The Weight of Student Loans

 Hanging over my head, feeding my depression was the feeling that I would never get out from under my student debt. The COPD and the eyes getting dimmer and my bleeding insides and the beginning of the Great Recession told me there was no way I was getting out from under my student loan debt. I started really hanging out with the crackheads of Muncie because I thought there was no escape. I spent $500 one night and tried blowing up my heart. When that didn't happen, I found crack had no utility in my life. Since my other suicide attempts had been very unsuccessful, I even got in my head the idea that if I got arrested for a felony then I would have no excuse for killing myself. I got arrested but the federal government kept me carrying out my suicide plan. Prison taught me I was no longer a responsible person which is all that has ever lifted the weight of my student loans from my back.

I wrote all this because I read Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me: An American family’s struggle for student loan redemption and never before have I read anything about student loan debt where I can even begin to recognize myself. See, I think student loads have turned us all into serfs.

And so it felt good to think about dying, in the way that it felt good to take a long nap in order to not be conscious for a while. These thoughts culminated in November 2010, when I met with my father one afternoon at a diner in Brooklyn to retrieve more paperwork. My hope for some forgiving demise had resulted in my being viciously sick for about ten days with what turned out to be strep throat. I refused to go to the doctor in the hope that my condition might worsen into a more serious infection that, even if it didn’t kill me, might force someone to at last lavish me with pity. I coughed up a not insignificant portion of yellowish fluid before my father and I entered the restaurant. We sat at a table, and I frowned at the forms he handed me. I started the conversation by asking, “Theoretically, if I were to, say, kill myself, what would happen to the debt?”

The ACLU has a petition for cancelling student debt here.

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