Who You Gonna Be? by Danielle Shorr

It’s fall of 2025 and I have officially entered my seventh year of teaching college. It’s my husband’s eighth year, which he celebrates by teaching eight classes across three schools. The time I spend on campus not teaching is spent tutoring kids in every subject I possibly can: psychology, anthropology, communication, ethics, sociology, nutrition, education. After a few semesters of tutoring the same topics and syllabi, I feel as though I could teach the classes myself. I tutor because it’s good money and there’s a need for it and also because I genuinely like it. I’ve worked with some of these kids for their entire college careers. Some of them I’ll follow to graduate school. When my first full-time tutoring student graduated in the spring of 2024 and I watched her watch across the stage to receive her diploma, I cried.

I like tutoring, but I wouldn’t do it if I could teach more. Tutoring can be overwhelming at times; feeling as though I’m responsible for the outcome of a student’s grades and success is mentally taxing. I can’t teach more, at least not here at my current school in California. A bill passed in my state ensuring that adjunct professors—or lecturers, as they’ve started to call us—can’t teach more than 19.75 hours without receiving benefits. This was meant to incentivize universities to move toward more full-time hires. The bill passed, but the initiative failed. More adjuncts than ever, less classes. Still, no benefits. My university goes out of their way to ensure that. I could go elsewhere, but that would mean more commuting, more juggling, change. Tutoring fills the income gap that my weak course load has left me with. 

Last year, I turned down a full-time job offer at a fairly prestigious university, a couple hours away. It felt like an honor to even be offered. After all, full-time teaching jobs are hard to come by, particularly in California. I tried to make the possibility of it real, but it didn’t pan out. The cost of living near the school was too high, and the pay not enough to meet it. No potential for spousal hiring meant that my husband would be jobless. So, I stayed where I was and hoped it would get better. Has it gotten better?

My first job was at Party City when I was fifteen. A short walk from my house, past the freight train and CVS, the Fuddruckers where an old man once hit my mom’s car, the bank and the used bookstore, Party City was a staple of that particular strip mall. As a kid, I often wandered to the back section of the store to stare at the rows of horror masks with a sense of semi-petrified curiosity. I loved Halloween, so the job seemed like a good fit.  I convinced my best friend to apply with me, and soon we were working shifts together with walkie talkies and making an impressive $8.25 an hour.

Our uniform was khakis, a black shirt, and a neon orange vest that said, “Who You Gonna Be?” in thick black letters on the back. It was the same motto our manager instructed us to shout-ask to customers the moment they walked through the door. Watch and learn, he said during orientation, then showed us the how-to by shouting at the first people to walk through the door, a mom and a daughter: Hi-whoyagonnabe?

The woman looked confused and rightfully so. The way he said it made it sound like he was speaking gibberish or having a stroke. He repeated the question a bit slower and the woman remained confused. Who-ya-gonna-be? It was not the watch-and-learn moment he hoped it would be. Eventually the woman understood what he was asking and responded reluctantly, Uh, I’m not sure. My manager directed her to follow the green footsteps to the costume wall in the back. 

It was a temporary job, seasonal, but money was money, and my friend and I needed it to buy weed and a classmate’s leftover opiates from his wisdom tooth surgery. We called to each other from across the store and traded accessories we borrowed from the miscellaneous costume aisle. Sometimes I wore cat ears. Other days, it was an astronaut’s helmet or a red clown wig.

I learned the intricacies of how fog machines work and which fake blood was superior and for what use. I spent my days sucking helium directly from the tank and staring in a trance at the life-size Freddy Krueger that sold for a mere $250. When you waved a hand over his sensor, a child’s voice sang. One two, Freddy’s coming for you. Three four better lock your door. Couldn’t Freddy Krueger get past the door? Wasn’t he an apparition of some sort? Didn’t he enter through dreams anyway? I had questions, but the statue still spooked me.

