Mutterings
I'm feeling out of sorts today. Probably some of it is that I have once again wasted most of my day off dinking around with the computer (instead of doing things I keep promising myself I'll do, like tidy the apartment or run errands or do yoga). Perhaps some of it may just be general moodiness, though the hormonal timing's not right for that. Or maybe it's my 35th birthday coming up in a couple of weeks.
Whatever it is, I'm feeling restless and cross and distracted. I've filed this under "PASS" because it's the posts about academia, particularly those about teaching, that often frustrate me the most. Frequently I run across someone's post about some knotty teaching problem, or a philosophical issue, or an observation about juggling academic and personal life, and my initial impulse is to join the conversation and/or offer advice based on my own experiences. Then I pause, part-way through writing up my comment, and decide to close the window instead of posting it. I'm not quite sure of my thoughts at these moments, but there's a swirl of feelings that include futility, impatience, boredom, wistfulness and feeling out of place. I mean, who am I to join conversations about these things? I'm out of the game, and by my own admission there was so, so much about teaching that never excited me. (If nothing else, I've learned that I like talking about teaching at least as much, perhaps more, than teaching per se.) Then there's the regret that the skills I had, the experiences I had as a practicing teacher -- skills which seem desperately needed these days -- are, now, essentially useless. I'm also easily frustrated by these discussions, because they seem so irrelevant to the life I'm living now. I find them simultaneously interesting (because of the familiarity) and tedious (because who wants to read about teaching woes if you're not teaching or taking classes yourself?). So I'm sort of trapped by them -- I can't ignore them (as I've been doing with the Chronicle, which I haven't missed At. All.), and I don't really want to, and yet I feel like the person looking in from the outside through the glass window at the cool kids.
I suppose it's that I don't have anything in my life currently that is worthy of admiration, that I don't inhabit a place shared by other people like me with whom I can commiserate. I'm sui generis, an academic who is no longer an academic, a person who has left academia but hasn't gone anywhere else. It's like the flip side of being a "visiting" professor as your main job (where are you supposed to be visiting from, exactly?) in this case I know where I'm from, but not where I am. For all that I am a rather solitary person in practice, emotionally I like -- even need -- to be part of a group. Academia used to be my psychic home, and in some ways it still is, at least in the way one's parents' house is still "home" after you've moved out. I have yet to find or make a new home, and it's unsettling.
Then there's just the angsty-ness of being about to turn 35, with little to show for it and no clear vision of the future. People talk about living in the moment, but when they do, they typically do it in the context of being distracted by the possibilities and the stress of planning for the future or worries about the past. In such a context, living in the present can come as a relief. Yet what they forget is that there is considerable pleasure in planning for the future -- the envisioning of the new house, the dreaming about the next career challenge, the laying out of the travel brochures on the bed, the painting of the study, the planting of the seeds in the garden. I can't do that. I can play with possibilities (and, yes, I know that all futures are essentially just that, possibilities), but they are so weak and transparent that it feels like a waste of energy. Counting chickens before they've hatched isn't a great idea, true, but holding an empty basket while all around you people are toting eggs to and fro and chatting cheerfully about them is worse.
It doesn't help that time doesn't feel like my friend in all of this. (Okay, people who are older, get your laughs out of your system now.) There are decisions that must be made in the next couple of years, or the decisions will be made for me, and not necessarily in ways I would like. The biological clock is the most obvious one (I'm already anxious about the physical demands of pregnancy and new motherhood at my age, and feel increasing doubt that it will even occur in the first place), but I'm also aware of the way that being in your mid-to-late 30s with little practical employment experience cramps one's career ambitions. As I've said many many times before, the context of employment in this country is organized in three informal tracks: the entry-level track, which is generally geared toward young people fresh out of college, or even within college; the experienced track, in which people move around in jobs requiring experience and expertise -- both gained during time in the entry-level track; and the solitary go-getter track, in which the job seeker blazes his or her own path and creates opportunities for him or herself. The problem I find myself facing is that I'm too old to enter the entry-level path easily (at least for high-order careers suited to my existing experience and credentials -- these seem to all begin with unpaid internships and while-enrolled fellowship programs), I don't have the experience in hand to move in the second track (except within academia, and we know how that went), and I lack the drive and personality to make the third work. Basically, I have to hope that I run across someone willing to take a chance on me and let me prove, on the job, that I can do the work -- and most people aren't going to want to do that, given the numbers of people out there who do fit in the neat little categories.
I'm tired of being my own weird thing.
Dear D.,
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