Okay, let’s have a conversation about how trying your best is good enough. I write this as someone who believes this theory. Yet, I beat myself up for nearly everything I do because I always think I can try harder. It winds up being a very tall order.

In school, I’ve become aware of how I operate under the conditions of my own expectations. In reality, I don’t really know how to write an academic paper, but here I am attempting it every week since this semester started. I believe I’m a decent writer—in general—but maybe I was a bit better in the past, like before the brain surgery or back when I was writing my book.

I feel like the memoir was pretty well-written; it was just the highly personal content that made me want to nix its distribution. I also do know how to cite sources, which I learned way back in my 30s at community college in LA. I was good in school for that bit of time. I took cultural anthropology, which I surprisingly excelled in, if I do say so myself.

When writing my book, I spoke a lot on coercive control, so I wound up citing all my many references. The entirety of the book was half kvetching, half sociologically scholarly, and part psychological dissertation about brainwashing.

Well, these past weeks, I’ve been allowing the history professor’s constant notes (most of them highly critical) to give me anxiety and cause me to lose sleep. I know; it’s one fucking class. It’s accelerated into a short summer semester, like we’re all on crack, but it is still just a single class. But I want to get everything done way ahead of schedule, like I do everything else in life. That’s just how I am. And I’ve been absolutely obsessed with getting an ‘A’ or else! Otherwise, I’ll feel like a loser. I know I’m not a loser, but not getting the highest grade makes me feel like one.

So, I haven’t just been working hard and doing the absolute best I can; I’m working beyond the best I can do. Naturally, I’m probably a B student, but I want to be an A student so badly that I think I can go further than I probably can. I’m trying so damn hard.

I’ve been working on the final synthesis, where we all write like a long-ass paragraph at a time. My synthesis is on the Space Race during the Cold War, and my key thesis sentence explains why NASA remained so racist for 25 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The professor, a white man, mind you, keeps getting mad at me because I’m not focused on what a “success” it all was in terms of how the Founding Principles were implemented into America’s Space Program. Easy for him to say…I guess. It’s a long, shitty story about how Ruth Bates Harris, a black woman hired to direct Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action in NASA’s personnel, was then fired for pushing a few boundaries. Then, because of Senate investigations into her bosses, she won her job back, only to be demoted to a position without any real authority to do anything. They truly fuck her about.

In my paper, I have a whole argument drafted about white normativity to give more context about WHY this was happening, especially at that time, but the instructor keeps posting comments about me “blaming” NASA for being racist. But the fact is, it was a racist environment, and in fact, the racism was invisible to the ones trying to enforce barriers upon Ruth Bates Harris. I have actual scholarly evidence of this, but he keeps jumping on me to focus more on what was accomplished at NASA. And I loved the Space Program as much as the next guy. They landed on the moon on my first birthday after all. But it took almost three decades to accomplish even the smallest equity changes at NASA. And now I feel like I’m going through a very similar thing that Harris had to go through, like I’m being silenced for bringing the inner workings of racism to light. How dare I?

Personally, I thought I had a damn good argument for how much more dangerous invisible discrimination is than overt racism, and how white people react when they think their status is being threatened. It reminds me of how some wealthy people feel like they will somehow lose the value of their money if and when poor people gain any. I’m citing a study that proves how this happens (The Minority Majority), and it’s really the same concept as Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet album. They probably said it much better, and of course, cooler than a bunch of academic pontificating, right? Right.