Living with It

What seems like a long time ago I coined the phrase "post-academic stress syndrome" to describe the ways I felt after falling out of academia.  I don't remember thinking much about the long term at that point, because I was too busy processing the active trauma of the experience.

Now, six years out, I find myself thinking about how apt that expression has proven to be. 

What it does is capture that sense of being the walking wounded, and now, the walking healed-but-with-a-limp.  Simply put, after all that time in academia, I still can't shake the effects it - and my fall from the tower - have had on my psyche.  Granted, living with someone who is an active member of academia doesn't help, but I remain repeatedly surprised at how difficult it is for me to shake off my sense of betrayal.  After all this time, I still feel like the hungry woman with her nose pressed up against the glass, watching others eat - and yet, I simultaneously am so suspicious of the food at that table, to the point where I'd find it hard to enjoy it even if I were allowed in.

I also am still unable to shake the sense that I am somehow responsible for my failure, that it was about something lacking in my character or skills, rather than about the market and the odds.  If only... I had published more.  If only... I had taken that job instead of that other one.  If only... I was better at writing cover letters.  If only... my interests were more marketable.  If only, if only, if only.

I feel like I was crippled, and that I still struggle with the effects of that now. 

What kills me, particularly, is that the experience of that career trauma is what has made it so challenging to move on.  In some essential way I feel damaged, and it carries over into all of my subsequent efforts to remake myself and my career.  An unfriendly market becomes a personal career failure becomes a personal failure, period. 

I doubt my ability to support myself, look at my efforts and think that if Social Darwinism operated, I should have starved homeless in a ditch long ago.  On bad days it feels like all I'm doing is racking up one failure after another - academic... museum curator... librarian... writer... photographer... craftswoman... freelancer... - and what kills me - absolutely kills me - is that each of these things is supposedly something that I have the skills to excel at.  People praised my research and scholarly insight, they praised my teaching, and now they praise my writing, my photography, my art.

And yet... I am a professional failure, making only $430 a month at a part-time, limited term job I find frustrating and unrewarding, a job that was also about the only one I could find that I was qualified for. 

(I know I should be grateful, in this economy, to even have a job, but it's hard to see this in a positive light, given what, supposedly, I should be capable of.)

And each of these failures, these attempts to translate something I'm good at into something I can make a living at that come to nothing, makes it harder to pick myself back up and take another run at it.  One of the ways that scar tissue differs from the tissue it replaces is that it is stiff, inflexible, binding.  I feel like my trauma cost me my resilience, my ability to bounce back from set-backs.  A crisis of confidence doesn't quite describe it, because I can manage brief moments of optimism.  Rather, it's like I've lost any ability I once had to sustain that optimism through hardship, to view set-backs as temporary and limited, instead of evidence that once again I have failed and will continue to fail.

And I don't know what, at this point, would turn things around. 

Comments

[Lorianne]

Ouch! As a perpetual adjunct, I have no wisdom to add, other than to say "I hear you, sister."

I make a decent living as an adjunct, but only because I teach at multiple institutions. So while my tenured and tenure-track colleagues get vacations and sabbaticals, I'm always teaching somewhere. On weekends when I'm not teaching for Institution A, I'm grading papers for Institution B. When Institution A is on break, Institution B is still in session, etc.

This perpetual work schedule leaves little to no time for scholarly research & publishing, so I've given up trying to climb out of the adjunct track. Instead, I try to make peace with my status as a "blue-collar intellectual": for whatever reason, I simply don't belong to the "class" of PhD recipients who are worthy of health insurance, job security, and tenure. This two-tiered class structure is the "dirty little secret" of academe, and I don't expect it to go away during my lifetime.

In my case, I gave up on academia before it necessarily gave up on me. I didn't even try to go on the job market, and I haven't even tried to publish. Not only are the cards stacked against a "working class" academic like me, I long ago decided I'm not really sure I want to be in academia. Maybe if the job market were different, I'd feel more hopeful: I'm a damned good instructor, and I'd be a damned good professor. But academic writing is exactly the kind of writing I don't want to be doing, even if I had the time to pursue it. So you might say my break with academia was a mutual one, although it would have been nice (in retrospect) to have felt like academia regretted (or even noticed) our split.

[Rana]

Yup. Sometimes I think that having been dropped out of the tower was a good thing, in that I was already starting to feel a bit burned out by academia.

What's frustrating, in particular, is that it's the very thing that I was burning out on that is what I can find work doing: teaching. I never wanted to be a teacher, really - indeed, part of the reason I went for the doctorate was so that I wouldn't be stuck teaching high school kids. It was always the research - and the writing - that excited me, not the teaching. The courses I liked best were the ones where I was learning new things in fields that interested me, partly because I could share that excitement with the students, but largely because that's where I found my reward (instead of in achieving student success).

It's basically a lot of work without much intrinsic reward for me; I do end up spending a lot of time thinking about my students and the class, but more in the sense that it's a difficult, sometimes unpleasant puzzle to solve. I'm a puzzle solver, so I can't help get sucked in, but it's not the sort of puzzle that gives me that much pleasure - even when the class ends there's not that feeling of accomplishment and closure that finishing a piece of writing gives me.