Now, more than 15 years later, I drive past the former Party City in my current town, noting the faded imprint of the letters left behind on the building, and sigh with relief that I made it out of high school alive. As hard as Halloween decorations try, there is ultimately nothing scarier than being a teenager.

I genuinely love teaching. When it’s good, it’s so good. My creative writing students remind me time and time again why I love writing, why I love reading, of the magic lasting power that is telling a story and having it be heard, received, and celebrated. The hour and fifteen minutes fly by when we’re sharing, speaking, and workshopping. I’ve taught rhetoric, both introduction and upper division; disability studies courses; and classes about intersectionality. I’ve taught first-year creative writing, memoir writing, and experimental writing. It’s a cliche to say, but I always learn something about myself from teaching, even if it’s something about myself that I don’t necessarily want to know. I’ve cried with my students, and I’ve laughed with them. I’ve had some who have taken every class they can with me, and I’ve so valued their return each time. 

At the end of spring semester last year, two students gave me handwritten notes. I keep them propped up in my closet for when I need to be reminded that the work I do is not entirely fruitless. 

When I was seventeen, I applied for a job as a co-song leader and music teacher at a Jewish summer camp. I knew the minute I left the office after officially being hired that I would hate my life for the next three months. I can’t tell you why I had this premonition, where it came from or how I was so certain of it, but it turned out to be right.

I got the job because my friend from school and soon-to-be co-counselor recommended me for it. Wouldn’t it be so fun if we did that together all summer? he asked. After hearing how much it paid, I agreed. A few thousand dollars to sing with kids and lead shabbat services over the course of a few humid months. It sounded just easy enough, and I liked kids just enough.

What I did not know was how difficult it would be to work with someone I thought I knew pretty well. As soon as the guitar strap hit his shoulder, his reign of terror began. He was unbelievably cruel, critical and scathing, for reasons I can’t even remember. He would scold me for anything and everything. He seemed to hate me, despite being the one who initiated my place in the program. Because we spent each day working together and carpooling to camp, I had few opportunities for reprieve.

When I did have time to myself, I hid in the arts and crafts closet and cried behind storage bins of beads and polymer clay. When Friday rolled around and it was time for shabbat services, I barely had the chutzpah to stand up before the camp and strum my guitar and sing. In between groups of campers, I shoved challah in my cheeks like a hamster and poured powder mix-made grape juice down my throat to wash it down. 

Once, during a song in one of our music classes, a kid in the front row sneezed. I watched the snot leap from her nose directly onto me and my co-counselor’s shirts. Because we were mid-song, I could not run from the room screaming. We finished the song and the class, and then I sobbed with my shirt under the sink faucet. 

I’ve never been stung by a bee before, I told a group of campers one day before stepping outside and immediately being stung by multiple wasps in the soft flesh behind my knee. I cried big blubbery tears while a seven-year-old patted me on the back on the bench in the nurse’s office. It’s going to be okay, the kid said, attempting to console me.  No, it won’t be, I thought to myself. I hate this job and I hate my co-counselor and my boyfriend is having the time of his life in Australia this summer while I’m stuck here being swallowed by humidity and the screaming stillness of suburbia. 

Even if at times it felt eternal, the hot hell that was that summer would eventually end and the job would too.

I joke that I could die here, in my classroom, and the university would ask who I was and how I got there. Sometimes I have dark thoughts. I don’t want to but I do. I dream about being hit by the campus shuttle, injured but not killed. My mouth waters at the thought of a potential settlement. I fantasize about objects falling, striking me unconscious, a library book jumping off its shelf and knocking me out. I dream about being hurt, just enough to get me the upward mobility in this job that I can’t get elsewhere. I don’t want to die, not at all, but I can’t help imagining how random chance could make me visible in this place where I’m otherwise invisible. When an adjunct dies, do they send out a schoolwide email? Or do they pretend, much like they do with everything else involving adjuncts, that they were never here to begin with?

