1. I have reduced all my insurance coverage to the minimum legal levels, and eliminated optional retirement contributions, extra payments to mortgage principal, and long distance and DSL service to my land line. I had already renounced yoga and I may renounce gym membership. I have not yet targeted studio rent, house cleaning, or grass cutting for renunciation, but I could.
1.1. For renunciation I now target most coffee, which would ideally be Peet’s or Café Bustelo, most wine, which would ideally be Norton Malbec, and most milk, which one should not drink anyway since even organic milk is so industrialized. I renounce almost all food not prepared by me or mine at least until 1 September 2009. My main food for 2009 will be vegetable soup. Renunciation of all these items is not difficult, but renunciation of self always has been.
1.2. I began writing this post in January, from point 8 back to point 1. I have already made significant progress on the plans laid out herein.
2. Maringouin is pleasant this year for the first time. This has to do in part with some changes in the village, but mostly with my temporary, but delicious escape from teaching so many required lower division courses with materials and methodologies over which I have no control. I knew a large part of my general desperation had to do with the nature of my job, but I had always thought a large part also had to do with my location. It is my job.
3. I am still suffering from academophobia. I do not feel it when I am inside my own house and away from e-mail, or away from the area of my university and from e-mail. Otherwise it continues to be strong. It started in the first week of my job at Stepford College. It subsided when I escaped to a better job, but then Reeducation told me I did not deserve to be a professor. This more or less finished me off.
4. I remained a professor in part because influential people were so shocked at the idea I might do something else. These people did not understand or would not believe that I was impaired for academic work by the PTSD I contracted around it through Reeducation. I contracted academophobia by trying to ignore the PTSD.
5. Many days I am nauseated and dizzy. I tremble when I approach my building, and I throw up many mornings. I try to say it will be better, that it is better, that it can be better, but it does not get reliably better. Yet if I am not required to go to my building, I do not have these problems.
6. Some people tell me that they, too, are unhappy, but that life is a miserable thing. There is nothing to do but endure it and hope one does not live too long. They believe they are “mature.” I say they are irrational.
7. Still others tell me I should just be grateful and happy. In fact I am wracked with guilt about not being able to limit myself and my appetite for life in such a way as to fit into a narrower space. Yet I think ultimately my views are the most rational and the least imbricated with various forms of denial. That is why I still have such difficulty with certain condescending platitudes (such as “nothing is perfect, dear”) which I cannot help reading as justifications for pointless suffering – not to mention for the refusal to work for the betterment of the world at large.
8. In the meantime, and in keeping with my master plan, I must wrestle academophobia to the ground. I will learn to be aware enough, soon enough, of when I am beginning to shout at myself certain things I was taught long ago. These things have to do with the illegitimacy of being who one is, and the importance, for survival purposes, of self denial and self mutilation. The PTSD is about the idea of being required to self mutilate so as to avoid execution. I dislike self mutilation and the idea that I may again be pressured to do it freezes me in my tracks.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Dodge and weave, dodge and weave. The thing about those whose thinking is determined by conventional mores is that they are stiff and lack flexibility and expect the same of you. So much of their power comes from bluff. So instead of mutilating yourself, you must learn to dodge and weave. You may not get the emotional release that you would achieve by turning your aggression upon yourself, but that is something you have to take into account. You can redirect your aggression through other means, such as by taking up some activity that seems to you more real than the mind games people like to play with you. You can also develop a certain amount of unspoken contempt for things that do not meet your standards. This will serve to redirect and refocus your aggression. Untamed aggression will, however, be turned against you if you are of the female sex.
Also, would you like a copy of my book?
I’d love a copy of your book although I think I should actually buy it and was waiting until March because I am overbudgeted.
“You can also develop a certain amount of unspoken contempt for things that do not meet your standards.” This would be very effective. Part of my demise via Reeducation was to stifle this attitude … it was arrogant, elitist, perfectionist, and so on … but I don’t really have a problem with those things, it’s abjection which irritates me.
Well, let me know and if you can’t afford to buy one, I will send you one. I do get my own book at less than half what you would pay to Lulu. Then again, I would receive a royalty if you bought the book, which I would probably send to some noble cause.
One of the ways of dealing with your right to have some kind of aggression is by considering aggression in a more abstract sense as a form of energy that has to be redirected through you somehow. Then it becomes a practical problem rather than a personal one. It also becomes more of a moral right to express it somehow, when you consider the alternative — that failing to express it means it eats away at you (causing health problems). So you do need to express it. For myself, I express my aggressivity in my martial arts training (which also involves a certain amount of controlled aggression against myself, as I put myself through a lot of difficult tests which require disciplining the body.) But you also can realise that a lot of really good academic writing is fueled by controlled aggression. The point is to control and channel the aggression — so that ppl can’t turn around and say it was impetuous or something like that.
