Being post-academic
Got another email today from a soon-to-be ex-grad-student. She sounds like she’s going to be okay, and I do not just say that because I like it when people tell me that reading my story helped them. Some of the people I hear from, I worry about—not that there’s a whole lot I can do for them. Her, I am not so much with the worrying.
Last week at work, a colleague stopped by my cube and was kind enough to examine the Wall O’ Diplomas (for which I thoughtfully designated the wall that someone coming into my cube is least likely to look at). He asked me about my history, and I used one of my usual terms for my first try at grad school: “crapping out.” When my colleague looked dubious, I amplified to “crashed and burned.”
“So there wasn’t any problem with the department?” he asked.
“Oh, the department was hell,” I said.
“Then it wasn’t you just crashing and burning,” he said, in the tone of one who is settling the question.
Gotta love that. There isn’t enough of it.
I find myself re-evaluating what stance toward academia I can take that would be most helpful for the people I care about—and to be perfectly clear for those who aren’t already trying to straighten out ears I’ve bent on the subject, that’s people who are trying to disentangle themselves from graduate school struggling with feelings of failure and hopelessness. I don’t give the tiniest wraith of an echo of a damn for the institution of graduate school. I want to limit the damage done to attriters, is all.
(I have been mistaken for a reformer. I’m not one. I actually despair of reform.)
Pretending nothing happened to me is pointless. No, harmful; the email I get announces with force and clarity that people in those straits value a story that feels like theirs. And even as the damage is healed and the worst of the memories recede, it would be foolish of me to rewrite my life story to minimize or obscure those four and a half years and their aftermath. Everything changed about me because of them, so much that I have trouble imagining what I might have been otherwise.
I like to jostle people out of their notions about attriters. I use the terms I do about my experience partly because they’re the bare truth, but also because I can say them with a great big cognitive-dissonance-causing grin. This is good for people in the middle of the maelstrom who can’t imagine ever smiling about it. It’s also good for people who sneer at everyone who’s been battered by the rapids. It’s a lot harder to sneer at someone who refuses to look appropriately shamefaced.
But dangers lurk on the other side of the equation, too. As I start settling into my new career, getting comfortable, picking up a few successes (and I landed a conference proposal and a book chapter last week, so I’m doing okay here), I can imagine being slotted into the “rule-proving exception” cubby. You know. The person who succeeds despite not playing by the advancement rules. The one they whisper about… “well, you know, she didn’t finish grad school; isn’t it great she got so far?”
At its worst, this constructs me as the baby with the caul, the charmed life. Either I’d be thought of as too good to fail (unlike your ordinary schmo, who’d better hustle through that dissertation), or it’d only be a lucky accident that I am where I am.
I don’t hold with either of those constructions of my story, because they’re flatly untrue, and they’re just not useful. Nothing charmed about me (and certainly nothing charming), and I’m nobody’s notion of genius aflower, either. And the people I want to reach don’t need a fairy-godparented orphan girl or a pedestaled hero; they need a scabby-kneed urchin with a gap-toothed grin to look them in the eye and invite them into the street to play.
It’s a weird road to walk sometimes. I don’t always do it with grace, which should surprise no one, as I can’t achieve grace consistently, or often at all. I do find that it helps to know why I construct it the way I do, though.