I was eighteen with the world at my fingertips, or at least on my laptop screen. I found the posting for the job on Craigslist. The official title was “webcam model.” The temptation was steep. $2.50 per minute without ever needing to leave my dorm room. I had an alias, a floor lamp, and a dream of quick cash. My profile picture on the website was a grainy mirror portrait of my butt in green underwear that I’d taken in an Urban Outfitters dressing room. My name was Lila.

It was an era before widespread and easily-accessible sex work or its normalization. There was no OnlyFans, no Instagram modeling or private Snapchats. Sex work was meant to be secretive, and even online, it came with the promise that it could be. 

In my time between classes, I chatted with men whose loneliness was palpable. By request, I did things that hadn’t previously struck me as being capable of fulfilling a desire. I stood in yoga pants. I tried on shoes—my own and my roommates’—and strutted around. I put my glasses on and took them off repeatedly. I tied my hair in pigtails. I chewed gum, spit it out, and put it back in my mouth. I tapped on my teeth and ate snacks with my jaw open. I yelled at men. I pretended I was disappointed in them. I pretended I was proud. Whatever I was asked to do, within my own boundaries of what I was willing to do, I did. The only request I couldn’t fulfill was one involving cheese—not because I was morally opposed to it, but because I didn’t have any cheese on hand. Although I wasn’t resistant to the idea of it, most of my requests involved no nudity at all, just extreme specificity.

While some encounters seemed scripted in their strangeness, most were normal, if not almost natural. Most of the men who sought my services wanted conversation, some semblance of companionship. There was one man I chatted with only through the private text messaging system. He wanted nothing more than to talk about our day to day. We messaged for an hour and a half, and I made $225. He returned more than once for the same. 

Of course, not all of my encounters were devoid of sexuality. Many of the men wanted to see skin, share their desires, flirt, shower me with compliments, or tell me that their wife was in the room with them, something said by more than one person. Was there really a wife in the room, or was it just a fantasy of misbehavior? 

I retired my account after a few months, only to put up with shit from men in my real life who didn’t pay me at all, men who would seek me out only after the sun went down, who wanted me in secret and avoided me in public. At least the job had a light at the end of the tunnel in the form of money on a prepaid debit card. The relationships I pursued afterward offered me nothing but disappointment, grief, and a feeling of shame I brought with me to bed and kept long after they left. In the end, I felt no shame about the men who paid to see me bare, just the ones who got to for free. 

In my sixth year of teaching, I take over a class for a friend who has quit, and rightfully so. After a year of filling in the full-time job of a retiree, she has been replaced by someone who had never stepped foot on this campus prior to being interviewed. There’s a whole group of us adjuncts, competent and fully capable, who could take over any class at the drop of a hat, and do. Yet when it comes to opportunities with actual job security, we’re passed over or through. Small ghosts haunting the hallways of buildings and classrooms, summoned only when needed and neglected when not. 

The new tenure-track hire in the department tells her students she only teaches so she can write. It reminds me of the longtime tenured professor in the department who cancels two full weeks of class every semester to travel abroad. The whole thing feels something of a Shakespearean tragedy, betrayal after betrayal under the guise of bureaucracy. It doesn’t matter how good you are at your job, how much you genuinely love teaching, how much your students love you. There will always be someone getting paid more to do less.  

The new hire negotiated the teaching of two classes for this semester, meaning she’ll make about three times what I do for about the same amount of work. I laugh when I learn this. There’s not much else I can do. What is exploitation if not this?

I was twenty and needed a job, specifically an internship,  but the only place willing to interview and hire me out of all my applications was a DIY cake decorating studio in central West Hollywood. It shared a wall with a triple dollar sign bakery, the kind of place that crafts life-size characters out of fondant and Styrofoam while serving you sheet cake and charging a minimum of $500. Our side of the wall charged $50 for customers to come decorate a previously frozen six-inch cake or six cupcakes.

