I’ve been teaching college writing courses for two and a half years—first as a graduate assistant, now as an adjunct—and in that time my belief that I’m qualified for the job hasn’t improved nearly as quickly as my ability to ignore the suspicion that I’m not qualified for it at all. Every so often, though, I’ll have a Wile E. Coyote moment: I realize I’m younger or less experienced than nearly all of my students, look down and see I’m standing on nothing but Pantone-blue desert air.

Some might argue that I’ve simply fallen into the “confidence gap.” Certainly, the female teachers I know seem more likely than men to second-guess their own authority in the classroom, and to have it second-guessed by students. Yet the lack of confidence women experience as teachers, and particularly as adjuncts, has a more complex provenance. Like all adjuncts, they are entrusted with responsibilities that outreach their qualifications. But female adjuncts, in my experience, often find themselves in a particularly precarious position: part-teacher, part-guidance counselor, part-confessor—they are filling roles related to mental health and general wellbeing that they are in no way qualified to fill.

Adjunct teaching is a job that is only really sustainable if you don’t need one. As contingent faculty—there are over a million of us in the United States—we may, and often do, wait until days before a new academic term until we know how many classes we’ll be teaching, and where. Universities can afford to press us into service because they almost always hire us on a part-time basis, which means they don’t have to provide us with benefits. Typically, making a living as an adjunct means cobbling together a full-time workload by taking on a class or two at a cluster of nearby (or perhaps not-so-nearby) universities and community colleges. Salaries vary based on school, but the Chronicle of Higher Education reported last year that, nationwide, adjuncts’ average pay for a three-credit course is $2,987, with some teachers reporting pay as low as $1,200. Even a humanities instructor can tell you how bleak this figure is in comparison to the average student loan debt for a student graduating from a four-year-institution: $29,400.

Increasingly, we find the institutions we work for expect us to be consummate professionals in the classroom, even if they don’t treat us as such anywhere else. We must, in short, give our students everything our institutions do not give to us. And we must do our best if only because the quality of higher education in this country rests on our shoulders: According to the American Association of University Professors, adjunct instructors made up 76 percent of universities’ workforces last year—an increase from 30 percent in 1975.

When I started teaching, I was 23 years old and had no weightier obligation than a masters thesis on Jane Eyre. I wasn’t married. I had no children. I had no pets. I didn’t even own a plant. I had worked as a camp counselor, a literary magazine intern, and at a strange neither-fish-nor-flesh job in which I allegedly curated a hotel’s rare books collection but mostly just poured wine for guests during a library-viewing-cum-happy-hour. It was during this last job that I learned I felt much more confident when I wore a blazer, and when I first started teaching, I attempted to convince myself that I had earned the right to tell my students what to do simply by outdressing them. I didn’t really have anything else going for me. I taught, and continue to teach, in a huge university that serves great numbers of “returning students”—that is, students who re-enroll in college after an absence ranging between a year and half a century—and I have never taught a class that did not contain several students who were older than me. All of them had and have more life experience in one way or another; it’s the kind of think you accrue fairly easily, it turns out, when you aren’t sitting in a carrel reading Jane Eyre.