Struggles of a PhD in Media Communication

What's up? My name's Dr. Bird. I have a PhD in media communication,

and I live in

my car because a year ago, I told the truth about Charlie Kirk's

white supremacist

Christian nationalism in the worst job market of my lifetime,

and I have significant debt that I have stopped paying

because I can't afford to. I basically have been looking for work

for a year. I've been applying to all sorts of jobs

across the skill level, most of which I am completely

overqualified for. And I went back to school to transition

into

librarianship because I think that it would suit me well as a

critical scholar and expert in identities, relationships, technologies, and systems

of power because I'm already an information professional.

I was a professor of communication for a decade.

I've done environmental activism and advocacy and been a

content creator for five years and love to usher in a digital

social media combination. And the self-realizations

that I've seen spurred over the last six years alongside the

denial of COVID-19 research that I've seen needs to be better

applied across every institution so that we can fundamentally change and

survive the colonial capitalist hellscape that we currently exist within,

owned and monopolized by billionaires.

But it seems as if the current structure does not want to pay you to

speak the truth. So instead, I have been crowdfunding to

survive

ever since the day that I was fired because people were like, "Make

a GoFundMe so we can help you survive the winter." And y'all did help

me survive the winter. And now another winter is approaching,

and I have a-

another batch of student loans, you know, a refund that would allow me to

afford to live ideally coming up, but I just got my award the

other day, and I don't see Grad PLUS loans on it.

So I have a meeting this afternoon with my graduate

financial aid advisor, and I need her to say, "Yeah,

we actually are gonna give you Grad PLUS loans," 'cause otherwise I won't be able

to continue my librarianship master's program, and I

won't have any money to live anymore because I

hate continuously asking y'all to help me support my life,

but I don't have any choice because the jobs aren't hiring me,

and

I

don't have any other income that's reliable enough for me to

survive on despite being a four-time author, selling online courses,

selling merch, and doing tarot readings more recently the

last

couple weeks, and being a paid writer on

Substack, which obviously I majorly appreciate.

That definitely helps, and having a variety of support links.

So anyway, if you could help me,

just share the word about this. I know that the times are tough

and all of us are

struggling, and I'm just another person who's

trying to share information with the public that kept me alive.

Because if I don't get help, I could very much succumb to the

elements in a matter of a month or two.