I spent my days developing carpal tunnel from manually rolling rainbow balls of fondant and teaching people how to make roses out of them. I stuck cakes to boards with frosting, and safe in the refuge of the kitchen, I’d sweep mounds of buttercream into my mouth with my fingers. I formed a passionate relationship with the walk-in refrigerator, where I would go to cry, or to hide from customers or my manager, or to ram four cupcakes into my mouth at a time from the too-ugly-to-sell bin. Every day, I stole a Kind bar to eat with my lunch, the only not overwhelmingly cloying item available for purchase. I always had a stomach ache, but it was more likely caused by my boyfriend at the time, a recent college graduate who refused to get a job and with whom I fought frequently. 

I loved my coworkers. They stood by me when I got chewed out for the cost of the decorating experience, as though I had any say in the matter. We pooled our tips and collectively sighed when private parties mistook the 20% service fee for a gratuity, despite it going directly and completely into the owners’ pockets. 

I made coffee for customers using the same beans for the entire day. This is the best coffee I have ever had, said a mom who had brought her kids in for a birthday party. She bought seven more cups for the rest of the moms, and they all agreed.

At the end of every shift, I shook sprinkles out of my hair and what seemed like all the crevices of my body. I’d become a vacuum for sweetness. Like many of the others, this too was a seasonal job, lasting only the summer. When it ended, I was relieved to be away from so much unbridled sugar. It would take me nearly a year to walk past the bakery aisle at the grocery store without gagging.

In my fifth year of teaching, I connect with a new tenure-track hire in my department. We chat over coffee and cookies, and when I reveal to her that I don’t have an office to use, she offers to share hers with me. I should know then that it is too good to be true, but I’m desperate for the opportunity to have a place to work on campus that isn’t the library or the faculty lounge, which is overrun with geriatric professors eating lunch and two faculty members who have frequent screaming matches in Italian.

I move a few things into the office and bring with me a bowl of candy that I keep filled to the brim. My officemate encourages me to put my name next to hers on the wall outside the door. The office is a saving grace despite being next to the bathroom, providing a clear path to hearing every flush of a toilet. It doesn’t bother me. I just like having a space of my own to exist in, an actual office where I can host office hours. 

Then after a year of office bliss, I receive a text. In it, there is good news and bad news, but because the good news has nothing to do with me, it just feels like bad news and bad news. 

My officemate has received a promotion and wants the office to herself again. I should’ve seen it coming. When she saw me in the office on the days we both were on campus, she always looked pissed. Was it me or some other factor? I’m not sure it matters. I pack up my three things and leave. 

I walk by the office almost daily on the way to my first class, longing for what I briefly knew. Smokey was right: a taste of honey is worse than none at all. The note on the door hardly ever changes: Working from home today.

At 19, I joined a casting website for people in the Los Angeles area. I had always wanted to be an actress and now was my time to try. I applied to every posting that remotely fit my description. I could play 14 to 22, or maybe younger if I had to. I was blonde, but I didn’t have to be. Curvy? Or slim? Athletic? I couldn’t decide what exactly I was, so I went with all of the above. I auditioned for anything and everything. I booked close to nothing. I was living in a Venice Beach apartment, driving hours in the claustrophobic city-wide traffic to get to castings and callbacks.

Eventually I landed some music videos and background work in a few films. The first music video was for a DJ named Afrojack. I didn’t know who Afrojack was, but the gig seemed promising. I was shuttled with the rest of the extras from Hollywood to the middle of the desert. We spent twelve hours in the hot, hot sun, dancing on the set of an abandoned gas station, listening to the song playing loudly over and over again in the background. We had our hair and makeup done in a trailer and ate ice cream from a colorful truck in front of the camera. It was a fun, exhausting day. Some people spent it fighting for screen time, but I was just there for the money and the free lunch. We all got paid the same, regardless of the end product. A few weeks later, the music video premiered on YouTube, albeit to a small audience, but I noticed something about the cover photo: I was in it, frozen in a frame, dancing in my purple bikini.

The next video was for T-Pain. It was a shit show on set, with no organization or clear direction. I was hired to be in a “featured role.” The song was called “Make That Shit Work.” It wouldn’t win any awards, but it was undoubtedly catchy.

