Finding My Own Schitt’s Creek, In Pursuit of the Career of My Dreams

My favorite show right now is a show called Schitt’s Creek. It tells the story of the Rose family, a well to do family who gets plunked into a small town after an unfortunate turn of events caused them to have all their assets seized by the government. The Roses resist this new life at first, but as the seasons evolve, so does their vision of their town, and the town itself. The show, while totally about class, takes other identity markers and fluidly emphasizes them by utterly normalizing them. Rather than tell the stories of queer, raced, and gender non-conforming bodies through the political stories of those bodies fighting for rights, the show shakes the presumption that white, male, heteronormative plainness is natural, and instead makes natural all sorts of other, normally Othered, bodies.

It’s a show built around love, disguised behind the big vocabulary and loud outfits of the Rose family. Written by Dan Levy and staring his father, Eugene Levy, and his often on-screen partner, Catherine O’Hara, alongside a frighteningly talented ensemble, the show tells us that it is okay to absolutely not fit in, because that is what will ultimately make you fit in perfectly. In fact, Schitt’s Creek’s town motto is “where everyone fits in.”

This motto can’t be a mistake. In fact, so important is this motto that Dan Levy quizzed eager audience members of the live Schitt’s Creek tour, “Up Close and Personal,” about the motto. Telling us super fans that he wanted to create a place where it wasn’t a question whether queer bodies fit in, everybody fits in. The gender, race, and sexual identity politics of this show are both wholly invisible yet strikingly powerful. The discursive universe the cast creates highlights an aspirational small town, one where, even if you’re not great, you’re okay. “Small towns aren’t so bad,” I say to myself, as I watch.

My favorite character, Alexis – played by the enigmatic Annie Murphy – is also the character who shows the most growth throughout the seasons. From the way she is costumed to the way she carries her hands in front of her, as though they are the limp arms of a T-rex carrying an invisible purse, I both saw none of myself and all of myself in Alexis. Often misunderstood to be shallower than I imagine myself to be because of my deep love of lipstick and fashion, I felt an ambivalence towards Alexis that was rooted in my own anxieties about my own body in space. From the markers of class to the markers of race and gender, I am hyper aware of how my body fits into my social world. I found myself resentful of the fact that Alexis could, likely because of her privilege, float through space, unaware and unaffected by the stares of onlookers at her outlandish wardrobe. Over time, however, Alexis grows, and as her depth is revealed, I fell in love with her, and shifted my resentment to hope – a hope that we could all be a little less quick to judge, a hope that we could really find a quirky little place “where everyone fits in.”

I recently went for a job interview in a small town of about 30 thousand people and about a 5-hour drive from the closest major metropolitan area. My PhD in Media Studies and an increasingly shrinking number of jobs for PhDs means, if I want to work as a professor, I go where the jobs are. I grew up in Colorado, spending time first in the suburbs of Denver, and then went to school in Boulder and now live in Philadelphia, so I was a bit anxious about going to a small town in a conservative and rural part of the country.

As I aggressively googled every fact about this town, I found myself hoping that the deeper I searched the more nuance I would uncover. Though I was seeing clearly the politics of the area play out in real color on YouTube, I hoped with each refresh of the screen and every video that would seamlessly lead to the next, I would see a different picture painted for me than what was being revealed online. I could live without my favorite restaurants and neighborhood haunts, if the quality of life is good, if I can find a place for myself, my family, if it’s a place my family would like to visit, I could make this work. I read the statistics on town demographics over and over again, willing the numbers to skew less white, as though my exotic stare could somehow will more people like me to move there before my interview. I imagined the Internet was only showing me half of the true picture, as something deep in me whispered that it isn’t the size or the demographics, but perhaps the remoteness that you find disconcerting. Nonetheless, I reasoned to myself, if David and Alexis can live in Schitt’s Creek and build such a vibrant community with all sorts of genuine friendships, why can’t I live here?

I am the daughter of Iranian immigrants who came to the United States over 40 years ago. I grew up in the United States and in a neighborhood where class seemed to paper over race and ethnicity. I grew up with the mythical narrative that, as an Iranian, I was one of the original Caucasians. Thus, if anyone asked where I was from, or what my race or ethnicity was, I could confidently answer back that I was white (for more on the way race is constructed and negotiated in the US for Iranians check out two really great books, The Limits of Whiteness and Whitewashed: America’s Invisible Middle Eastern Minority).

