Becoming Irrelevant; February 11 2026

School has me feeling a bit stagnant from a career standpoint, and that feels rather counter to the point. I haven’t written anything new in a bit – though I do have a new novel concept – and I haven’t been submitting to any new publications either. I’ve done my midterms (passed one, waiting on results for the other two) and signed up for my summer courses. Since I’m on a reduced courseload overall, I’m using the summer term to make up for the electives I didn’t take earlier this year.

I miss writing, though. Reading week is coming up, but I’m going to dedicate that to assignments.

If learning about all the ways social injustice is baked into the systems we live in is doing anything for my writing, though, it’s giving me plenty of anger. I’ve learned I write my best stuff when I’m pissed off about something – the way the rich deliberately keep disabled people in poverty, weaponized incompetence and the societal expectations of women, the dismissal of mental health issues in children. When I’ve got opinions, my work is at its strongest.

I will say, one of my professors in particular stokes that ire better than others, but hey. I was bound to have a prof I didn’t like sooner or later, and I lucked out in my first term.

Just… One of his arguments against social workers (he called us ‘leeches’, to be exact) was that social work relies on homelessness and poverty to get paid. That we profit off a system we claim we’re trying to fix. If there’s no more poverty, there’s no more social work, which puts us out of a job…

But that would put us in poverty, which we would have ideally eradicated through the creation of equitable systems. Being no longer needed is the goal. He doesn’t seem to understand this as a counterpoint.

But then, this guy also scoffed at the idea of universal basic income. Sigh. I’m not going to change his mind.

Maybe I can change somebody else’s.