I am once again of good cheer

My sadness and mopeyness of yesterday did not last very long, and the world is looking pretty good again.

Among other cures, I actually said something to the flower-assigner of yesterday. I tried to keep it light and not passive-aggressive, but I did let her know that I was brought up short by the description of my "thorns." Turns out that she used this stupid bouquet metaphor regularly for small groups, and that quite often someone winds up offended (last time it was the dandelions person). And yet she persists in continuing this weird practice! Go figure. In another mixed metaphor moment, she assured me that "The thorns are what holds the vine in place, and you served as an anchor as we tested new waters." D. and I had a hilarious moment last night of trying to top her floral metaphors; I can't remember exactly what we came up with, but it involved "using the pesticide of unnecessary interference" on the "aphids of distraction" (the latter phrase has now gone into D's notebook of good band names). All of which is to say that I knew I was being oversensitive yesterday, and by nightfall I had managed to get over that and could now laugh at the whole episode.

But here's what really turned the day around: Right after I finished blogging yesterday, I hopped into the car to meet someone for coffee. This is someone I hadn't met; we're both alums of the same undergraduate school, and a board member of the school had put us in touch with each other to brainstorm about an alumni project. And we did such brainstorming ... for about 5 minutes at the end of our almost-two-hour conversation. We're going to get together again to do the actual work we've been asked to do, but we just had way too much other stuff to talk about yesterday.

She's a dozen years older than I am, and it turns out that she also has a Ph.D. in literature and came onto the market in an era that was even worse than it is now. And she wound up deciding that it was more important to her to choose where she lived than what her job was. So she and her partner decided that Adventure City was where they wanted to make a life, and they moved up here and found an apartment and then found jobs and have been living here very happily for over twenty years now. And she's had such an interesting career, one that has moved in and out of academia but not in the field of literature at all. And she has taught and published and conferenced and done all of those things that people do in academic careers, but she has done so very much on her own terms. And when she wants a change, she simply alters her course: quits the job she's doing, or starts saying "no" to things, and then new ways open up for her. Or one job leads to another opportunity, or her current employer asks her to take on a new challenge. She said that she's been very lucky, but of course it's also possible to make one's own luck to some extent, and she's clearly done that.

The whole conversation was incredibly inspiring and motivating and bracing! Among other things, she brought up the issue of being not academic enough for academia but too academic for non-academia, which was one of the very things I was fretting about in yesterday's blog post.  And she had two sage pieces of advice: (1) make this in-between state work for you; think of it as a niche rather than a no man's land; sometimes people in both camps will listen to you more because you're filling that niche; and (2) develop a thicker skin, because there will be other people in both camps who will either look down on you or laugh at you; get over it and get back to filling that niche.

We also talked seriously about what it means to be a risk-averse person who finds herself no longer on the paved path to traditionally defined success but suddenly making her own path. She shared with me what her own strategies had been, and we both said that one of the things that we had learned about ourselves in this (and of course she's been doing this much longer than I) is that we're not actually as risk-averse as we always thought we were. And then we talked about what it means to decide what one really wants in this world, especially when the traditional definitions of what one *should* want are no longer really working.

I came home bubbling and enthusiastic and feeling that things will somehow work out fine for me. And I woke up with the same conviction. So my glum afternoon of yesterday eventually became a frabjous day after all!

 

Comments

[Hilaire]

This is so wonderful, WN!! How fortutitous to meet this person right about now! and after yesterday, too!

[negativecapability]

What a cool person to meet! And wow, do I ever always feel this: "the issue of being not academic enough for academia but too academic for non-academia." Although that might be a function of the institution that I'm at now which, might subside a little when I get a job at a different kind of institution. I like where I am, but it's not really "me."

[Tiruncula]

This is so exciting! I'm energized (well, a teensy bit) just reading about how energized you are by the meeting. I'm going to have to come visit and meet this person. Email and tell me more about her, if it doesn't involve too much typing.

[codfish]

WN, she sounds great! Glad you got to meet her and that you sound so much better than you did yesterday. :-)