I had various experiences growing up in a mostly white neighborhood that, while bothersome, I rationalized to myself as “probably what everyone is going through to some degree.” From the time my mom and I were denied service in a Steve Madden Store for “not looking like we could afford designer shoes,” to the time we went to check out at a Calvin Klein outlet store and the white cashier went to find a Mexican employee so we could check out with what he referred to as “someone who speaks your language” – my Spanish is just okay, for the record. I had minor slights thrown at me all the time. Perhaps as a coping mechanism, I functioned under the assumption that that was normal. In school, I took the bastardization of my name to mean there was an American word for Samira, and an Iranian word for Samira, so the obstinance around pronunciation of my name was chalked up to an issue of translation. I went by Sami for most of my life and though it is a loving nickname I share with my family, it doesn’t carry the power or grace of my real name. Though I bristled each time someone stared at me for just a little bit too long, or asked me where I was really from, or quipped that my summers at my Grandmother’s house in Iran “must have been so scary,” I tried hard not to fixate, the mainstream cultural pressure not to be the angry brown(ish) woman in the corner seeping deep into my understandings of myself.

It wasn’t until I moved to Philadelphia that I realized how deeply I didn’t fit in where I had been living in Boulder. I fit in in lots of ways, my family was just an hour away from there, so was my family of choice made up of mentors, friends and colleagues, but I always felt just the slightest bit uncomfortable in my own skin. In the classroom, few of the students looked like me. At work, I felt myself gravitate towards other people with similar life histories to mine. I guarded my body in ways I noticed my conventionally white friends not feeling the need to. I don’t want to be misunderstood here, I hold a deep affinity and love for Colorado, it was my first ever home, it is my family’s home base and where I got the education that taught me how to understand myself in relation to the world, the world in relation to the media, media in relation to culture. I cherish that, but it doesn’t change the fact that I didn’t always feel one-hundred percent comfortable walking down the street in a college town, specifically in a neighborhood and apartment building filled with mostly white, young men who often fell out their front doors inebriated and with very little sense of their bodies in space.

In Philly, I walk my dogs through our Center City neighborhood every day. People smile at me, say hello. Only once in the two years I have lived year has anyone asked where I was from, and it was a person eager to try to find shared histories in our Middle Eastern narratives. This is not to say that Philly is free from the racism and ethnocentrism that I now realize marked my body so overtly in Boulder (Though I share my experience, I understand and recognize the complex race and class issues Philadelphia faces, including rampant and rapid gentrification of the city, you can read more about it here). Rather, here, it seems to me, that while my body is still marked, there are so many others whose bodies are similarly marked, who have had to negotiate their own bodily existence so fiercely that they are careful not to reify the constructs that serve to demean our sense of safety in the world. I don’t know this for sure, this is simply my experience. There’s just more diversity here, there are more people, and in the ability to be swallowed by the crowd, comes the ability to fit in. At least it certainly feels that way.

On the small prop plane that was to take me to the small town where I had a campus visit for a tenure-track professorship at a small liberal arts college, I sat across the aisle from a black woman who, like me, seemed overdressed and just a little out of place. When we found out that our flight was cancelled and that we were both indeed going to the same college for interviews in different departments, we became fast friends. She was an inspiring powerhouse, full of wisdom, measured in her delivery, cautious and thoughtful with her words in each interaction. I instantly admired her. Over the next two days we shared breakfast at the buffet in the old-fashioned hotel, named for a problematic small town hero, where job candidates routinely stayed. We shared stories of what it is like to be an academic in today’s job market, and how we feared we would or would not fit in in a town that was described to us by our interviewers as made up of farmers, workers at the local prison, migrant labor, and college professors, groups that they advised us, rarely interacted. We were told the community was complicated but friendly and that the weather was usually good.

I went to do my interview and felt I did a great job. I gave a presentation where audiences members nodded politely at each of the complicated points I made about media, trauma, and Iranian Americans’ negotiations of the Trump travel ban. I taught a class of enthusiastic students about memes and media. I made my mark, I tried hard, and all the while I felt incredibly…uncomfortable.

