I have to talk about this at some point. My good colleague is not wrong and I would love to be in her department. But she is quite a different person from me.
I am going off to my Monday meeting of terror, prelude to my Tuesday of horror, after which we will be home free, so to speak. I am remembering that last Monday’s meeting went far better than expected.
I originally associated academia with pleasure in work but then was taught to associate it with abuse and that is why I have these phobic reactions, wanting to run away as far and fast as I can.
This is not entirely irrational. Especially in institutions with no visibility they can do anything they want to you, anything at all, and it is horrible.
That, not cuteness or prestige, is the reason to be at a place like Madison, much though the people in Madison may suffer.
*
What was it they said, the time I was seen for anxiety? “You appear to have suffered a very big, very destructive boundary violation to which you had to submit under the threat of lethal or near lethal violence.”
It is as though I flirt with this, again and again. Allow a smaller violation and strike back if it goes too far.
*
In academia as I have experienced it, it is dangerous to speak for yourself. I find that in training myself not to speak for myself, I lose my research voice. I wanted to change fields to law in part because then my job would be to speak for others.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
These, in particular, are the points I wonder about:
“What is not rational is to fritter away one’s life waiting for a call from the Sorbonne. Or pining to be hired in Ann Arbor or Chapel Hill or Austin or Berkeley or Madison.”
We used to always apply to Ann Arbor, Austin, Madison and elsewhere, routinely. Every year. The idea was that you were not really started until you were in a place with PhD programs in your disciplines (which Ms. Mentor’s institution has) or were similarly research oriented. Were we being snooty/irrational?
(I think it is actually possible that we saw ourselves as too transitory, but gosh, we wanted life….)