Though I’ve made my decision and don’t see myself revisiting it—I found just the right kind of beeswax to stop my ears, you see—I am still pondering my way through the ramifications of last week’s bizarre little Dorothea-hunt.
Because, sure, against all my better judgment, against the gut feeling that has the best track record for decisionmaking of any part of me, I was tempted. It behooves me to figure out why. The more I know about my own softheadedness, the more I can do to escape it.
A lot of it was plain ordinary pleasure in being valued. I doubt I’ll ever be immune to that, and I don’t even know that I want to be. In its proper place, it’s a terrific motivator. (Allen Renear knew this about me quite well. I knew he knew it, but I didn’t resent him for using it; in that case, it was icing on a cake I’d have been eating anyway.)
A little of it—and I think it’s to my credit how little it really was—was “I’ll show ’em!” self-puffing revenge dreams. Look, Dad, I’ll show you what was in the kid you bloody well slagged off. I’ll show the Department from Hell what they threw away. I’ll show ’em what I’m capable of. I’ll march right up to the eleventh floor and make ’em call me “Dr.”
Bah. For shame. I know better. And my husband is a good example on this point; I haven’t heard him so much as mention his ex-department in years. It’s not as though mine would care, anyway. Or even remember, like enough. I don’t think they even know I’ve told my story.
I would, given the chance, still send a broken camel’s vertebra with “Last Straw Award” etched on it to the foul-tempered, dismissive, crooked-minded bully of a man whose callousness pushed me right over the edge at the last. I do hope, though, that this nasty little wish of mine is the last gasp of puerility.
So that’s what called out to me in their offer. I do wonder, though, what they thought they were offering. I don’t think it was necessarily what I was hearing; I felt as much earlier.
I think their main selling point was ambition. Status. Cachet. They can’t guarantee a job for life; tenure is crumbling all over. They can’t guarantee the big bucks; nobody in LIS makes the big bucks. They’re offering all the cultural baggage that goes along with being able to call myself “Dr.”
Ten years ago? Would have worked. I didn’t know myself terribly well ten years ago. Was easily led. Dangle a carrot of approbation in front of my nose, and I’d follow it anywhere. Nor did I have a floor under me, a sense that I could make my own way on my own terms. Somebody else had always been the one dictating terms, ten years ago.
That’s changed. I’m fond of Allen Renear, and I value his good opinion very highly, but I didn’t stay at my last soul-sucking employer for his sake. I’m fond of my current employer, but I politely declined the last semester of support they offered me, because I need the time for jobhunting. I’m even fond of SLIS—but I won’t delay my life, bore myself senseless, or compromise my ethics for them.
Ambition for status? Not a big driver any more. I’ll take status and approval when they come my way (as long as I believe I’ve earned them fairly), but given a choice between quiet accomplishment and empty status, I’ll take the former. Given this choice—between going out into the wide world and accomplishing some more stuff, and hanging around in a grad department putting accomplishment on hold for the sake of status—I think my choice speaks for itself.
Ambition for power? Never had it, never will. Autonomy—power over myself—I value, so much that I’ve fled places that tried to take it from me. (Why do you think I recoiled when Info-Arch-Prof started talking about the research I’d have no choice but to do?) Power over others I don’t want.
Ambition for accomplishment? Now we’re talking. I want—a lot of things. Too many to fit into this post. But I want ’em, and the way I get ’em ain’t through a Ph.D.
Not everyone’s ambition, I suppose, but it is authentically mine; try how they may, I don’t think the sirens can get past it.
