All about love, part II: self-care & refusal
Happy first day of March! To continue in the spirit of love from my previous post, let’s talk about refusal, self-love, and self-care.
The second thing I learned about love is that I made my career decision out of love for myself, and not for the ideal career of my dreams (finally!). Moreover, I have learned to love myself through my loving relationships with others. As corny as it sounds, the decision to choose the public health job was out of love for myself: for my happiness, mental health, wellbeing, spirit, and family. Learning to make decisions out of love for myself has been a long road. I used to think the freedom of time to think was the ultimate form of self-love and the poverty wages, overwork, burn out, precarity, and constant moving were just collateral. Wrong.
I’ve been seeing a lot of social media posts about self-care, particularly with pandemic fatigue. I see calls for more sleep, taking a bath, cooking yourself a nice meal, going for a walk, doing yoga, being kind to oneself, and so forth. I 100% agree that these are activities that I need to do as self-care to maintain myself on a day to day basis (geograpal nerds: social reproduction). But if these are activities required to show up for the next day and the day after (not necessarily for paid work), are they really self-care or are they fundamentals (or what my career coach calls “tent poles”)?
I’ve been asking myself this question for a while. Critiques of the indulgent consumption-based self-care aside, whenever I hear the word self-care, I feel a little cringey in the gut and I eye-roll a little bit. Not because I disagree with the calls for self-care — on the contrary, I need all the constant reminders I can get — but because I had in some ways integrated many of these self-care activities into my life and I was still burned out, exhausted, anxious, and depressed.
So I was doing self-care activities that allowed me to work everyday, albeit with great energetic costs, but I was still metaphysically in debt. I was doing all the things you’re “supposed” to do for self-care but they were ultimately activities I need to do to maintain myself. What could self-care look like on a different plane beyond activities I enjoy doing? If I was doing “all of the right things” in taking care of myself why was I still miserable? It was because I hadn’t taken it to the next level. I needed to cut out people, places, narratives, and activities that take away from my spirit in life and career.
I realized refusal is also self-care.
While I was engaging in activities of self-care, I wasn’t taking care of myself. I wasn’t dealing with or fighting against the voices that told me I was “lazy”, “not good enough”, “if I just work that little bit harder I’ll get there”, “I’m so lucky to have gotten this far”, “I just have to get this paper out”, and “the misery is what it takes to live your dream and love your job”. I let these voices run free in my head, and worst of all, I believed they were me. Only now with many of these voices gone just by choosing a different path or diminished with hard work, do I understand that I had internalized these messages as a way to will myself into being incredibly productive to the point of burning myself out… and to what end? There were so few tenure track (TT) jobs to be had.
Those voices of self-doubt and self-hatred are ever-present, though… even as I write this, I can hear the voices creeping back in about how “my writing here isn’t perfect”, that “I was a quitter”, that “if I was really so die-hard about it I should have stuck it out”, that “I wasn’t a Michael Kraus-superstar”, that “I was relatively lucky in academia”, that “I didn’t publish enough and that’s why I didn’t get a TT job”, that “my work wasn’t sexy enough”, yadda yadda, yadda. It’s just that now I fight back with “ok, there’s always more I can do and also I am so much happier. Do I miss elements? Yes, but academia is the opposite of a meritocracy with fewer TT jobs each year, and even if you get a TT, the uphill battle only gets harder, and for what?” and now I actually feel and believe it.
My dear advisor once told me that I have to control what I can control. The self-care activities were definitely some of those things I could control. But I could also control how I approached academia in my thoughts and I could control how much cruelty I was willing to tolerate. In the same way I was spending a lot of time in therapy learning to set boundaries and saying no against my people-pleasing tendencies, I needed to do this with my career. In my job, I had gotten better at saying no to individual requests for advising, committee work, etc. but I hadn’t tried refusing the institution itself.
In hindsight, I didn’t even know that making that leap was an option. To acknowledge that was to take away from my in-it-to-win-it drive to be a prof. When I was about to finish grad school, I refused adjuncting, not because there is anything wrong with adjuncting, but because I knew I was unable to tolerate that level of precarity and uncertainty. It was because in the last year of my PhD, I was told that I could make $3000 per class as an adjunct with a semester-by-semester contract and would only receive healthcare if I taught three or more classes. After my first fancy postdoc, I refused to take any one year gigs nor move somewhere where I knew no one, to a place where I had no connections.
And finally, when I found myself backtracking on those boundaries (because I began to consider one year options), it came down to refusing the career altogether and calling bullshit on academia where I was told I had an amazing CV and still couldn’t get a TT job in my field after four tries on the job market. As my therapist said, you can only bash your head against the wall so many times and expect a different result. There was nothing else left to do but for me to say no.
I’m still working on developing a sense of love for myself, and I will be working on it til my last breath. I don’t mean loving yourself in a navel-gazing, self-centered kind of way. It’s not a question of selfishly making decisions for yourself, but drawing a bunch of boundaries for yourself of conditions you refuse because no one is going to refuse for you. That means we have to be responsible for our refusal and do it for ourselves because let’s be real: the institution doesn’t care.
When I think back to the crossroads, I have this image in my head of my two hands white-knuckle-holding on to a railing for dear life (the railing being academia) because I was conditioned to think it was necessary. I was absolutely terrified of letting go because I didn’t know if I could survive letting go and I had no idea what life was like beyond. But then I asked myself “what is the worst that could happen?” It’s not like academia wasn’t full of uncertainty. I could envision my ideal academic position, but that was it: it was a vision and not reality. But I could at least envision, whereas with letting go, I couldn’t see what was beyond. Or what I could imagine beyond were all of these terrible things like boredom and rigid schedules. I came to the conclusion that I needed to at least let go and see what would happen because I was already miserable, anxious, depressed, and burned out.
Perhaps I am relatively lucky to have landed in a job that provides incredible stability because I’ve read countless posts of folks not landing where they want to be (failure of the system). I am also lucky to be engaging in the parts of academia I love (my geograpals, advising students, and writing). But we have to let go and try something new if academia isn’t giving us what we need and we want to try and build a career that fits with the lives we want.
So here’s to taking care of ourselves and refusing the bullshit.
