Between everything else I’ve had going on (include falling behind on Animorphs books because I’m too tired to stay awake reading most nights), I read a book recommended to me on Cohost called Ducks: Two Years In The Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (of Hark! A Vagrant fame). The user who wrote the post held it up as part of an example of the great talks Beaton gives since she doesn’t just discuss the book at hand. In the talk that user shared, Beaton took the themes of the book as the starting point and talked further, focusing on the way that class impacts the arts and how a person’s conception of a place doesn’t necessarily reflect the place so much as it reflects the person. Even a person’s experience of a place can sometimes reflect them more than the place they’re at because if someone excepts a ruin, they will find a ruin. If they expect a garbage dumb, they’ll find a garbage dump. The Cohost user brought in some examples from their own life, mainly focusing on how they dislike the common depiction of gas station attendants as vapid wastrels with no prospects who are sometimes even depicted as being a waste of space. Those jobs need to be done and a lot of people doing them are more than just their job. There’s a lot more to people than their situation or the brief context in which you see them, for good or for ill, and one of the things that Beaton’s autobiographical graphic novel does is examine that idea through her experience working off her student debt via jobs in the oil sands of Alberta, Canada.

I don’t want to say too much about the book despite the fact that I think it’s definitely worth a read, though I will add a content warning for sexual assault before recommending you buy it since the only warning I found was one in the book. I would have bought the book anyway, but I’d have appreciate knowing more fully what I was getting myself into before making that committment. Which isn’t why I don’t want to say anything about the book. I just appreciate the experience I had, going into it with no idea beyond that it explores ideas of class, the impact a person’s class has on the arts, and that there’s more to people than the stereotypes about them/their jobs/their class. It’s a really well-written story that was incredibly moving. It was heartbreaking, not just because of the constant sexism, misogyny, harassment, and assault Beaton suffered through during her time there, but because it she captures so well the things that everyone there was doing to support their dreams or the lives they left behind and how those decisions and sacrifices changed them as well as how all that changed her.

It is difficult for me to not feel impacted and drawn in by the very premise of the story. Beaton leaves her home because there are no jobs there and she wants to pay off her college loans so she can do the kind of work she finds interesting and live the kind of life she wants. She sacrifices two years of her life (and a whole lot more along the way) to pay them down and it’s difficult not to read that and feel a mix of sympathy and (a little) envy. I haven’t taken on a job that would put me in a situation nearly so isolated or rough, but I’ve now been setting aside my dreams and the things I’ve felt were important to “making” a life for myself in order to pay off my student loans for over ten years. I wanted to work in theater. I wanted to get an advanced degree and continue studying English literature in some form or another. Instead, I’ve spent a decade cycling between barely making enough to pay the minimums on my various loans (I had to buy a car and then lived on credit during my first year out of college due to just not making enough money), making enough to start paying those loans down, and then getting thrown back to barely making ends meet as a result of some upheaval in my life (like leaving a job that was emotionally and mentally destroying me for one I could tolerate better that paid significantly less, cutting off my parents and all the things I was suddenly paying for myself rather than leeching off family plans, the pandemic and being unable to work full time, leaving my roommates because it turns out they’re not great people, massive increases in my rent, and so one). I wanted to write more than anything else and I can barely afford the time and energy to work on that because I’m still paying down my student loans and barely making ends meet unless I work a bunch of overtime every week.

I’m grateful I can work all this overtime and don’t need a second job or anything, but that doesn’t change how much it sucks to be in this position a decade later. To see how so many of my college friends are living their lives, doing whatever it is their heart desires, because they didn’t have almost $100,000 of student debt by the time they graduated college. They’ve spent all that (and so much more, thanks to interest) on building lives for themselves. On doing work that pays less and is more rewarding. On pursuing their dreams or starting families and all I’ve got to show for it is the knowledge that my rent went up another fifty bucks a month this year and my job is now leaving me more exhausted than ever before. Sure, I’ve managed to start paying down my student loans finally (at least in a way that feels significant), but it’s been ten years. Some of them would be gone already if it wasn’t for the pandemic. It is more than a little difficult to watch so many people I knew and was once close to move on to other periods of their life while I’m still stuck here in the same position I’ve been in since December of 2013 when my first student loan payments came due and wiped out what little I’d been able to save.

There are not a lot of books, yet, that deal with topics like this. That tackle the privileges of class and the ways that even being in the middle class isn’t a guarantee that you’ll be able to set yourself up well for you adulthood. Hell, my dad probably brought in an upper-middleclass income and that still wasn’t enough because my parents refused to help pay for my college education. For any of their children’s college educations. Being well-off or living comfortably as a child doesn’t necessarily help when the deck is so stacked against you from the instant you head off to get a degree that is basically a requirement for any job that will pay a living wage and that doesn’t involve trade school (which has hurdles all its own), and even then those degrees don’t count for much because everyone has them now, most of them mean almost nothing to your job and life after graduation, and most people have saddled themselves with student debt (or a path toward student debt) before they were old enough to buy cigarettes. A decision I made at seventeen has been impacting my life for fifteen years, now, and will carry on for who knows how many more. It sucks and it sucks that so many people I know just don’t get what it means to have to set everything aside for years in the hopes of being able to eventually pick it back up again without the millstone of debt around your neck. Reading Beaton’s book was genuinely the first time I ever felt seen in a story for this specific thing and even that was a stretch.

It’s a really good book that gives life to so many characters, that explores the depths of so many difficult topics, and that somehow manages to maintain the humanity of pretty much everyone you meet. Because even the horrible people are humans, too. Even the people society sees as nothing but horrible stereotypes are humans as well, even when they often wind up falling into patterns of behavior that reinforce those stereotypes more often than not. It’s a really, really good graphic novel and everyone should read it. Maybe you won’t feel seen by it, but it will at least give you a lens through which you could examine some of your own bias or privilege. Plus, it’s really well written and drawn, so it’ll carry you along like misplaced faith in your parents will carry you into significant student debt.