All about love, part I
Happy Lunar New Year! Welcome to the year of the Tiger. I don’t know how to phrase it in English, so I’ll just say that it’s my year! As tigers, we are aggressive, tenacious, competitive, and strong. We are also fiercely loving. I’m glad to have come across the latter part because while I’ve been told about the former my whole life, the combination with the latter really encapsulates who I am and the life-career decisions I made last year.
For sure, this is an odd title for a piece related to career transitions… hear me out! Full credit to bell hooks for the title.
I was inspired to write this piece a few Fridays ago when I was gathered on Zoom with some friends workshopping one of their article drafts over my lunch break. While I wished we could be sitting around a table together, I felt so elated to be in that intellectual space with them engaging in the parts of academia that I love. I had realized a small piece of my vision for my career where I didn’t have to be in academia to still participate in academic life.
Last summer, when I was weighing whether to take the fancy one-year postdoc or take the public health job, I was really concerned with the lifestyle, loosing freedom over my time, the grind of working 8–5, being bored of the work I was going to be doing, and that it wouldn’t be intellectually stimulating enough. None of these ended up being true, by the way!
But more than the lifestyle concerns, I was worried about losing my community of people I had built in the academy. They weren’t just my colleagues. They were my friends, supporters, cheerleaders, inspirations, co-conspirators, listening ears, and compassionate hearts. I was afraid that by jumping ship, as it were, that I would lose my connection with these folks. Over the past 10+ years, I had built a web of geograpals, as I like to call them, across the discipline and beyond. We workshopped papers, plotted reading groups, gave talks, facilitated writing groups, organized writing retreats, discussed our hopes and dreams while running, and the list goes on. Over time, I realized I had grown to love these folks.
Now, I get that sounds strange for a group of people I came to know through work, but I guess that love comes from needing to shield each other from the hurricane that is life in academia. We listen to each other’s deepest darkest fears, celebrate every small win, problem-solve injustices, and just shoot the shit. Last Friday, we did a little bit of all of that and in the kindest and most loving way possible. We discussed writing anxiety and putting ourselves out there, organizing conference sessions, new tools to manage our work, and career crossroads. If only all corners of academia were like this, we could have an academia that many of us aspired to work in as baby grad students (and in my case, until very recently).
As I was at the crossroads and really had to dig into and clarify what I actually love about academia, it was my geograpals. I used to say that I love my job, I love mentoring students, and I love thinking and discussing intensely theoretical thoughts. I realized I enjoy those activities. The people and my relationships with them are what had kept, and keep, me going for all this time.
We’ve all heard the saying that a job will never love you back, and it is 100% true of academia. Let’s be real: a lot of us have stuck it out in academia because we “love” doing a bunch of activities of academia and we believe we need to be in academia in order to keep doing those things. I believed that if I wanted to keep doing the things I enjoy, the crappy things about academia (uncertainty, precarity, poverty, constant moving, elitism, dragging people down, numerous terrible tenured faculty, scathing peer reviews, etc., etc.) were a price I had to pay. But that is just not true. It’s my deep connections with geograpals (and students) that kept me going all this time, not doing the activities I love under grueling conditions. So I found a job that allows me to continue to nurture relationships with my geograpals and continue engaging in the activities that I love doing in academia, albeit with much better pay and benefits living in a place I want.
At the crossroads, I learned two things about love. The first is that because we had developed these relationships based on friendship, love, trust, support, encouragement, honesty, and other qualities necessary for any successful relationship, it didn’t matter what career I had; these folks would still be my friends and colleagues. Yes, these friendships were facilitated by the academy, but they aren’t growing or thriving because of it. We’ve moved to a place where our relationships exist beyond the academy. We don’t necessarily talk often and we may see each other even less but we can still participate in each other’s academic lives and we can also go for hikes and have picnics together.
The second, which I’ll discuss in the next piece, is that because I have the love and support of my geograpals, I learned to make decisions for love of myself.
I dedicate this piece to all of the geograpals in my life whose love keeps me going on this path (in no particular order): Katie, Anne, Mae, Jodi, Laura, Yana, Aaron, Dani, Meredith, Carrie, Kessie, Megan, Sam, Jess, Rawan, Brittany, David, Brian, Becky, Tish, Aurora, Jorell, Bethany, Pam, Emilie, AJ, Jeremy, Derek, Laura, Garrett, Rebecca, Nick, Ryan, Gregg, Caitlin, Jeanette, and so many countless others.