But! Today I met with a group of indexers at one of their semi-annual workshop/conferences, and I feel really excited about the possibilities there. So... fingers crossed!

[New Kid on the Hallway]

After all this time, I still feel like the hungry woman with her nose pressed up against the glass, watching others eat - and yet, I simultaneously am so suspicious of the food at that table, to the point where I'd find it hard to enjoy it even if I were allowed in.

This really resonates with me - I am really glad I chose to do something other than keep chasing academic jobs, but there are times when I feel very much on the outside, feeling excluded from something, something that most of me doesn't even want at this point - certainly not the options that would be available. Partly because I got tracked into teaching jobs somewhere along the line - probably because of where I did my undergrad, and how much teaching we did as grad students in my grad program - and while I enjoy research/writing more, I always felt that teaching was more important, so put more time into that. I did enjoy it, in many cases, but by the time I had stopped learning new things in the classes I taught, it got REALLY old. I know my experience isn't the same as yours, but I know some of what you're talking about.

(In fact, one of the reasons I went to law school was because I was too chicken to strike out on my own and try to carve out a career of my own making, so I really respect that this is what you've been doing.)

[Bill Tozier]

I know exactly how you feel.

One wants to be more of a reform activist, feeling this way. But of course the hesitation, the niggling but inevitable expectation, is that if one were a reform activist, the first response of the sickest professors in the system would be that familiar, dismissive scoffing all over again.

To do what we love, maybe we need to make a new place, and a new way, that ignores the Academy completely. That's a hard, hard thing to do alone, I agree, as isolated folks unaffiliated and scattered.

[Rana]

New Kid - I don't know if it's so much that I'm not chicken as the other way around - I'm frightened by the thought of making another long-term commitment of my time (and money!) to yet another thing that doesn't work out. (Which is why I'm not in, say, library school right now.) So, instead, I'm making things up as I go, which isn't very effective.

One thing I've come to realize about myself is that in many ways I'm more of a project-oriented person than a process-oriented one, in that the greatest reward for me comes from having reached a concrete goal, rather than from doing the things needed to reach that goal. This isn't to say that some processes aren't engaging or interesting or rewarding, but rather that if they are "pointless" I find it difficult to sustain my attention when the going gets rough. I've been coping by trying to find smaller, more achievable goals, but then they start feeling like laundry - a lot of the same, and never done - which negates the whole point. Unfortunately, it appears that the world outside of academia is more "laundry-like" than I'd realized, and so my coping skills for that (if I ever had them) atrophied while in grad school. I'm learning, but I feel like I'm behind the curve.

Teaching very quickly becomes laundry-like, in a way that research never did for me.

Bill - ah, you have more energy than I do, or less cynicism, because I find myself at this point utterly uninterested in reform. I warn students about the perils of investing too heavily in the notion of academia, and that's about it. Of course, part of this is that I am honest enough to admit that if someone offered me a post-doc I'd be excited by the opportunity, and that I am still drawn by the collegiality and schedule of academic life.

I think perhaps the fact that my experience was never personal - no one ever did that dismissive scoffing in my case (except the very first year of grad school, but that's a different situation). To the contrary, what was particularly traumatic about failing to succeed on the market (and about burning out) was that so many people were so positive about my work, my teaching, etc. etc. - and yet all that positive, supportive energy meant... nothing. It felt good, but it didn't - and couldn't - translate into concrete results, such as a salary and benefits. It also made me intensely cynical and suspicious of praise, because it started to feel pollyanna-ish and clueless, rather than based on real abilities.

I still suffer from the effects of that - when people tell me my work is good, my reaction isn't increased confidence - it's more like, "Yeah, whatever, like that ever mattered." The praise becomes empty when it fails to translate into anything more than compliments.

(Weirdly, I also have difficulties with praise that does result in things like excess respect - as in the way this happens at things like temp agencies. There, people are too impressed by my skills - which means that I'm ruled out for most jobs - and it's aggravating when I know that they're praising things that, at this point, are no big deal for me. It feels a bit... fake, somehow. Or, again, clueless.)

There are multiple reasons why "post-academic stress syndrome" has turned out to be such an accurate description!

[Pronoia]

Oh, I so hear you. I left of my own accord because teaching didn't feed me and it turned out the disciplinary-ness of academia ruled out what I really truly wanted to think and write about -- and I couldn't stomach spending years doing other work so I could eventually return to what I love.

And I'm finding that I'm only now, four year later, being able to imagine doing intellectual work outside the academy. In fact, I'm only now being able to imagine it existing outside the academy, even though I'm far more excited by what's going on out here than I ever was in there.

Is there something that would have helped us? Made the separation easier, less traumatic, more seamless? Is there something that would have helped us get to the next right thing?

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Your suspicion of praise sounds to me like a reasonable response to finding out that academia (like life) is not a meritocracy (no matter how much it pretends it is). I have a sort of similar reaction - I still very much like hearing I've done something well, because I can't quite let go of the meritocracy idea (I did well! that has to matter!), but I'm also super conscious of the fact that, say, getting an A on my trial brief is nice, but doesn't mean diddly in the grand scheme of things. On the one hand, this is good, because I think it makes me better able to get over grades than some people in my class (this is relevant only in school, of course!), but on the other, I get anxious/paranoid about how to do all the other networking/meeting people that's supposed to matter in the non-meritocracy, the kinds of things I don't feel I'm any good at because I spent all those years believing my skills and achievements mattered.

