Academic Job season for the Failed Academic

There’s a part of me which wonders how many years I’ll write a blog like this.

Once again it's Academic Announce Your New Job Like A Wanker’ season. Ok, they aren’t all wankers. Some of them are very good, very nice people who deserve everything they are getting. Others, by a law of averages, are indeed wankers. But that’s another story.

Every year the slew of ‘I’m thrilled to announce having signed the contract, that I’m joining…’ announcements feel like a stab to the heart. Or a kick to the stomach. You know that real sinking feeling or that gripping of the chest…both of those at once sometimes.

And it doesn’t matter how much I tell myself I don’t want an academic job. It doesn’t matter how much that is true. It still feels like failure. It still feels like ‘should have been me’ it still feels like ‘why not me’.

And I’m not bad people (mostly) I don’t and have never wished ill on anyone who gets those jobs (who isn’t a wanker obviously). I want to celebrate with them, be proud of them. But there’s a little part that always thinks ‘that’s not for people like me’. And knows now it never will be. And there’s always a part of that which will break my heart a little.

People ask with frustrating regularity ‘but what do you REALLY want to do?’ as if I’ve spent my entire life to this point flitting from one thing to another. When the truth is that I spent a very large chunk of my professional life working towards a very specific goal. Between waiting to be able to afford to/get into a PhD and completing it was seven years of my life. I finished my PhD and graduated by 30. And I’ve spent 5 years trying to figure out what next. Most people do that 5 years between 21 and 26 and they don’t get the same judgment. Just think about that next time….

But that’s tangential. The point being 7 years of my life were spent dedicated very specifically towards that goal of being an academic. And then for the next 1-2 years after, with admittedly decreasing commitment…or confidence. But that’s 9 years of my life. Hell, let’s round it up to an even decade just for simplicity.

Much like the kind of abusive relationship academia is (rightly) often compared to, you don’t just walk away undamaged by that. You also don’t put near enough a decade of your life into one thing and suddenly walk away. It’s a gradual process. And a gradual coming to terms.

I decided that I wasn’t willing-  more accurately able- to commit to the kind of ‘everything for maybe’ approach that academia needs. The idea that you have to base your entire existence around a slim hope of an academic career- moving every nine months or going from short term contract to short term contract, working (continuing to work) survival jobs…all with diminishing returns in a sector that is falling to pieces. After another five, even ten years there was still little hope I’d have a permeant job. And even if I did, the culture of overwork, all-consuming nature of academia…ultimately I decided that wasn’t a path I was on anymore.

But you don’t just ‘stop’ being an academic overnight. And nor should you. Slowly we are coming around to new ways of thinking about scholarship. That it's possible to conduct scholarship outside of the Ivory Tower. That sometimes, shock horror, it is possible. And just because I don’t choose to pursue this as a full-time occupation does not mean I’m less of an academic- although unfortunate the academy often does not agree. I am still an expert, particularly in the areas my PhD covered. I’m still an expert in many other things I’ve undertaken research in. I’m still an excellent teacher. Those skills didn’t all vaporise with the last day of my library access.

And that’s what is difficult about this season. The feeling of being on the outside peering in. Almost as if someone locked me out of the library and I’m looking in through a window watching everyone else ‘do academia’. In reality, most people aren’t in the library, they are at home in their PJs, they’re teaching endless classes, doing admin…and being researchers around all that.

But still, for those on the outside, there's a sense of being not good enough. I've always told myself I just wasn't talented enough to cut it. Like a dancer cut in the first round of an audition, I just never quite had what it takes. It's more complex than that in reality- lack of opportunity, lack of financial privilege, class privilege, disability...all played into it. More than that I beat myself up for 'giving up' that it was easier to give up and say I walked away than properly fail. And maybe it was. But maybe that was the right choice as well. Maybe it was the right choice to live my life another way- to find another way. 

And I am, in a way....I'm  doing what I do, and I’m doing it on my own terms. I’m writing articles. In a stubborn rebellion to the PhD supervisor who said ‘you write like a journalist’ as an insult, I’ve managed to carve myself out a few niches in that area. And I am by day, as I’m sure they will look down snottily upon, working in marketing, where again my writing style is appreciated.  Meanwhile, I’m writing the book of (half) of the PhD. I have plans for the second. I’ve contributed to edited collections. I’ll never be in a journal and that’s ok. I’m picking and choosing the projects that interest me rather than what is ‘REF-able’ or will ‘get me a job’ and to be honest I couldn’t do it any other way now.

And I’m writing creatively. Which maybe none of it will last, but I’m giving it a damn good go. I’ve got a play on (hello PhD supervisor again, you said I never would), I’m working on a range of (translation far too many) creative projects….and so I am so much more than an academic job. 

As a friend said today, from the outside it looks like I’m ‘smashing it’ …and maybe it does, for a moment at least. But its ingrained in us to feel like failures, if we don’t reach the traditional academic goals of a ‘proper job’ or more accurately ‘doing all the shit jobs that might have a dim promise of the actual job at the end’.

To which I say a sincere, but thankful ‘pass’. I made my choice or it was made for me. But I'm carving something out of it.  probably wouldn't have got to this point without doing my PhD. And I'm thankful for that. I know that this is probably the 'right' way for me to do it...but it's still hard watching the could have-should-have-would-have versions of your life through social media this time of year. 

And it may take a few more years for that sick to the stomach, stab to the heart feeling to abide. But one day it’ll be gone.