unapprovedthoughts

This blog is about my literacy journey, and honestly, it’s about a lot more than just reading and writing. It’s about how I learned to make sense of the world around me through my environment and the systems I had to navigate.

When most folks think of literacy, they think of reading and writing, and that’s exactly what I thought before enrolling in ISED-748 with Dr. Perez. Now, I understand that literacy comes in many forms beyond that. My own literacy journey is about learning how to survive, how to interpret the world around me, and how to move through systems that didn’t understand or account for my reality. My understanding of myself was shaped early on by my home life, reinforced by school, and later challenged through my experiences in the military and college.

Using Bakhtin’s concept of ideological becoming, this project explores how my beliefs and sense of self were formed through the different voices and systems I encountered over the years. I didn’t start with my own understanding; I learned it through experience and eventually began to question and reshape it to what it is today.

I chose a Tumblr blog format for this project mainly because I was a chronically online teenager who used Tumblr to express myself during some of the most turbulent years of my life, and thought it would be fun. I like to think that all those nights blogging into the dark hours of the morning are finally paying off.

Each post represents a moment, and together these moments show not just what happened, but how those experiences shaped the way I understand the world, and even myself. 

Some of these posts are heavy, but that's life sometimes. And if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that literacy isn’t just about making sense of texts, it’s about making sense of your life.

On my phone, I have a reminders widget that helps me keep track of everything: do laundry, tax appointment 4/9, buy dog food. But there’s one reminder on there that’s a bit different. It’s more of a mantra:

“All is well, everything is working out in my favor, I am safe.”

It’s something I look at when my thoughts start to spiral. It reminds me that I am safe now, and that no matter what, things will be okay. After the 31 years I’ve been through on this earth, I know I have the gumption to get through anything.

Growing up, I lived in Grass Valley, California on a farm (of sorts). I was surrounded by pine trees, running around barefoot in red dirt, and hearing the cricket symphony at night. Our house had two bedrooms and, at one point, ten people were living in it. I am the youngest of seven children, and I shared a room with three of my sisters. It was a small house, but I remember the hominess of it, the loudness of chatter from my family, the smells of what my Mom was cooking in the kitchen for dinner. It was nearly 100 years old when my parents bought it, and it had all sorts of issues, like when you wanted to take a shower after someone you would have to bail out the tub with a bucket and dump the water into the toilet, or else wait 7 hours for it to drain. Or the critters you’d find around the house and property, like rats or rattlesnakes or even black widow spiders. But still, it was our home.

It was a cold and windy day, and my family was not prepared for the weather, so we went to Ross and got to get new jackets. We only really got to buy clothes once a year for school, so this was quite the treat. Mine was white and pink and reversible, I loved it so much, and I used that jacket until I outgrew it a couple years later. That day, we went to the wharf and got salt water taffy and got scared by the iconic bush guy and we visited the SF zoo. I mainly remember sitting in the back of the family car driving through the city with the towering skyscrapers that I had to crane my neck up to see, the way the colorful houses were squeezed together, and the way that people expressed themselves made quite the impression on me.

When we were leaving the city, we were in gridlock traffic on the 101, which has one of the coolest views of the city’s skyscrapers. My parents hated any city really, but San Francisco especially. My dad had been making comments all day, but at that moment, he was getting more and more agitated. When he got like that, the safest thing to do was to stay quiet.

“This place is a hellhole, Debbie. At this rate, we won’t be home until midnight.” He grumbled to my Mom. She nodded, and looked out the window. 

Suddenly, we heard the engine of a Harley Davidson motorcycle, and its rider was a man in a leather bra and leather chaps anddddd not much else. This was my Dad’s last straw.

“GODDAMN SAN FRANCISCO!” He bellowed as he pounded the steering wheel.I thought to myself, Wow people are so free here. I have to live here someday.

That moment changed the trajectory for my entire life, it showed me that the world I grew up in wasn’t the only way to live.

Why am I telling you all this, you ask? Well this isn’t just a story about how I got to where I am now, but it’s about the systems, environments, and experiences that shaped how I saw the world, how I learned to navigate them, and how I eventually began to question them.

Recently, I was on the phone with my Mom and she mentioned how I used to “play” sick so I wouldn’t have to go to school. At the time, I guess I could see why she would think that. Through most of grade school, every morning I would feel these twisting pains in my gut, to the point where I would start to feel nauseous. A few hours later, the feeling would pass.

As an adult, I know now that it was anxiety. It wasn’t easy growing up in the household that I did.

Remember that farm (of sorts) I grew up on? It was more dysfunctional than functional, and we had more animals than our family could realistically handle. We were expected to help out, which sometimes meant waking up at the crack of dawn to clean horse stalls before going to school. My parents were strict about schedules: bed by 9:00 p.m. and up by 6:00 a.m., even on weekends. There wasn’t much room for rest, or play.

