A day to remember

Dr Manuel Muñoz
Nov 5 · 4 min read

I’ve only stated to consider the term ‘alt-ac’ about a month ago.

I’d read about it, but it felt somehow wrong. I still have my reservations, because after all, ‘Alt-ac’ refers to an ‘alternative’ to academia, as if it’s Quorn instead of real meat we’re talking about. Like a substitute for the real, better thing.

However…

Next month it’ll be a year since I started working for my current company, and it’ll be a year and three months since I had my viva and obtained my PhD. Time doesn’t fly: it basically cons you into thinking it exists at all and that it isn’t a weird warp that shrinks and expands at will. I could say time has gone by quickly but, rather, I would say parts of it have. The viva feels like yesterday and like a lifetime ago simultaneously, while being in my latest position feels comfortable even though I’ve only been doing it for three months.

At first, my job was just temporary, something to do while looking for the actual job that would let the palaeographer in me shine. You guess right, it never happened. After few unsuccessful applications, and after finding out that in most of them there was a pre-determined candidate, I gave up. And it wasn’t just due to a bleeding pride, or anger. I was tired. Exhausted. After five years of PhD while doing several jobs (including teaching), why was I enduring that? What was the point? And for what, for a six-month contract, 10-hours a week in a different city?

There have been several tipping points, though. The first, when I learned that a job I was interested in but never applied because it was temporary/part-time/away (the holy trinity), had been filled by someone so high in the hierarchy I thought it was a joke. It wasn’t only that with that kind of competition I would have never got it, but the utter sadness of them considering such a precarious job in the first place. Like, is this what I want? After however many years, however many publications, monographs, teaching and short-term postdocs, is that what awaits me?

‘You don’t want it enough’, ‘you have no patience’, ‘you’re not trying hard enough’. I’ve heard that many times, with nicer phrasing and good intentions. And you know what? It’s all true. I cannot want it enough not to have a life after many years without having a life, I cannot be patient after years of financial insecurity and shitty jobs, and I cannot try harder when I’m exhausted after the PhD. Acknowledging this has taken me until yesterday.

Few days ago I received an automated email saying my university account would be deactivated in a couple of weeks. Logical and fair. It wasn’t until yesterday that I sat down to write to a few people telling them my personal email address, should they wish to contact me. Also logical and fair. But something clicked so hard I could almost hear it, because next to my laptop on my desk there was the (gorgeous) case containing a new collection of miniature paints that had just arrived in the post.

What the actual…? I hear you say. During the PhD years, I slowly but surely lost all my hobbies. I felt guilty of not being writing even when I was visiting my family, let alone when thinking of painting a miniature. The toxicity of it was so hard that almost a year on from finishing I didn’t know what to do in my spare time, because I had forgotten how to have spare time. I’ve slowly re-introduced, as if it was some degraded ecosystem, pleasures like reading — not speed reading, not marking reading, not footnote reading — and music. And not long ago I decided to paint and assemble models again, after years of neglect.

And there I had on my desk an email telling me my academic identity in the shape of an institutional email address was going to disappear, next to one of the tokens of me having a life. What a perfect metaphor.

After this powerful realisation of what I had gained, a second revelation came. I’ve rambled before about how writing commitments were a source of anxiety. Of three publications I had agreed to do before finishing the PhD, I could only finish one, with another one ‘almost there’. There was a third that, because it wasn’t directly based on my research I didn’t have any idea of how to start it. It’s been present in my mind for so long it became normal to think about it every time I was commuting home. I would do it, I would write it, I would succeed. But the truth is, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I would panic — physically panic — at the thought of it, it would make me anxious at times. I used to feel, deep inside, some of the guilt I used to feel, like a lingering reminder of the life I supposedly ought to have been living. And yesterday, after mourning my academic email address, I was honest with myself. I had to write a painful apologetic email, but I had to get rid of that, I had to cut that tie. You cannot be an academic, with all it entails, without being one. When I was finished, I felt at peace with myself in a way I hadn’t in a long time.

In this long road to acceptance, I’ve taken another little step. And if that is ‘alt-ac’, so be it.

Dr Manuel Muñoz

Written by

PhD in Palaeography and Manuscript Studies @ King's College London. Alt-ac, it seems.

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