When I crawled into the campus counselor’s office at last, a mind-fried wreck of a thing after four years of the Department from Hell, even then I had to repeat several times that I needed to leave graduate school before the counselor would believe me. It was the decision his skillful handling led me to make; it just wasn’t the decision he wanted out of me.
Apparently I’m just that much everyone’s notion of an academic. I don’t find this flattering any more. Or funny. I just want academia to give me up for saved.
I will enter classrooms again. No doubt about it. Too much to learn, not enough time to teach myself. I will never darken the door of another degree program. It just won’t happen. Academia’s eaten over a quarter of my life as it is, and let’s just not even talk money and opportunity cost, hm? I have other and better things to do now.
(Yeah. Over one-quarter. Three and a half years of undergrad, four and a half years in the Department from Hell, two years in library school. I’m 33. Do the math. If you’re not appalled, you should be. I am.)
And I’m certainly not going to do it merely because other people think I belong. That way lies madness. I know; I went that way once, and duly went mad.
So it’s time to attack this pernicious idea from the other direction. Time to figure out just what it is that makes people slot me into their mental “academic” slot, and change it.
I’m starting to think it’s my eccentric, sometimes stodgy, sometimes ’70s-boho fashion sense. That’s not changing, because I like what I like—but I might be able to cross it.
David suggested hot-pink hair. Hot pink isn’t quite my thing, I fear—but I’m strongly considering streaks of Kool-Aid blue. Eat that, academia.