I chalked it up to my outfit. My clothing stood out immensely. Although it is not uncommon that during interviews the interviewee is often a bit more spiffed up than the folks who can relax into their job security, my full face of make-up, my high heel boots, my brightly patterned blouse combined with my slick black suit held no similarities to the clothes of the people I saw around me. Nowhere was this more evident than at the gate at the airport where an older, white woman, asked me who I put my face on for, looked up and down at my clothes, and then told me my lipstick shade was a “good morning wake up call.” Seeing the discomfort on my face that is often unable to hide my feelings, the woman assured me that it was a compliment and that it must be nice to “stand out” and went on her way. This interaction, while rather benign on its surface, stuck with me as I walked sparsely populated sidewalks on the campus in question. Though I did not see many people in my walks around campus or my walks around town, I realized that not a single person other than the woman I met on the plane was a person of color. In fact, aside from at the airport, the only people of color I saw were those hand-selected for me to meet with.

The discomfort I felt in that small town was magnified to me when I found myself, the night before my flight, repeatedly refreshing the airport flight tracker to make sure that there were no delays in the evening flight. Being such a small town, if the evening flight didn’t come in, no one was flying out in the morning. I could think of no more uncomfortable fate in that moment, than to stay an extra day in a place where I viscerally felt I did not belong. I reflected on my interview knowing that while I would be safe in the halls of the academy, to fit in in this type of small town, or at least blend in, I would have to fundamentally change the way I look, dress, and speak.

When I first moved to Philadelphia, I was having lunch with a friend, a very accomplished and polished doctor, who happens to be a young black woman. She is a personal inspiration to me because of the way she works, inhabits her life, and shares her medical knowledge. As we watched the passersby wander in and out of the square outside our restaurant, she began to ask me about the differences I felt being a woman of color in Denver versus Philadelphia. I told her my experiences and as the conversation progressed, in an effort to recognize that my olive skin can be read as any number of ethnicities, I told her that I knew it was a privilege to be able to pass and that had impacted my embodied experience. I rationalized the racial and ethnic slights I had felt to her, the same way I’d always rationalized them to myself, erasing the systemic and structural inequality that lurked within each of them. She looked at me, her expression incredulous, her words steady and clear.

“Are you sure?” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked

“Are you sure you can pass and that people weren’t trying to make a point when they said those things to you?” she replied.

I didn’t speak, absorbing the weight of what she said.

She continued, “Are you sure you can pass? When I look at you, I see a body just as marked as mine. I see a woman of color afraid to own her body because of what society has told her she can and cannot be. I appreciate you trying not to coopt a black woman’s struggle,” she told me, “but let me be clear, you cannot pass.”

I heard the same thing in having frank and open discussions with the friend I made on my plane ride to small town America. In trying to check my privilege, women who have no choice to think that they pass and no false narratives telling them that they can pass, like the narratives I grew up with, told me I had to own who and what I am. I have never been more grateful to anyone as I am to those to women, who despite always having to be the teachers about race, opted to teach me too, and to do it with openness, grace, and kindness.

Coming to Philadelphia, I never knew how much I didn’t fit in in other places I lived, until I went somewhere where no one seemed to stare. Then I journeyed to a small town, in search of a quiet life, a place to quietly carve my dreams into a career, but it was not a place I could fit in. Spending a few years not being stared at with every turn left me with little desire to confront those stares head on. I went home from my trip and binge watched Schitt’s Creek. I laughed at the aspirational small town where there is no “foil” to juxtapose the struggle of queer, raced, differently able bodies. I thought about my own aspirations that the town I visited would take me in the way Schitt’s Creek took in the Rose family. I thought about how I really had believed I could live there because of the show. Then I went there.

I didn’t get offered the job at that small liberal arts college and I think that’s okay. I think I will keep looking for a job that better captures my passions and for a place where my heart can exist more freely. There is no utopia for marginalized bodies, not in this world with its politics and divisions. The world that Dan Levy built is more than tolerant, it’s loving, and that world only exists in our reality in small pockets. Until things change, I will keep looking for my own little pocket, where I can quietly tuck in, live in radical love with my life and my surroundings, and maybe, just maybe, do more than blend in, and actually fit in.



Samira Rajabi is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, she is currently (still) on the job market.