But the hardest part wasn’t the workload, it was the unpredictability at home.

When my dad came home from work, my siblings and I moved through the house like soldiers in a field of active landmines. Anything could set him off. My Mom looked the other way, which was her own way to navigate the space safely. Even just leaving the house for school was a reminder of what I was dealing with everyday. Next to the front door was a hole in the wall my dad had punched through in anger. It was never fixed. It just stayed there, a constant reminder of what could happen if you stepped out of line. 

This was my normal. I didn’t realize it was any different until I started sleeping over at my friends’ houses.

My dad wasn’t just some controlling asshole. He was the sole provider for a family of seven; working long, exhausting construction hours and eventually turning to drugs to cope with the pressure. That was the reality of growing up with a parent struggling with addiction.

Living with that kind of constant anxiety deeply affected my school experience. It’s hard to focus on homework when your parents are screaming at each other until 1 a.m. It’s hard to answer questions in class when it feels like your throat is closing up. It’s hard to pay attention when your mind is somewhere else entirely. It wasn’t long before I was labeled as a “bad” student in school. 

I don’t remember anyone at school ever asking how things were at home. And honestly, I don’t think I would have told them even if they had. Despite everything, they were still my family. That was my normal, and I didn’t really have another option but to keep going.

As I moved through middle school and high school, I carried the label of being a “bad student.” The only classes I did well in were the ones where I could do the work in class like woodworking, media, anything like that.

After my parents’ divorce, my mom and I moved into a studio apartment outside Sacramento. The house I had lived in my whole life got foreclosed, and my parents sold the animals. With all my siblings gone, it felt like my parent’s frustration had zeroed in on me.

My mom was struggling. She was on welfare, partially supported by my grandma, and had been raising kids since she was 19. I’m the youngest of seven, with a 19-year age gap between me and my oldest brother. By the time it was just me left, she was over parenting.

I remember her telling me, more than once, “I wish you graduated high school four years ago so I could go live my life.” I was 12. It was clear to me that I was something she still had to deal with, not someone she wanted to raise.

A lot of things were left up to me to figure out. Pads, deodorant, a hairbrush. Everything became a trade-off, if I went to Taco Bell with friends, that meant I couldn’t afford something I actually needed with the little money I could scrounge up. 

At least I got to go to my older sister Sam’s place once a week, where she did her best to make me feel taken care of. She had been a built-in babysitter for my parents when I was born, and she raised me in a lot of ways. She was a single mom herself, working and going to school full time while taking care of her daughter Destiny, but she always managed to find ways to help me too. She majored in screenwriting, and we often watched all sorts of movies from her classes together.

I liked writing too. My English teachers saw that, but I rarely turned in work, not because I couldn’t do it, but because everything else going on in my life made it hard to keep up. That didn’t matter, a lot of teachers simply shrugged and gave up on me. I was yelled at, told I had no excuses, and once a teacher told the whole class that “In a few years, Calleigh is probably going to end up working at 7/11 with a work ethic like hers.” All because I didn’t turn in 10 pages of notes for the week. Ironically, this happened in an AVID class, a class meant to prepare students for college.

So yeah. “Bad student.”

At that point, I was more focused on being out with my friends, staying away from home as much as possible. My mom had already made it clear what she thought my future looked like. When I brought up college, she told me there was no way I would be able to go. How was I going to pay for it? That idea shut things down quick and fast.

Now, I realize my school followed a rigid 'official script' that simply had no room for my reality back then. Because this script was based on the values of a stable middle-class life, my teachers couldn't see the invisible work I was doing just to survive an unpredictable home. This placed me in a constant double bind (Gutiérrez, 2011), an impossible situation where I had to choose between meeting the school’s narrow demands and managing the basic needs of my own life.

By my senior year of high school, I was two years behind in credits. All that hanging out with friends into the late hours of the night was catching up with me. I ended up in an accelerated program to try to catch up. Even the teachers there told me it probably couldn’t be done, but I did it anyway. Six months later, I graduated earlier than the rest of my year.

Not long after that, my mom sat on my bed and told me she was moving in with my grandma and that I couldn’t come with her. I remember her hugging me and telling me that this is the way my family was, that all the children moved out at 18. My stomach dropped.

I needed to find a job. I needed to figure out where I was going to live. So I did.

I got a full-time job at a thrift store and moved in with a coworker after knowing her for a week. That didn’t last long. After a few months, I begged my mom to let me move into my Grandma’s house, and she eventually agreed, but with a catch. I had three months to find somewhere else to go.

