Standing on a Beach: The Longing of Being Passed By
A positionality reflection on time, conversations, and (re)storying ourselves.
It is December 2022, and I am sitting in a chair on “the point” at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park in Key West. It is sunset, and my beautiful niece is standing under a little moveable archway in the starting moments of her wedding ceremony. My daughter, sixteen and so much more thoughtful and put together than I was at her age, sits next to me. My husband and two sons couldn’t attend, so we represent our branch of the family. We’re on the front row, next to my older sister (mom of the bride, holding it together) and my brother-in-law (perpetually fighting back tears). Rows of chairs, wobbling on the gentle slope towards the water, hold friends and family. More than a few bits of sand grind around in my shoes.
My older brother stands well to the back, tending his first grandchild, a precious and rambunctious three year old in a tiny ring bearer suit. I imagine my Mom at home in Texas, wondering how it’s all going and waiting anxiously for photos. All has been perfectly timed: an edge of vibrant gold sun touches the blue green ocean just as the ceremony begins. Peaceful, intimate, perfection. A few hundred yards away, an absolute behemoth of a cruise ship emerges into view, turning a slow arc out to sea. Tiny people line the promenade deck — maybe hundreds of them? They are fading as they pass. I think I see some of them waving.
In a previous post, I expanded on “positionality” as a complicated concept, a personal-individual location as well as an interpersonal-communal relation, both always in motion and prompting adaptation. In this post, through reflecting over my lived experiences, I try to evoke a particular positionality that I cannot name, one enmeshed in longings and time. It is both about positionality as being “in the midst” and the feeling of being passed by because of the timing of a career path.
Straight out of my undergraduate degree, I began my master’s program. The economy was terrible, I had no safety net and no mentor, and I had to do something. Graduate school felt clique-y and estranging. I didn’t fit and watched from the sidelines as peers formed study groups and made community. They threw around big words like “postmodernism” and nodded sagely to each other about people named Derrida and Foucault. It was 1992, and the internet was not available to offer non-judgmental guidance for my flailings and ignorance. Out of the loop, I asked another graduate student, “can you tell me what ‘postmodernism’ means or how it works as a theory?” In reply, I got a look that made me feel very small. She said, “the whole point is that it is impossible to explain” and laughed in a knowing way that affirmed my status as outsider to the club. I learned not to ask vulnerable questions and keenly felt my position watching peers finding entry into academic conversations that I did not feel able to join.
Graduating from my MA, I earned a full-time job as a lecturer (a.k.a. teaching faculty) in the same department where I had just finished my MA. I was excited to shift into a different position, hoping for a new path to belonging in that community. Instead, I became invisible, an aberration. Faculty who had gladly taught me as a graduate student now looked right through me in the hallways. When I went to my first department meeting, eager to listen and learn, to begin to feeling a connection, one of the professors I admired leaned over to her colleague, side-eyed me, and semi-whispered “what’s she doing here?” Turns out, my hard-earned position as a “non-tenure track” lecturer meant my efforts didn’t really count for much other than pushing 100+ undergraduates per semester through their required course in technical communication. Although I developed a couple of friendships, mostly I experienced an intense sense of isolation, longing to belong.
That longing would last almost twenty years. I worked hard to be an excellent teacher, served in a junior administrative role, sought out professional development: things you do to create some self-efficacy. Tenured professors or department leaders — often decades older than I was — would occasionally remark with surprise and their own good intentions, “You don’t have a PhD? Wow! You think and speak like you do!” Their good intentions were also cutting. Although I had assumed we were in the midst of similar academic rhythms of teaching and grading, of supporting students and doing the work of a university, I came to understand that others did not see me as present within the arcs and spaces of their own ongoing career stories.
Being “in the midst” reminds us that we are all located in our own layers of temporality: daily and monthly rhythms, annual calendars, the passing of seasons, cycles of community interaction, annual family activities (e.g., reunions, holidays, etc.), our individual notions of “becoming” through life, and more. One way we feel aligned with others is when our time-cycles harmonize. We’re in the same boat of daily struggles and achievements. When I lived abroad, we joked about the differences between “American time,” which was highly individualistic, measured with scrutiny, and driven by a sense of “progress” in contrast to “Arab time,” which felt much more communal, measured in terms of quality, and driven by a sense of relating. One reason the pandemic proved so disruptive is that it threw our common daily rhythms out the window. Queer time and crip time speak to additional embodied perceptions.
Over the past 14 years, my life has changed a lot. I went back to school, got a PhD, and wrangled a tenure-line position at a different university. Being a new professor was energizing, a start to an exciting second phase of my career. Celebrated as part of a cohort of new hires, I was invited to monthly lunches with the school administrators, who had a vested interest in their tenure-track professors succeeding. Same old academic life, now viewed from a fresh angle. As I introduced myself at that first lunch, I felt out of place — I was 10+ years older than other new faculty around the table.
