coldhearted scientist وداد

I am academically oriented in fact, but originally this industry was also important to me because it was the only place I knew I was competent. It was thus the only route to sustenance and safety, and I cared about it for those reasons as well as purer ones. That is why my first academic job, what happened there and some circumstances surrounding it, were so traumatic.

You cannot be who you are here, either, you cannot be an intellectual, women should not be research oriented, and you must permit mistreatment, I learned. And some others: do you see? We told you, you are not able to work or you don’t want to, we don’t know which it is but either way, it is bad. That last was my first permanent wound, but it was not entirely disabling.

While was at my next, much better job, and things were going well, I decided it was a good time to go to psychotherapy to learn to better deal with certain people. What I learned there, however, was, once again, that it was a sin to be an intellectual or research oriented. This was proof that there was something very deeply wrong with me, deeper than I knew, and the fact that I did not agree with that perspective was yet further proof of its validity.

I decided then was that I would have to move, geographically and in terms of profession, far from the scenes of all of these crimes and recreate myself. I could grow whole again, it seemed to me; in the end there would be no harm done. There was everything to gain and nothing of importance would be lost. And I did not do this for reasons having to do with short term finances but also because the family was so worried and my academic friends were so disappointed.

At that point I began working academic jobs like a trade. I really dissociated: my real self went into the deep freeze, waiting for a better day, while a public self did manual labor, so to speak, using the many academic skills I have. I have been in that state since the time of my third academic job. (Perhaps the better day I was waiting for then, has come.)

*

That was a nice VAP job but I needed a real job. I kept getting very good interviews — amazingly good ones, brilliant ones, I realize in retrospect, especially considering I was someone who had not made tenure at a lesser school — but people would perceive, at the interviews, that my heart lay elsewhere. At one MLA interview at a very good school, they asked what my particular interest was in them and I, who never cry, realized that the only way not to would be to tell the truth: “Because yours is precisely the kind of program that would have fit my interests and expertise when I wanted to be an academic, and this position is one my family and friends would very much like to see me occupy.”

I had a campus interview at another very good school, where I wish I were now, and it all went very well except in the meeting with the graduate students. They were very interested in me and they were trying to engage me, and I could not focus on the material at hand because being with people poised to enter a profession in which they were very interested was so distracting. I caught their vibration and during the meeting had to spend most of my energy suppressing enthusiastic discussion about the kind of career I would really like to have.

For the interview at still one more very good school I chose the presentation topic I knew they wanted me to, and then could not, for the life of me, drum up enough interest in this topic to prepare a better than lackadaisical paper. I then spent the social part of interview talking about news and software rather than culture, research and teaching.

This, once again, was not an attempt to sabotage the interview but to make it go as well as possible. I was not committed to the project I thought I should be, I knew it showed, and I felt terribly guilty about it all; I did not know yet that I had the right not to be interested in that particular project. Therefore I made the interview boring, considering that if I did not do that it could turn heartrending.

*

So that is why I do not think people should be pushed to do what isn’t right for them. My new phrase “You have no power over me any more” is extremely potent and I may finally be awakened from my Sleeping Beauty or Rip Van Winkle like spell, or liberated from my cloven pine (actually I really like this reference, and it is about the right amount of time). Whether these many years of strife have been worth it, I am not sure, and I believe some movement would have broken the spell more quickly.

Axé.