Let's Talk About Hard Things by Anna Sale

Author:Anna Sale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

“This is a systems issue.”

Financial emergencies can be sneaky. When we don’t have enough to pay for what we need, deciphering between a temporary setback or a life-changing comeuppance can, at first, feel like a matter of attitude. Credit cards or short-term loans can cover a shortfall, and that debt can seem opaque and abstract, so you’re left to spin it as you see fit. Is this a signal of a wrong turn, or a test of your resourcefulness?

“The trouble with denial is that when the truth comes, you aren’t ready,” Nina LaCour wrote in her novel We Are Okay. Danielle Muñoz sees a lot of unready people in her office. She runs the crisis assistance center for students at Sacramento State University, where enrollment hit record numbers as the rate of local rent increases topped national lists. Her job is designed to help students in any kind of crisis, but since she started in 2016, it’s money that brings students to her door. “You’d think it’d be all over the place, but it’s not. It’s all rent-related.”

Danielle told me that when she first meets a student, she starts by offering what she calls “precision care.” Before talking about numbers or choices or the housing crisis in California, she thanks students for just coming in. “I really recognize that it’s really hard for people to ask for help, so hard that I think people go years without asking.”

Students usually come to her after revealing to someone else on campus that they’re in a financial emergency. “Most students don’t come forward and say, ‘Hi, I’m not housed.’ They’ll say, ‘I’m not going to be able to do the work you assigned me because I’m going through this.’ That’s where the stigma is,” she said, so a lot of her work is making sure instructors and faculty know where and how to refer students to her.

That was exactly the case for a student named Alejandra. She was referred to Danielle by an instructor who’d noticed she was visibly flustered after she turned in a test. Before Alejandra could rush out, her professor stopped to ask if she was okay. “And I just started crying,” Alejandra told me. “I told her that I was probably not even going to finish the semester because I had to get a job and help my husband.”

Alejandra was in her mid-forties and had been working toward her degree for more than six years, first at a junior college part-time, and then full-time to try to finally finish her degrees in child development and Deaf Studies. When she’d started at Sacramento State, her husband’s job at an insurance company was enough to support her and their three kids. “We knew it was going to be a sacrifice, but we didn’t account for him being out of work.”

Then, he was laid off, she told me, “and then he got another job, and then he gets laid off a year after. Then he goes a year without a job, and then he gets another one and gets laid off.

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