In reply to puzzled looks, I learned to say “I have an established career in teaching but am a newbie when it comes to research.” I felt out of sync in those meetings, yet my years of experience as a lecturer meant I was familiar with educational bureaucracies, knew how to design courses, mentor students, fulfill service roles, and manage my workload. Adding on a research agenda was less of a juggle because I was accustomed to keeping plates spinning. However, I traveled a different trajectory. I earned a promotion to associate professor quickly.
Last semester, I had coffee with a new assistant professor in a neighboring department. Young and in the second semester of her first year as a professor, she was feeling the uncertainty that comes with a new job. Although fully prepared with a doctorate, experience teaching as a graduate assistant, and a research/publication plan, she seemed sad or worried. She confessed to being in the midst of a bout of impostor syndrome. She also paid me a kind compliment, saying something along the lines of, “I see professors like you who have achieved so much and feel so unsure I could ever get there.” She didn’t know about the decades I had spent feeling out of time and place, and had storied me in a way that felt so generous but also was so not how I storied myself. We traded descriptions of our paths to our current positions. Although those paths were different, it felt nice for both of us to realize the other’s was also marked by uncertainties, non-linearity, and feelings of isolation in finding our way.
Impostor syndrome relates to but is not the same as that feeling of having missed the boat. Some advise fighting feelings of inadequacy through embracing it, seeking out a state of being in “flow,” and finding community. However, I am more persuaded that feeling like an impostor — particularly when one has the receipts clearly saying they are qualified and of value — is more a problem of our systems than ourselves. In academia, patriarchal gate-keeping and rigid (as well as toxic) hierarchies further fuel perceiving ourselves as deficient.
Additionally, the positioning I’m describing doesn’t exactly equate to “fear of missing out” or FOMO, even “intellectual FOMO.” Rather than fear, it’s more of a melancholy realization that the timeline of my story doesn’t fit in with the timelines of stories of others who feel more centered in their academic communities. I’ve missed my chance at a kind of “temporal cohort” of thinkers, teachers, and writers because the trajectory of my career doesn’t align with the younger folks who are leading the conversations I find most exciting. I witness what’s going on but have missed my chance to feel a sense of belonging to the milieu. Even when my younger, cutting-edge colleagues are welcoming — which they often are — I am placed on the periphery, watching (and admiring) the ship as it passes me by.
Recently, I was talking to one of the mentors I’ve been blessed to know over the past 10 years. I adore this woman. She is an intellectual leader, a goddess in our field. She has received awards for her generosity supporting scholars, and she embraced me — even as I was a latecomer to research and writing — with a kindness and engagement I didn’t know existed. To have a “captain of the ship” believe in my work has been breath-taking and humbling, filling that longing I felt for too many years. We were on Zoom discussing a project, and I asked her if I would see her at an upcoming national conference. Her expression dropped a bit, in a way I wasn’t used to seeing: something other than her usual energy, hope, and fighting spirit. She told me a story about being at another recent event. Despite her decades of noteworthy and visible leadership, no one at this recent gathering seemed to recognize her. Seeing all the young new scholars around her (whose work was built on paths she forged), she herself had come to feel isolated and out of touch. This thinker, writer, and mentor who had made such an impact over decades now felt left behind.
We are all in the midst of our own becomings, and our timelines are all unique. Some of us fast track to our careers and perhaps feel the belonging of being part of a group that makes a difference, that inhabits a zeitgeist together. Others take different routes, still legitimate or productive. We may feel “just in time” for some conversations yet left behind in others. We may grow to feel out of time. These feelings typically remain highly internal, undiscussed. As we look in our mirrors and across our tables, we story others, usually more generously than we story ourselves.
Like the mentor who’s come to stand on the shore with me, I love teaching, learning, and contributing to knowledge-making with people of great diverse backgrounds and interests. Therefore, I’ve had to decide that my best move is to re-story myself in terms of what missing the boat means. Beyond the ponderings of my inner Eeyore, missing the boat frees me of feeling like I ever had to be on the boat. I can choose projects that speak to me then consider if there’s an audience for them rather than letting the field or central conversation dictate my direction. Working with other folks newer to my field, particularly graduate students, being free of the boat means I can view the boat from a different perspective.
My career-long insider/outsider status helps us consider questions not yet asked, texts not yet considered, and methods ripe for reconsideration. Having missed the boat allows me to be in the midst differently with my students, research participants, and communities. I can relate to them more in the moments we share because I see myself more in their spaces than in the lofty realms of academia’s insiders. Storying myself on the margins of my disciplinary community keeps me always in relation to that community yet takes off a bit of the pressure to impress that community. While I shouldn’t lose sight of the boat, I have come to peace with it remaining always on the horizon.
