Being happy for others

by clothwright

I talked to a friend recently and found out he got a job!  By which I mean, an academic teaching position.  It is not a TT position, but he’s been trying as long as I have and as far as I’m aware he really wants to stay in academia, and this will let him do that.  I’m excited for him.  Genuinely happy.  I congratulated him enthusiastically totally bypassing the mental comparisons that are so insidious (why him and not me?  What does she have that I don’t?  Why is X subject more interesting to search committees than mine?)  A little later, as I was reflecting on his good news, I realized that in fact, my happiness is not mitigated by self-doubt, feelings of inferiority, or envy.  I don’t want another temporary position.  I don’t want to move to the city in which my friend got a job.  I don’t want a position that is only teaching.  The prospect of having heavy teaching load with increasing pressure to get a book published and the near certainty of going on the academic market again in a few years…. I don’t want that.   The fact that I am happy for him without the least bit of jealousy augments my happiness considerably.

On the other hand, it is getting increasingly difficult for me to be around my colleagues.  Well-meant innocuous questions such as “What are  you doing this summer?” or “Any news on the job search?” cause me to cringe inside.  The answers are “I have no idea” and “no”. In the last four weeks or so I’ve started to admit out loud that I have no chance at a TT position and that I’ve given up on the academic market.  To their credit, no-one has yet looked down their nose at me.  Of course, I have communicated that information selectively.  My colleagues are for the most part kind people.  Even so, I can feel myself inevitably being nudged to the outside of the academic nest.  They are talking about the trials of trying to buy a house close to the campus that just hired them with a superstar salary and generous startup funds.  I don’t even know if I’ll be moving or not.  They are discussing conferences and symposia they hope to organize in the next year or so–I listen politely, knowing that in a few months, I will be that pariah, an “independent scholar” without university affiliation, and as such, a highly suspect attendee at such a conference.  They are anxious about how to fit fieldwork and writing into the four long months of summer; I am anxious about how to pay my bills.

It’s no longer exactly hurtful, at least not with the acute piercing disappointment of the first few rejection letters.  It feels as if it is all slowly floating farther and farther away.  As if I am alone on a cloud which has become unmoored and is caught by a maverick breeze.  A few weeks ago I could have jumped back into the discourse about research funding and fieldwork plans–supposing, for instance, I’d experienced a last-minute miracle and gotten a job offer.  Now…  I’m not sure.  I think the gap might have become too broad to leap.