Around that same time, I got fired for being late three minutes total over three months. Funnily enough now, my first boyfriend ghosted me.

I tried not to be at home, so I started couch hopping between friends’ places. I didn’t have a car, so I walked everywhere, sometimes ten miles a day. I was just trying to get through it.

One day, I was walking to a friend’s house and it was pouring rain. Like I’m talking TORRIENTIAL downpour. I was soaked, exhausted, and still had about zero plans for the future.

Then I saw a sign light up in the distance:

U.S. Navy.

Both of my grandfathers were in the Navy during WWII in the Pacific. My father was a Marine.

I sighed.

Then I thought, fuck it.

I wasn’t exactly what you’d call patriotic. As an edgy, Tumblr-obsessed teenager in 2013 (back when Tumblr was the wild west of the internet, before the mass clean up), I had started exploring different philosophies. At the time, I was reading The Communist Manifesto and watching Whitest Kids U’ Know sketches about 9/11 being an inside job.

(Millenial tumblr post, 2013)

Gutiérrez talks about how “learning is conceived of as a process occurring within ongoing activity” and at that point, my “ongoing activity” was just trying to survive being an adult without any kind of safety net.

I made my decision, not out of fealty for my country, but out of necessity. I wanted a place to sleep, I wanted to be fed. And most importantly, I wanted my college paid for.

I had to prepare, mentally and physically. I had never been active before, so I started running around my neighborhood. At first, it was just a quarter mile. Then it turned into one mile, then three, and before I knew it, I was running five miles every day. My sister Sam, the movie lover, thought it would be a good idea to show me Full Metal Jacket. Terrible idea, and afterward that’s when it really started to hit me. I was about to go to boot camp.

Before I left for boot camp, I cut my hair from my waist to the nape of my neck. I had to because of regulations, and at the time it felt like a spirtual reset. Like I was shedding my old self and stepping into a new season of my life. Looking back now, it was the first step of stripping my identity.

The flight from Sacramento to Chicago was about five hours. I had only been on a plane once before, so everything already felt unfamiliar. By the time we landed, it was dark and pouring rain, a dark omen of what was to come. We got on a bus with the other recruits to shuttle us over to Great Lakes Training Naval Base, and people were talking, introducing themselves, trying to make it feel normal.

Then the doors shut.

A Petty Officer in charge of the bus stood up and immediately started yelling at us, “Shut the fuck up! No talking, look forward and stay quiet.” This really set the vibe for the next eight weeks. From that point on, every minute of our day was controlled. We do anything without asking for permission from our RDC’s, the Petty Officers that ran the divisions.

“Petty Officer, may I please use the bathroom?”

“Recruit! How many times do I have to tell you that is not the bathroom, that is the HEAD! Drop down and give me 20 push ups, then I’ll think about letting you go to the head.” Get the picture?

I was sleeping maybe three or four hours of sleep a night, especially after being “volun-told” to be the Head Petty Officer, which meant I was responsible for cleaning the head before and after inspections every day. We had to answer questions on the spot, like reciting the 11 General Orders or Sailors Creed or what rank a 0-4 is, and if you got it wrong, you received punishment in the form of push ups or airchairs. Showers lasted five minutes. The meals were silent. You just sat down, ate as fast as possible, as our RDCs would pace around our table and make comments about each recruit’s food choices. Lord forbid you reach for a brownie, or you wouldn’t hear the end of it for your entire lunch. 

Sunday was our only day of rest, and although we still had to muster by 0600, we’d be able to receive mail that day, go to a religious service, or take a 25 minute shower. We were only allowed to call our family twice the entire time. There wasn’t space to think, let alone space to be yourself, which is the point of boot camp. To mold you into what they want you to be. At some point, I stopped trying to make sense of it or agree with it, I just focused on getting through it. I remember one specific moment. Our division had gotten a demerit for something, I don’t even remember what but the RDCs were furious.

That night, they woke us up at 0200 and immediately started running us through exercises: air chairs, push-ups, jumping jacks, whatever they could think of. It went on until we were drenched in sweat and could barely breathe. To the extent that all of us, men and women, were crying.

Then they made us sit down in front of the projection screen, and played a loop of the planes hitting the Twin Towers. Over and over again.

The RDC started screaming at us about our purpose for being there. One by one, he made us answer.

When it got to me, I said, “I have nowhere else to go.” 

Totally brainwashing cult behavior, much?

This intense moment left no room for resistance, just total and absolute obedience. It’s like Bakhtin explains, “the authoritative word demands that we acknowledge it, that we make it our own” (76). At that moment, I didn’t question it, I just accepted what I had to do to endure that night, let alone the rest of boot camp.