Adventures in Academia: Passion, Community and You.
This past week, I had the honor and joy of attending a seminar at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. One of the nation’s oldest and leading research libraries, one could not ask for a better way to supplement their training in diagnosing books than by engaging with the primary materials that the AAS holds.
This is what I thought when I first received the call for applications to my school email, saying out loud to no one but the distorted reflection of myself on the computer screen, “I want to do that.” With the subject matter being on Black Print, Black Study, and Black Activism in the long 19th century, I couldn’t help but start my application then and there, sitting on my unmade bed in the middle of the afternoon.
Before my junior year of college, reading anything prior to nineteen-hundred made me want to douse my irises with heavy-duty eye drops because I found many of the readings in American Lit 101 to be as dry as store-brand saltine crackers left out in the sun. Yet, I kept winding up in English classes devoted to surveys of literature that barely reached into 1930, and with each class, I became more and more interested.
Then, the next thing I knew, I started conducting research in the field, and here I am now, willingly applying to a seminar on a time period I previously thought was never in my wheelhouse to begin with. This is a ‘dismissal-turn-love’ type thing that keeps occurring in my life, but the past week has extended to include ‘passion,’ an emotion that has made my scholarly path clearer than I could have hoped for at this point on. It made me realize how freeing it is when you come to know and let your passions in.
Galavanting from Boston to Worcester (pronounced ‘Wor-STER,’ or ‘WUAH-STAH’ depending on the degree of your northern accent, real or otherwise), I didn’t know what to anticipate from the seminar, or what I would glean in my endeavors to set a good foundation in the field and find new perspectives to help my research.
I didn’t know that for five days we would not only dive deep into the study that is Black Print Culture-an excitedly growing field as new documents and key players are uncovered and brought into the light from the archives-but also develop a strong community among us students, scholars, librarians, and archivists. It was the exciting discussions over coffee, lunch, and original documents that elevated the seminar into a place of vibrancy and joy.
I think the community is what began to nurture the then fledgling root in my spirit, coming into a circle of people who are just as enthusiastic about what they do and are eager to know what you’re doing too. I was fortunate to experience that early on, and this current familiarization with folks of the community fostered this happiness in me, so deep that it ruptured into jubilation. I found my people, and I found a form of place for myself, by myself, and totally outside those that were expected of me.
Hence ‘passion.’ I think it’s such an abstract thing sometimes because it’s an emotion that’s almost ethereal. Its backbone is intensity and it’s leveraged by a sense of surety that is borderline scary. Because life is a series of uncertainties varied by different degrees of risk. And though I am a believer in taking [calculated] risks, ‘surety’ presents itself as a slim-to-none aberration in our everyday lives, save for the comforting schema of a morning routine or nightly ritual or “Wednesdays we wear pink” kind of safety net.
But once passion introduces itself into your life, whether as a warm pit in your stomach or a rainbow of thoughts in your head (it’s more of a ‘you know when you know kind of deal), accepting it is one of the most freeing things we can do.
That’s how it felt when I accepted the fact I wanted to subject myself to five to seven years of hellfire to be able to place ‘Dr.’ next to my name. That’s a desire of a different kind. That’s a joy of a deeper shade of yellow. And it’s felt when we release and lay in what drives such an emotion; passion.
Something that I’m learning as I lean more into who I am/will be is that not everyone is going to ‘get it.’ And that’s ok (easier said than done, I know). Upon returning, a friend asked why I got so excited over “old books,” how I got so excited over something presumably niche and specific. I responded in the way of saying that it’s “just what I like,” and tried to convey the immense feeling of optimism I felt through coherent sentences that translated from ‘passion-rambling’ to standardized speech.
Sometimes talking about who we [truly] are and what gets us out of bed in the morning can sound foreign to others; but does it not sound the same when it’s the other way around? A mutual language based on passion could be achieved in an ideal world where there are zero inhibitions and everyone maintains the absolute right to be. But that world is hidden deep within the multiverse, and the collective world as we know it now is based so much on arbitrary social constructions, harmful norms, and the fear of ostracization in many of its forms.
What we do have, however, is an innate sense of curiosity. A language based on wanting to know could, verily, be achieved. Even if it sounds like a brand new language to our ears, isn’t it stimulating to know that such a language even exists?
Sometimes it can get a little lonely when not everyone your circle even tries to ‘get it,’ but acceptance of that fact can be cathartic. This is when community comes to be bigger and better than ever, because not only do you speak the same language, but your shared culture waters your roots and helps them grow, mightily.
Even in an institution that puts forth the notion that this work is solitary (and in many instances, it can be), the communities on the inside and out are the lifeblood. Our scholar in residence, Dr. Gabrielle Foreman (Pennsylvania State University) put forth that shared discussion and inquiry are what help to make this work more meaningful. Your passion is meaningful, and the community makes it purposeful.
I couldn’t agree more, scarily as someone who was never the biggest fan of group work. But passion will take you to places of yourself deemed unmarked territory. Like 90% of the ocean, there’s so much more to explore. To realize, release and lean into passion is an exercise in self-actualization and love, encouraged by people and place endemic to the fabric of you.
