist institutional, diagnostic, or narrative coherence: chronic illness, academic precarity, queer temporality, grief, and the strange condition of living toward futures that continually recede. “Still Valley” names one such condition: the feeling of remaining alive, ambitious, and intellectually devoted while one’s professional future is repeatedly deferred by institutions that promise movement while administering suspension.

Academia often asks people to make themselves intelligible before it offers them belonging. For some, that translation is relatively uncomplicated. For others, institutional life becomes a continual negotiation between lived complexity and the narrow categories available to contain it. Even now, after almost a decade spent in the humanities teaching, writing, researching, and increasingly turning toward theology and narrative studies in Atlantic Canada—with no healthcare or any other coverage as an employee—I still struggle to explain my isolation within academia because no single category seems sufficient to account for it. Over time, I came to realize that what exhausts me is not marginalization in any singular sense but the cumulative burden of existing within institutions that claim to value complexity while continually demanding coherence, legibility, and administrative containment from those whose lives exceeded their frameworks. I am administratively unintelligible: too contradictory for neat institutional narratives of diversity yet perpetually required to render myself coherent within institutional frameworks.Footnote ¹ I do not feel marginalization in any singular sense but the cumulative burden of inhabiting identities institutions claim to recognize while remaining fundamentally unequipped to meaningfully hold the people who live within them. I am Afro-L’nu, queer, neurodivergent, chronically ill, and living with a rare neurodegenerative disease. I’m also approaching 35, an age at which many people expect stability, institutional belonging, or at least the reassuring illusion of forward momentum. For contingent academic workers, time itself is administered in short, anxious intervals: perhaps two or three months of provisional stability before the next contract ends, the next application begins, and one is again required to justify one’s continued presence to institutions sustained by the very precarity they describe as flexibility. This experience is not singular. Recent Canadian commentary on “hope labour,” sessional teaching, and the language of precarious faculty has similarly described academic precarity as a structural condition sustained by universities’ reliance on contingent workers whose labour remains necessary yet insecure.Footnote ² What gets me is not just interpersonal; it’s atmospheric and temporal. Institutional life is defined by suspension, just waiting and waiting.Footnote ³

And waiting some more.

• Waiting for contracts.

• Waiting for recognition.

• Waiting for support.

• Waiting for the promise of inclusion to materialize into something more tangible than rhetoric.

Exhaustion is not just about workload. It comes from the continual demand to remain professionally legible whilst living within systems that distribute stability unevenly and render certain forms of existence forever provisional.Footnote ⁴ The isolation begins to feel temporal as much as interpersonal, caught between institutional narratives of progress and the lived experience of ongoing precarity. Part of what further disillusions me is how academia romanticizes positionalities of teachers, learners, administrators, and overseers as though they exist outside the ordinary capacities for cruelty, entitlement, social manoeuvring, or bad faith that define relationships elsewhere. But universities are not utopian spaces purified of power, resentment, performance, or group dynamics. Anyone can collude to misrepresent. They can weaponize institutional language. And when these dynamics play out against instructors already living within precarity, illness, marginalization, or administrative vulnerability, the consequences are disproportionately severe. What unnerves me respective to that is not criticism, but how readily institutions seem prepared to absorb accusations while demanding near-infinite resilience from those of us subjected to it.

In the absence of meaningful accountability, I learned—and remain grateful for—the whisper networks that often function as informal mechanisms through which patterns of harm are acknowledged and remembered.Footnote ⁵ They arise from the hard reality that official channels frequently absorb, neutralize, or administratively obscure misconduct without producing visible reckoning. Yet these networks are not uncomplicated. While they can operate as necessary forms of mutual protection within precarious environments, their opacity can also create conditions where exclusion becomes difficult to distinguish from accountability, particularly for those already lacking institutional power or social capital. I have witnessed how quickly reputations can calcify beneath the surface of professional life without transparency, explanation, or meaningful recourse. Still, as I participated more candidly in these conversations, I came to understand them as one of the few mechanisms through which people attempted to make informed decisions about whom to trust, which environments to avoid, and how patterns of conduct minimized by official channels continued circulating unofficially. Which underscores how and why I never assumed that shared positionalities, identities, or political vocabularies produced solidarity, generosity, or ethical conduct as a default. Academia tends to encourage the fiction that marginalization itself guarantees greater empathy or moral clarity, but my own experiences repeatedly proved that students, faculty, and administrators alike remain fully capable of cruelty, opportunism, self-preservation, and indifference regardless of the qualifiers they inhabit or publicly profess.Footnote ⁶ Gradually, I found myself less interested in how individuals identified symbolically than in how they behaved materially when questions of risk, vulnerability, accountability, or institutional consequence arose.

It’s funny how quickly ideals dissolve once vulnerability carries material consequences. It’s easy to speak the language of equity, solidarity, care, or justice when nothing tangible is at stake; as in the Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization (EDID) statements, strategic plans, and public-facing commitments through which departments and universities present themselves as inclusive, even when those commitments conflict sharply with the experience of precarious workers seeking actual protection or care. Far more revealing are the moments in which someone’s reputation, livelihood, stability, or future become precarious because those are the moments that expose whether institutional ethics are genuinely lived commitments or merely performances sustained under favourable conditions.Footnote ⁷ Academia has never been simply an intellectual pursuit for me; it has always been the structure through which I pursued livelihood, belonging, and a viable future. This is why its contradictions became so difficult to separate from my own life: The institution that taught me to value justice, care, and critical thought was also shaped by risk management, reputational self-preservation, and disparate distributions of protection. Under such conditions, proximity to progressive discourse does not necessarily produce courage, compassion, or integrity when institutional pressures intensify.

