I’m building new communities of people and relationships with others to support people in their creative ventures. I'm also thinking about how to have more joy in writing. What might shift for us as writers and people if we looked for those moments in which writing feels joyful and creative? What if we allowed struggle and joy to overlap? Struggle and joy in the creative process might be better thought of as a both/and than an either/or.
Sometimes you just have to take The Flying Leap, engaging in some big inspired action that would otherwise make no sense under ordinary circumstances. The Flying Leap occurs when your inspiration and desire for change become bigger than your fear.
Reclaiming trauma stories and telling those stories as our personal truths is different from creating victim narratives. They might sound similar, but victim narratives almost always involve blame, either explicit or implicit. Reclaiming your pain and trauma story means standing tall in your truth, no matter how much it hurts.
If you’ve ever felt helpless, you may have been the sitting-on-hands-and-complaining-loudly person. You refuse to accept any solutions to your problem. You reject any solution as ridiculous and preposterous at best, and downright foolish and risky at worst. At this point, you’re not actually trying to solve problems, even though you pretend you are. You're in the grips of the "Yes, but..." syndrome
The grief I felt when I conceded defeat on the job market was the real deal. I cycled through every one of the Kubler Ross model’s stages of grief several times. And as anyone who has been through the five stages of grief knows, they are not really stages at all, but rather suggestions. Grief is a full body contact sport that involves cycling and recycling through the stages of grief, moving forward and backwards and sideways at the most inopportune moments until the heart and soul decide there’s nothing more to be done and they’ve let go. There’s nothing rational about grief and no time table to “get over it.” It’s insanely confusing and consumes massive amounts of emotional resources. Grief is involuntary and wild and frightening.
If you’re one of the many, many, many people who don’t end up with even the crappy consolation prize of an adjunct position, your worth as a human being is entirely independent of your professional accomplishments. You are not your work and your work is not you. Your sense of self has probably taken a wallop. Be kind to yourself when you’re hurting.
Here’s what I want you to know today: you are a worthy person. Full stop.
One of the most difficult parts of leaving academia is the idea of breaking up with the life of the mind. When you’ve devoted years of time and thousands of dollars into training for thinking up new ideas for a living, sometimes life outside of academia seems beige and uninteresting.
Fortunately, academia isn’t the only place you can chase your personal intellectual passions. Plenty of problems to solve and interesting things to think about exist outside academia. You can stay engaged with ideas and thinking up new stuff, but it may be on your own time.
Like so many things in life, your access to resources (or lack of them) may determine how engaged you stay with your research and new ideas.
I’ve been thinking lately about our underlying assumptions about being an alt-ac person and how external resources shape life outside of academia. For instance, if your spouse happens to have a well-paying job, maybe you can still afford to go to all of your favorite academic conferences without travel funding from an academic department. If you have some cash laying around, maybe you can afford to make your research into a hobby. Maybe you’ve got enough resources so that you can start a freelance business from scratch without having to do it in your spare time.
On the other hand, because of the neoliberal debt-servitude model of the modern PhD, a lot of people are graduating under crushing debt loads, with shitty academic job prospects, and even scarcer resources. Getting out of academia gets us out of the adjunct rut (maybe), but the alt-ac life still hinges on the racial, classed, and gendered structures that shape our paths forward.
People with few resources at their disposal are probably going to have to get day jobs while they’re trying to figure out what to do next. A day job often isn’t particularly satisfying, but pays the (student loan) bills. A lot of day jobs, though necessary and life-saving, are boring and soul-crushing. They require considerably less creativity than we’re used to exercising as PhD people engaged in the search for truth and the creation of knowledge. It’s hard to leap from discussing Foucault and the idea of governmentality (particularly these days) to a job that requires little to no critical thought. Before I got my current job, I worked a whole slew of weird temp jobs; some were okay, others were awful. Some of them involved things like spreadsheets and bored me to tears. On the bright side, day jobs usually pay more than adjuncting.
Working 40-hours a week at a day job makes it hard to stay engaged intellectually. Exhaustion isn’t conducive to intellectual production. Working a day job may leave you intellectually understimulated and bored, especially if you’re only using a fraction of your PhD skills. You may start feeling like you’re slowly losing your critical thinking skills.
Here are some ideas about staying engaged intellectually and practicing critical thinking skills while working your day job:
In the ideal world, we’d be employed in jobs that gave us free rein to pursue our intellectual lives. In today’s world, with higher-ed and the humanities under attack generally, I predict that more PhDs are going to have transitional day jobs as they figure out what to do next. Staying engaged with ideas while working a day job isn’t easy. But better than boredom.