In the video, you can see me holding a selfie stick and taking a photo before being interrupted by someone else. I was supposed to get paid $300 for the day. I never saw a cent.

One morning in July, I awoke with a violent stomachache simultaneous to my phone ringing. I answered and the voice on the other line reminded me of a role I auditioned for. “The director asked for you, personally,” the line on the voice told me. The memory of the audition returned. The director was Andy Milonakis, a figure I’d watched on TV and loved growing up, and as I stood before him in that small room, I couldn’t resist telling him. “I’m a huge fan,” I blurted out. Ultimately, I couldn’t overcome the cramps to make it to set that day. 

My last memorable role of the summer was on an indie film where my phone overheated beyond functionality and I had to stick it in a cooler to get it working again. I spent all day in the sun, ate pizza with the other extras, and had a small cameo in the film standing bikini-clad with poor posture next to Tim Heidecker as he emerged from a cake.

I did not make it big. Acting was hard. Getting the opportunity to actually act was harder. I didn’t mind being in the background, but it was more work than what I was compensated for, and it would take years to get union status. I did not renew my subscription to the casting website.

We used to have an hour-long meeting at the beginning of the fall semester for adjuncts in the English department. We would convene in the art building to talk about the year ahead, discussing classroom successes, failures, bright moments, our hopes for the semester. I looked forward to it. We haven’t had one in years. 

It would cost the university $30 per professor to pay us for the hour. Most of us wouldn’t mind attending without pay, but the university is afraid of being sued, so no more meetings. I used to be involved in the disability studies meetings, too. I liked those. I felt like I had something to offer my colleagues. I liked discussing disability politics and how they translate to the classroom. I also got ousted from those meetings, which would’ve cost the university a total of $30 a month. 

I laugh when I walk by the disability employment month banners that adorn the light posts on campus every October. In my disability studies course, we talk about systems, how they oppress and marginalize and harm the most vulnerable groups. We talk about inequity, inequality as inequality, and healthcare access. I do this while knowing that I, a person with a disability, do not get healthcare from my job.

I applied to the adult store in my town the summer after I graduated college and heard back before I could apply anywhere else. 

Located in a rundown strip mall a few miles from my house, sandwiched between a Metro PCS and a local pharmacy that was likely a front for something more sinister, A Touch of Romance had just the thing to satisfy the needs of just about anyone. I became a connoisseur of self-pleasure devices, bondage materials, and overpriced positional wedges. I learned more than I wanted to about both the products and people buying them.

It sounds gross to say that I ingested a lot of lube at that job, but I ingested a lot of lube. Flavored, that is. Tiramisu, pumpkin spice, mint chocolate chip. I particularly liked the lotion for handjobs that was meant to taste like cotton candy. As I strolled the generally empty store during my eight-hour shifts, I’d sample the new edible variants out of boredom. The place was an oral-fixator’s dream. 

Every shift, I’d pop two aphrodisiac chocolates in my mouth, not because they caused an increase in libido, but because I was hungry and I liked how they tasted. The results were that my cheeks would flush for the first half of my shift but not much else.

I spent my days helping men purchase items that I thought should be illegal to buy (a child sized silicone abdomen with breasts, a rose tattoo, and two points of entry), and kindly declined when they asked me out.

I hung up pairs of panties with jingly bells attached and wondered what bells rattling had to do with sex. Perhaps there was something Pavlovian about it. 

I loved the job, truly. I loved the stained cheetah print carpet and the gargoyle chandeliers by the vibrators that made absolutely no aesthetic sense. I loved hanging up the cheap lingerie and helping women (and some men) find a set that made them feel sexy. I loved watching people try to stealthily shoplift pairs of $1 underwear and doing nothing to stop them.