There’s a peculiar sorrow in devoting years of one’s life to a vocation that continually withholds stability while insisting that one remain grateful for proximity alone. Eventually, academia stops feeling like a future steadily approaching less than a series of partial losses: lost opportunities, lost certainties, lost communities, and lost versions of myself that once believed good faith and dedication would lead to belonging. What makes this grief especially difficult to express is that nothing truly ends. The institution remains present, but increasingly as something inaccessible, conditional, and emotionally estranged; a structure I continue orbiting long after it stops feeling capable of holding me with care.Footnote ⁸ I grieve not only what academia has done but what it ceased to make imaginable.

A director was recently hired for a position I pursued. Long before, I had already withdrawn my application after recognizing how deeply unhealthy and untenable the surrounding environment had become, so the outcome itself did not shock me. What lingered wasn’t disappointment over a job I no longer truly believed in, but grief over another imagined future that had quietly closed; another version of academic life in which intellectual work, institutional belonging, and personal stability might still have cohered into something sustainable. Knowing that withdrawing had likely been the healthiest decision does little to lessen the sorrow of recognizing how many forms of hope had already been surrendered long before the official outcome arrived.Footnote ⁹ Experiences like this scatter hope for an equitable and healthy academia like ash.

Under prolonged precarity, uncertainty becomes atmospheric. It migrates from the institution into the psyche and body. One begins checking emails compulsively, rehearsing possible futures, anticipating loss before it arrives, and structuring entire emotional realities around decisions being made elsewhere by people who will never fully experience their consequences. Administrative ambiguity stops feeling bureaucratic and becomes physiological. Sleep becomes difficult. Rest starts feeling irresponsible. Even moments of temporary calm are haunted by the awareness that stability remains conditional and revocable. What bothered me most was realizing how effectively institutional precarity reorganized my relationship to time itself; not as something through which I moved with confidence or continuity, but as a horizon continually interrupted by contingency and waiting. Over time, this altered how I imagined the future in addition to how I experienced loss. I’ve already outlived several beloveds who believed my years of study, teaching, writing, and sacrifice would eventually lead to a stable and dignified life. They died before ever seeing that future materialize. This grief lingers alongside the realization that the versions of me they believed in, “the professor,” the scholar securely situated within an intellectual community, the person whose devotion would eventually be reciprocated by institutional recognition, now remains perpetually deferred. What hurts is not just the absence of stable employment but the sense those worlds organized around hope, reassurance, and promise were for naught.Footnote ¹⁰ Furthermore, this grief does not feel separate from professional precarity; the two begin folding into one another until even ambition is haunted by mourning.

Living with chronic illness and neurodegeneration magnifies these conditions. The Ivory Tower sells intellectual life as disembodied, sustained through endless adaptability, productivity, and output; but the body stays present, even when institutions prefer otherwise. As I aged, I waned physiologically and so grew painfully aware of how time ticked past amidst miscellaneous milestones I’d deferred. I wager my very survival was an anomaly since the institutions continued operating according to temporal expectations fundamentally incompatible with vulnerability, dependency, fluctuation, or limits. Misogynoir, ableism, and a plethora of prejudices also misrecognized my progress and pride. I honestly have no words to aptly convey just how exhausting it becomes to exist wherein endurance is framed as insufficiency.Footnote ¹¹ There’s not much room within academic culture for bodies that cannot reliably conform to ascriptions of productivity, hegemonic composure, or vying in perpetuity. It forces me into what Ellen Samuels calls crip time, a temporal condition in which illness interrupts “linear, progressive time” and the normative milestones through which a life is imagined.Footnote ¹² Time no longer feels abstract or infinitely extensible, but intimate, finite, and biologically contingent. The queer promise of the “not yet,” to borrow from José Esteban Muñoz, becomes charged with a different kind of urgency when the future itself feels medically and materially uncertain.Footnote ¹³ This is why professional timelines coalesce as a matter of survival: how many years remain to build a life, attain dignity, secure a job, or simply experience rest before my body imposes limits beyond my control. Footnote ¹⁴ Watching peers achieve milestones long framed as “eventual” for me—stable employment, homes, marriages, children, and institutional permanence—while I remained suspended within cycles of contingency only augmented the idea that my life was unfolding according to an entirely different temporal order. Even moments of accomplishment became shadowed by the awareness that I had often achieved them through depletion rather than support, survival rather than security.Footnote ¹⁵

In some ways, I guess I’ve come full circle. My mom named me after Fallon Carrington, though she deliberately altered the spelling to “fallen” because she liked to say I was like a fallen angel, an angel who had somehow fallen to her.Footnote ¹⁶ For much of my life, I understood that name through the language of fracture, descent, exile, or displacement. Yet increasingly, I find myself returning to its theological and narrative dimensions differently. The figure of the fallen angel is not only tragic, but unruly: a figure associated with estrangement, yes, but also with refusal, autonomy, and the painful pursuit of self-determined becoming outside structures incapable of holding complexity without demanding submission.Footnote ¹⁷ Perhaps this is partly why theology now feels strangely proximate to the cinematic and narrative worlds that shaped me intellectually for so long. Both are concerned with how human beings construct meaning amidst suffering, contingency, longing, rebellion, and grace. Despite everything academia has taken from me or failed to provide, I cannot say my life has been devoid of love. My partner, kitties, and other beloveds proffer so much tenderness, continuity, and grounding within a life otherwise shaped by uncertainty. Loving and being loved reminds me that dignity is not exclusively exhausted by institutional recognition; and that forms of devotion and care still persist capable of making survival feel meaningful rather than merely endured even amidst grief, precarity, and deferred futures.Footnote ¹⁸