By my senior year of college, I had already learned that intelligence does not pay tuition. (Sometimes I’m a slow learner.)
I was preparing for graduate school, but I had also lost a scholarship and been dropped abruptly into the arithmetic of survival. I was paying for college myself. I was struggling financially. Whatever illusions I had once held about brilliance carrying me through life had already burned away.
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I paid my bills by typing. I worked for a hand surgeon, transcribing medical notes, precise, unforgiving work where errors mattered. It wasn’t clerical filler. It was how I stayed enrolled. It was how intellectual ambition remained materially possible at all.
One afternoon, waiting for class
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