It was the best of retail jobs and the worst of retail jobs. The best because we didn’t accept returns and the worst because sometimes new hires would take items back anyway and I’d have to explain to them that we can’t accept a vibrator once it’s left the store, for obvious reasons. I loved the job because the women I worked with were interesting and strange and just as sad as I was. Tina was a sex therapist who worked at the store part-time to further her mission of public sex education, Allison took the job because she had to and hated every minute of it, Meg moonlighted after her fulltime job as an accountant at The Cheesecake Factory, and I was there to fill time and save money ahead of graduate school. Regardless of our differences, we were all united by our circumstances and our surroundings, which was a shitty paying sales associate title, boyfriends we hated, and a seemingly endless array of butt plugs, some of which had animal tails attached. It was a little less than a year but it could have been a lifetime. I left with a fuller drawer and more knowledge on the body and the sexual preferences of strangers than one generally needs to know.

My students laugh when they find out that I’m on TikTok, but what they don’t know is that I’ve made more over the summer from three videos than I make in an entire year of teaching. It’s funny but also so not funny that it hurts. This is not the promise of studying and working hard for a career that was sold to me in my childhood. Year after year, I watch as tuition goes up and our pay stays the same. I go out of my way for students, and the university goes out of their way to pay me less and less. I’d suggest we unionize, but they’d replace us before we got to the second syllable. I wear all the hats I can fit on my head because I love my job, and there are people here getting paid four times what I am who hate theirs. 

I tell my students it’s not about career. It’s about making enough money to survive and be able to enjoy your life, the one that Mary Oliver reminds us is “wild and precious.” I say it often, but sometimes I’m sure I’m saying it to try and convince myself of its truth. Do I believe me? Does it matter?

I joke that I’ll die here and part of me worries I’m not joking at all. I’m not concerned with legacy, but I don’t want to meet my end somewhere I’m not loved, acknowledged, or appreciated. My students remind me I am these things, but sometimes I worry it won’t be enough to make me stay beyond the present semester. Then I get to thinking about what would be enough, and if it’s even out there or possible, a job that recognizes my efforts and keeps me close to who and what I love.

I often think of the nonsense I put up with at the jobs I’ve had throughout my life and the person I have been at all of them. Would she have put up with this shit?  Or would she do like she had before for so many years, refusing to deal with the ridiculous and move on to the next. I know that girl well. Once, when a customer asked her, If there’s no bathroom, then where do you go? she stared straight ahead, expressionless, and answered, Where don’t I go? I’m peeing right now. When scheduled to work New Year’s Eve despite requesting it off, she put in her two weeks.

I think about the girl who cried at the cash register after her best friend died and no one would cover her shift. I think about the girl who had to call the police for protection at work and how they laughed when they got there, more than an hour after the call. The place she landed is not what she thought it would be—it is both worse and better. There are tenured faculty that refer to us adjuncts as “the help,” research we can’t get funding for, and contracts that don’t guarantee a future. But sometimes there are poems, and stories with drawings, and students who say things like, This class reminded me why I love to write or I was going through a rough time and this class is what I looked forward to or Being in your class saved me from myself. What is life if not half-dance, half-wrestling match? It isn’t all suffering. I stay here, despite all the indifference and discontent, because there are always new discoveries to be made in the classroom, new connections formed, new stories told and written, and how lucky am I to get to witness it all? I stay because of the teachers I had who gave me more time than they were compensated for and for the students who make me want to do the same. I stay because there is no better place to be a courier of kindness and because I can be kind. I also stay, in part, because I’ve grown scared shitless of change. My jobs of the past were easy to leave, because they were just jobs. They were never meant to be permanent or indefinite, simply a paycheck for the time being. But this is my career, and if there’s no way of moving up, can it even be called that? If I let it go and move on, will it fade behind me, insignificant, like those other jobs I gave so many hours of my life too? 

When the frustration boils and bubbles and nearly overflows to the point of no return, I think about why I’m still here, at this institution that does not love me like I do it. Maybe it’s because it’s bad but not bad enough, but I like to think that there is always a reason we put up with the things we’d rather not, a purpose lurking somewhere among the sacrifice. Something or someone calls out in the dark and reminds us how we got here and why we stay, so we stay. At least for now.