A few weeks ago, I started reading Sheryl Sandberg’s book, “Lean in”, a charming tome that blames educated white women and their poor workplace choices for being the reason that women make 77 cents on the dollar to men and are not advancing up the corporate ladder. Who knew women had the kind of corporate agency required to make it impossible for women to advance in great numbers in the workplace. All. Their. Own.Fault. For not leaning in. Oh, that wasn’t your take on it? Because it was definitely mine.
I didn’t finish the book, of course, before it was due back at the library, because I work a 60+ hour a week job, and the big joke about what I do is how flexible my career path is, because I get to choose which 60 to 70 hours I work each week. I am not complaining though: I chose an academic life, and I chose it thoughtfully and with care. And it turns out, I am good at it. Good at engaging college students in the classroom, good at using The Bachelor and other horrific pop-culture media to teach tricky theoretical concepts, and good at coming up with ideas. But I am not good at office politics, especially the byzantine grudge-holding and secrecy that permeates academia, and I am not good at hearing that I can’t voice an opinion in my field until after I am tenured.At the same time, I was becoming increasingly good at talents I never wanted to cultivate. Talents like, being so filled with anxiety that I could no longer open my work email without taking a Xanax first, and moving so far past the point of anger in my day-to-day life that the only thing left in my emotional toolkit was indifference. And what is so weird is that when I was at my most anxious, most stressed out, most emotionally bankrupt point, I won an award, got an amazing set of course reviews from my students, had 3 papers accepted at conferences. But I felt like I was drowning, and it was abundantly clear that my department was fresh out of life preservers.
So I quit.I just quit last week.
It is weird to quit something that you wanted so badly. I really wanted the academic life, at least the romantic version of it. I don’t exactly know what the fallout is going to be. I know I most likely won’t finish my PhD now, and that stings, but as I settle farther into this decision, I keep reminding myself that that is a pretty ‘first-world’ problem. Poor me, gentle reader, I didn’t get to finish my PhD. Poor ME! And I have to keep reminding myself that out here, in the real world that I feel like I have rejoined, pretty much nobody else has a PhD, either, and yet are somehow managing to live happy, productive lives.
I don’t have another job. I am not even looking, to be honest. I told my husband I wanted some time: time to let the anxiety leak out of me, time to read novels again, time to play with my kids without always running that academic voice in the back of my head that reminded me that any time spent away from the computer was automatically considered wasted time. Time with my children felt like wasted time, time I couldn’t get back, time I was losing, making me fall behind at work. It is crazy, so crazy to me, how that felt. So now, I am taking time. Time to clean my house, cook some decent meals, volunteer a bit, time to breathe, time to be in the moment with my children, relaxed and happy.
Time to regroup. Time to just be still and silent, let the world pass by for a little while, and forget about me. And time to read.
The dirty secret of academia is that you don’t get to read. Or rather, you get to read constantly, but it is all journal articles and scholarly books, and you aren’t supposed to read for pleasure, and if you dared to, you certainly should never, ever admit it. A few years ago, I had a conversation with another graduate student about our summers, and I trusted her enough to tell her that, over the summer, while I still worked like crazy and wrote like crazy, I snuck in the time to read two popular novels. Two! I could never have told anyone else I worked with. They would have labelled me as lacking ambition. And then she whispered to me – whispered, like it had to be a secret – that she had read the entire Hunger Games Trilogy. And loved it. Three young adult books in 3 months? Not really allowed. Because if you think you have time to read, well, let’s face it, you also have an enormous pile of journal articles and french social theorists to plow through. So now, I am reading: light fiction, literary fiction, good biographies, trashy celebrity autobiographies, everything. Reading, and (whispers) writing.
All of my life I have been pursuing careers I didn’t necessarily want, as a means of creating a buffer between myself and what I really wanted to do in life, and my resume is as crazy as it gets with regard to career changes. I paid the bills, kept the lights on, worked in a number of completely disparate fields, and told myself I was being a responsible adult, but I have to say, that path feels less and less like responsibility, and more and more like lying to myself. Being good at something is not enough of a reason to do it, I have recently realized. And being happy is completely important. No doubt I am being falsely swayed by the plethora of bad life-coach inspired self-affirmation quotations that show up on my Pinterest dashboard, but what is life for, if not making extravagant mistakes and being an epic failure, in the pursuit of your dreams?
I love my dreams. So why haven’t I been pursuing them?
I am giving myself a year. A year to put my mental house back in order, to stop stress-eating crap in the middle of the night because I can’t sleep, to stop pursuing everything career-wise that I don’t want, and to finally be honest and just admit to myself that all I really want to do in life is play with my kids, bake, read, and write, and that is perfectly okay. A year to Lean Out, a year to write without pressure, a year to lower my blood pressure and my cholesterol and golf and clean and have a completely unstressful Christmas and learn to knit and hopefully publish something and bake things and be happy. I just checked the latest Tori Spelling memoir out of the library. I made hors d’ouevres for my husband and I to snack on after the kids go to bed tonight, so that we can have cocktails, snack, and watch a movie. After I finish writing this, I am going to make some homemade macaroni and cheese for the kids, revel in the domestic life a bit, and then read until they get home. It feels good. I feel guilty, still, about it, but hopefully that will fade.
That’s enough feels for one day, I think. Time to slip back into my unfeeling robot-like Episcopalian skinsuit and go dust some baseboards. Here is Danny Trejo, to read us out.