Stiffed.

Overall, I think tipping culture is a net good. (Perhaps, one day, I will write my thesis on that, too). However, it is one of those things that, by virtue of being an unregulated system, requires goodwill in patronage in order to succeed. Most days, I make what I believe I am worth. ($20 an hour on average. Which is $24,000 a year and well below the poverty line, but perhaps, one day, I will write my thesis on that, too.) This is the job that must pay my bills.

There are also very defeating days which I believe a higher power bestows upon me to remind me of my place in society. Two Sundays ago, I was forced to come into work while running a fever of 101.2 degrees Fahrenheit. I was stiffed three times in a row. At the end of my shift, I had made $11 an hour. The hostesses had made more than I had. The high-schoolers in To-Go had made more than I had.

This is the downfall of tipping which almost makes the system fail entirely.

Earlier the previous semester, I called my mom at 6am the next morning while I drove to my advertising lecture, and I cried. The last table I had the night before had forgotten my name and called out “Hey, girl!” when they wanted my attention. They left at 10pm without leaving a tip. “I had to tip-out on those tables. I had to pay to serve them.” I was heartbroken by the reality of being stiffed. “I am nothing to them.”

The publishing industry, like the restaurant industry, is one which thrives off of unpaid labor.

Because I chose this line of work, I have seen my fair share. The semester before I graduated, I was taking 16 credit hours while working part-time at Texas Roadhouse to pay rent, because all three of my internships were unpaid. Even now, after earning my degree, the closest thing to a “real job” that I’ve achieved is a volunteer position reviewing submissions for a literary magazine in Charlotte. Despite being told that they have no paid positions to offer me, I do the work in hopes I can one day convince them otherwise.

I chose to be an English major because I love writing, and I love reading, and I feel it enriches the world. I feel no STEM degree could fulfill my soul the way literature can and has. And yet, I can’t help the disdain I feel when my partner reveals his starting offer for his entry-level software engineer position is $81,000 a year— more than my parents made as high school teachers with multiple degrees and twenty years of experience.

Why is it that interns, servers, and teachers are so undervalued? Why are we forced to settle for “experience” instead of a salary? Why are we meant to feel grateful for $20 an hour?

Sometimes I wonder if I have made the gravest mistake with my four-year investment. The object of a degree is to make money. It is a tool that opens doors to greater and greater sums of money. Perhaps that is true for the business and engineering degrees of the world, but English degrees, like all things related to literature and art, will always and forever be an item of only passion. What doors has this degree opened for me? I pay my bills by bringing sweet tea and peanuts to hungry, blue-collar veterans.

The only hope is that one day, somehow, I will be one of the lucky ones. I will be the acquisitions editor for a Penguin Random House imprint, even though I’m too scared to actually apply for any of the internships. I’ll start the literary magazine that gains thousands of subscribers overnight, even though I’m too scared to even publish my own writing. (What would the people I knew in high school think if they found my lame ramblings about post-grad unemployment?)

But I often wonder if I wasted my time and my money on this degree. I often wonder if I will ever actually use it for what I wanted it for, or if I’ll end up trying to convince 16-year-olds that Shakespeare was the Elizabethan Mr. Beast for $40,000 a year. The problem with the English degree isn’t that it’s useless, but that it requires an absurd amount of talent and hard work in order to succeed. In the same way that tipping is a system which can fail easily, the English degree can easily become another decoration on the wall of a 35-year-old Texas Roadhouse server who was never good enough to become one of the lucky ones. She never had the guts to move to New York or work for one of the Big Five, or start her own magazine, or write a book, or get a PhD, so she rotted away in Athens, GA doing menial unpaid labor and scraping by.

Before I was born, and before she decided to become a high school teacher, my mom owned an imaging center. She did it out of spite, to prove to her previous employer that it wasn’t hard, and that she could put him out of business. Once she succeeded, she hated her job. It was a project born from hatred and driven without investment in the genre.

She had five white towels, and she used one every morning to wash her face before she went to work. Every day, she counted them. Only three more towels. Only two more towels. One more towel, and then it’s the weekend.

My father hated accounting, but was extremely frugal. He didn’t need fulfillment from his career, he just needed money. He was going to work as hard as possible and make as much money as possible, and then he was going to retire early at 50. It wouldn’t matter that he hated his job, because he was only going to do it for thirty years.

Then, he died four days before his 40th birthday.

So, this is what I tell myself when I worry I made a mistake: When we are scoured by the nuclear fallout or alien invasion, we will not remember the Ray Krocs and the Jack Welchs of the world. We will remember the Walt Whitmans and the Ray Bradbury’s. We will not define ourselves by our salesmanship, or our ability to write excel spreadsheets for the next quarter. We will be remembered by that which truly defines humanity: our ability to create art.

“Medicine, law, business, engineering— these are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love? These are what we stay alive for.” Dead Poets Society (1989)

I want to look back on my life and know that I tried to make the dream work. Even if I’m just a high school English teacher, or a volunteer submissions reader at a local magazine, or a server at Texas Roadhouse, I’ll know that I tried to be something big and I failed. I wasn’t good enough. But if I had given up on Shakespeare and Whitman and Melville and done Advertising or Business or Accounting like my father, I’d never know if I could have made it in the publishing world. I’d wonder for the rest of my life if I could have achieved that dream had I truly tried. I’d rather be not-good-enough than good-enough-and-never-knew.

For now, I will pour sweet teas and refill baskets of bread and I will write and I will dream and I will try.

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1892)