Part time rats: that’s what we were. We learnt a … resilience. We adapted to it – that’s what’s worst. We became … opportunists. Scavengers … Ingratiators …
Auto-humiliators: that’s what we were. Auto-exploiters. We sold ourselves out. We prostituted ourselves. We were our own pimps. Our own slave drivers.
Forced to entrepreneurs of ourselves. Forced to sell ourselves – our intellectual wares. A life lived on our knees. A life on all fours.
Like some dreadful process of natural selection. Like evolution in progress. There were people who could cope with this. Who could live like this, year after year. But not us. We were the dross. We were the losers. We were the weak. The unable to cope.
We were the ill – mentally ill. We were the mentally fucked. We were the couldn’t-cope-with-all-this types.
We weren’t strong enough. We weren’t trainable. We weren’t biddable. We didn’t accept it, the new reality. The casualised reality. We didn’t accept it … not in our hearts. Not in our souls.
We refused in our souls. In what was left of our souls. We said, no, in our heads. In what was left of our heads.
Until Livia scooped us up.
Work in Progress 