And I have a similar reaction to overpraise - when I was interviewing for summer internships, people tended to make impressed noises about my publications/conference presentations. For me, this was only because none of them were academics, they were impressed by things that were ordinary for academics to do, and in fact, if they knew what a REAL academic's c.v. looked like (at a comparable stage to mine), they'd realize I was nothing remotely special (that, and they're comparing me to other 1Ls, of course).

You probably have a wiser attitude towards money than I do...

[arvind]

After living for just a few years with my wife who struggled to find a paying post-doc after her graduation, and is struggling every day even after, I feel that the blame should rest squarely with academia and nowhere else. Some days I feel like the entire institution needs to be demolished to the ground. I often joke that the corporate world is where people take credit inversely proportional to their actual productivity, but I truly feel that it is far better than the opposite case in academia. Sometimes, I find it hard to believe that it is possible for humans to exhibit such toxic disdain for the productivity of their peers when my wife comes home with horror stories from the academic world. There were some artisan castes in India in the olden days and I think some servant classes like the Butlers in England who found a way to take pride in their inferior position in society by taking pride in their work instead of fighting the injustice. I find it hard to not conclude that people of an academic bent-of-mind suffer from a similar mental disorder and/or coping-mechanism-gone-horribly-wrong. When I read all the posts on the leaky pipeline and other hardships in academia and see all the talk about how to fix it with no one questioning how inhuman the very standards expected for scholarship are, I am left wondering if these are really the smartest people in the world. How can anyone sit by and see the ridiculous process and publishing expectations for tenure and not call bullshit on the whole thing? Yet while the academic work environment borders on slavery, I keep reading one article after another on how you just have to keep your nose to the grindstone and if you really loved it, you wouldn't be complaining and I'm like, are these people fucking nuts? It is an insane, corrosive and toxic environment and I hope that enough people would come to their senses and jump out of the shitty pipeline at the first chance until either the whole enterprise implodes or they are finally driven to put in measures to provide some basic human rights taken for granted in the rest of the working world like more humane and realistic expectations on productivity and pay.

Which is a long-winded and full-blown-rant-mode way of saying that you deserve much better than what the stinking ivory tower has to offer, and don't you ever doubt that!!

*exhales* Ok. I'm fine now. Really. :-)

ps: Lest I give a wrong impression about my wife, I want to add that my wife doesn't have any any of the traits I criticized, nor any illusions about academia, and would definitely prefer to leave it if only she'd get a chance outside. On the contrary, I was the one with the rose-tinted view of academia until a combination of living with an academic and reading online blogs by academics gave me a true picture of how shitty things really are.

[Rana]

definitely prefer to leave it if only she'd get a chance outside

And that's the rub, isn't it?

If I could find non-academic work that (a) paid decently, (b) let me be my own boss, (c) had a flexible, task-based schedule, and (d) took full advantage of my skills and interests, I'd be one happy camper.

Except for the teaching, academia was pretty much that for me, which is why I am still conflicted over it. If it had been a bad fit from the beginning, I wouldn't have stuck with it for so long. Unfortunately, it fit all too well - it simply turned out that jobs inside the ivory tower like this are about as scarce as those outside, but the inmates pretend that they are not, and I bought that line, because I wanted it to be true.

[butuki]

I very much identify with how you feel and how you have gone about trying to work it out. Part of the problem, for me, is that I constantly feel that I need to identify and name what it is that I am supposed to be and do. However,... and it eerily has something to do with how I perceive the natural world and identify with it... I intrinsically feel that in order for me to feel justified and matched with what I do, it would have to absolutely have nothing to do with niches and pigeon-holes: the reason I feel so peaceful and complete in the natural world, and why I so deeply need to find work within that sphere, is because nothing is defined or specialized. At least that's my gut feeling. You and I have all these disparate skill, but there is nothing available for work that brings them all together.

Also, the world we are in now demands that all of us, all of us, now become merchants. There seems to be no room any more for anyone with other skills or proclivities.

After two years I've come to understand that I love teaching (15 years) but I detest working in an academic setting, and can't stand teaching English (which I never wanted to teach). I want out. I guess I have to do what Barry Lopez did. He loves and is a master of, both writing and photography. In order to focus on his skills and make a living he decided to forego photography and concentrate on writing. So we rarely see any of his photographs. We have to choose, Rana, and that is something both you and I will probably have the hardest time with, but at the same time that is the mark of a professional...

[Rana]

Yeah, but I keep hoping that I can thread that needle, and find something that allows me to combine my skills and interests into one neat package.

Instead what I think I'm trending toward is one set of skills devoted just to earning money on a flexible schedule, so that I can spend my time and attention doing other things.

It's a very alien way of thinking, this "day job" thing, for those of us who've been processed by academia, where your job is your life and your life is your job.