I can buy one, but effective March 1! It isn’t long until then …
Agressivity, I don’t think this is my issue as much as what I’ve always termed right to existence, and right to independence / individuation. Those were considered inappropriately aggressive so I have tried to repress them, which *is* inappropriately aggressive … it also causes anger. The key is that right to exist isn’t inappropriately aggressive, even if / when it’s aggressive.
I’m using the term in a Freudian sense, I believe, and not in terms of its conventional usage. Aggressivity as I mean it is the opposite of passivity, of playing dead. We have life forces in us and if we do not express them outwardly, we have to deal with them as forms of inner corruption. Aggressivity is just “life energy”.
AHA, I get it!
“5. Many days I am nauseated and dizzy. I tremble when I approach my building, and I throw up many mornings. I try to say it will be better, that it is better, that it can be better, but it does not get reliably better. Yet if I am not required to go to my building, I do not have these problems.
6. Some people tell me that they, too, are unhappy, but that life is a miserable thing. There is nothing to do but endure it and hope one does not live too long. They believe they are “mature.” I say they are irrational.”
I would like to help you if I could, but I’m afraid I’m in a similar situation. All I can do is agree that your work situation sucks (and so does mine), and hope that someday soon you will be able to teach fewer lower-level classes.
P.S. I think your blog is beautiful.:)
Also, have you considered that there is something inherently liberating about keeping a blog such as this? In so doing, you are resisting self-mutilation. (I think of Winston Smith in 1984, even though your situation is much different from his (I hope)).
I take issue with your giving up coffee, however. Must all joy be taken out of your life? Why not keep the things that make you happy and minimize your contact with those that don’t?
HOLA Natasha and MERCI! Yes the blog is my act of resistance. I’m not giving up all coffee, just most of it – I drink too much of it – and what I am substituting for it and wine is high end organic tea from Western China, and fizzy water. I may even buy a seltzer bottle.
Lower level classes – yes. I am totally different when I do not have to deal with that. Being on sabbatical, one thing I *also* don’t have to do is attend meetings where people argue about what to do about these. It is so wonderful, it makes me forget I dislike my job and want a career change. Yet when I hear about those meetings I realize how awful the situation is and how difficult to resolve … and how important … and how different it would be to work in the same place and not have to focus on that problem.
I will be informing my (interim) chair that I will not be attending the next faculty meetings because the public bullying by a senior colleague has now escalated to the point where it has seriously affected my physical and mental health again, and I refuse to be a target in the absence of any institutional solution.
I am in a state of nerves as we speak due to something similar. I’m glad not to be the only one, although I also send condolences.
“5. Many days I am nauseated and dizzy. I tremble when I approach my building, and I throw up many mornings. I try to say it will be better, that it is better, that it can be better, but it does not get reliably better. Yet if I am not required to go to my building, I do not have these problems.”
I almost vomited in class this morning, as I broke my only rule in life (never drink tea on an empty stomach). This is relevant to the discussion I swear, because said empty stomach was due to having slept late, which finally was due to my academophobia induced insomnia. NB, I am not a professor, but a student.
And as the person who caused your little artificial spike in hits, I also think your blog is beautiful. It is full of life, truth, and revolution.
Merci atheistwoman! Beauty, life, truth, revolution, that’s great … And guess what – I got through what I had to today and now I feel normal!
Normal is such calming place to be. :-). Congratulations.
That should be “…such a calming…”
I find the point about the vegetable soup intriguing. I feel like the demands of my self are something too much clothing that I have to stuff in the hardshell suitcase of my life. Everytime I push aggressively in one place, stuff explodes out from a different place. I’d been reading too much for pleasure in January, so I made myself stop. But it meant that I started eating badly. When I tamped down on that, I consumed about 10x the normal alcohol for me in a week. Not a danger level, but still. It’s like the demands of the self WILL out.
Still love your blog. I now have 93 things you have written since September bookmarked because they provide so much fodder for reflection.
Hi, y’all! S, this is American, I think – the demands of the self express themselves in consumption. Voracity is great but I think that when it is expressed in consumption it is because there is no other available outlet for it, or because the culture is set up that way. I want to direct voracity t0 exercise and novels, I think this would be good.