I’ll never forget the caveat a fellow ex-academic gave me five years ago when I asked for blogging advice: You’ve got to keep at it. There’s nothing sadder than an abandoned blog. A prolific writer, Lisa used her blog to rant: about the $100,000-debt she’d racked up to earn a history doctorate; about the obscenely difficult humanities PhD market. I thought of her as that hangry woman: hungry to join the professoriate and madder than hell that she couldn’t.

Hangry wasn’t a term I could apply to myself back then. The blog I’d started had been my quixotic statement of commitment to writing. And in particular, to the memoir I’d been trying to set down for almost ten years. But the truth was I had neither the balls of fire nor the sense of mission Lisa did to keep screaming into the void. She wanted to expose the rottenness of academe, liberate other graduate students with truth. I respected her. But all I could think was good luck with that.

It took me six months to realize that my mission was to shut up about the memoir I was going to write and just set the damn thing down. So I abandoned the blog and started outlining. Then other things claimed my attention. The small liberal arts college where I’d taught part-time needed to do a salutary “restructuring.” What that meant in practice was blitzing its humanities offerings to only as many as its full time faculty and a handful of adjuncts could teach. So in the summer of 2018, I taught my last class and bailed like a rat off a sinking ship.

I landed a job with a state agency that catered to crusty, hard-headed firemen who didn’t think too much of women. It didn’t pay well but I held on for dear life, sitting in a gray cubicle. Listening to the assorted snorts and wheezes of colleagues who communicated only by email. And struggling with a fat and psychopathic boss who picked me apart in an office with no windows nobody else in upper management wanted. Writing after hours and in private became my refuge. The job was hell, but a hell that bought me enough security to focus on the memoir.

Only I couldn’t. Three months into both my job and the book, I became so riddled with anxiety I stopped writing and went into therapy. The therapist said it was compounded trauma. The shock of leaving academia for a new job. And of probing half-processed, razor-edged memories for stories. By spring, I crawled back to my writing. My boss’s reign of terror had ended and she more or less ignored me. Once my work was done, I could do what I liked so long as I remained at my desk looking occupied. So I journaled, mostly about the psychopathic boss and my snorting, wheezing colleagues. Then I got brazen and took notes for book chapters. Suddenly I loved my job. I was having my revenge and eating it, too.

For almost a year I did this. And then COVID devoured the world in March of 2020, turning a one-week vacation into an extended stay at home. Soon I found myself with more time and space than I’d had in years. No more psychopathic boss glaring down her nose at me. She’d turned tail and fled as soon as a new director got hired later than spring. So I wrote. My colleagues, meantime, forgot about me. And eventually, about what I was supposed to be doing in the first place.

Fast forward to August 2021. Still marooned at home, I now had a revised memoir manuscript. But I couldn’t celebrate because pandemic cutbacks and backroom politics had swallowed my job and left me unemployed. My anxiety spiked to levels I’d not seen since I started seeing my therapist. I couldn’t sleep; I slammed down meds. All I could think about was losing all the ground I gained. The townhouse I’d miraculously lucked into on a tiny civil servant’s salary. And my inevitable decline into hunger and want. My new obsession soon made me hangry: devoured by a fear and rage I could not control.

I went on unemployment and snagged the first part time job I could find: working at the market up the street from where I lived doing curbside delivery. I chugged down SlimFast milkshakes to save money and eventually took myself to the local food pantry for groceries. Wealthy interfaith Christians with a penchant for organic food and connections to expensive city markets ran the place. Of course I didn’t realize this until the day they shoved three $15 chunks of Parmigiano Reggiano into my astonished hands.  

I found a temp job with possibilities for permanence and quit the curbside job in late October. But it took more than a month after that to finally turn down the fire alarm in my brain enough to think like a rational person again. I stopped guzzling the SlimFast and cooked proper meals for myself. My kitchen soon became the one place in my house I wanted to be in the most; yet no matter how much I cooking I did, the comfort I found there wasn’t enough. For three years, I’d feasted on the words of my memoir. Then I’d stopped, first out of rage at losing my job, then out of fear I’d be unable to feed my body. Now I was compensating, but with food.

Without realizing it, I’d become word-hungry. All along, the kitchen had been my substitute study. What I needed to do with writing was what I had been doing with cooking: slicing, dicing and sautéeing; mixing, sifting and baking. Creating because I needed to create. Creating because I had a hunger that cried out to be sated. Then I remembered Lisa and the blog I’d left behind. The irony made me smile. I’d finally become the hangry writer on a mission to discover what was next.