Once upon a time, there was a country, where lived a little girl. She was alone. No one else. She decided that this was not good. But she decided to make herself the Queen of the whole country. She worked a teacher in a regional university. She was new to the job. But there was no one to teach her. But it was ok, because she had no boss. And the University had no students. Or other teachers. It was just an empty place.
Then she decided to experiment with research. She was worried because she was a single woman without a partner or boyfriend or whatever. She at times felt like life as a professor would be better. So she decided to become a professor. It was very different from what she had been led to expect it would be when she was a teacher; she at times felt like the fact that she was a single woman marked her as invisible or different in ways that made people uncomfortable.
She decided to fix this. She would write books, to explore ideas related to these things, but she did not want it to be a diary. Rather, she constructed a voice that was brash, at times caustic, at times inappropriate. She did not want to perpetuate the weird language of promotion and tenure notebooks and letters of application. She wanted to talk not exactly as herself but nevertheless in a voice that was decidedly not her academic voice. She also wanted to keep her “real” identity secret. A pseudonym gave her, or so she thought, a certain measure of freedom.
A few weeks ago, she decided, after having considered the idea a number of times before, to end this experiment. Why abandon a professorship that has developed into something good? Why do this now?
Then for a long time she felt somewhat hemmed in by the space that she lived in. It was empty yet she felt crowded. Her pseudonym give her freedom, but at the same time limited her. The voice was always there. She had to be very careful about what she did. She was being watched.
What she’d achieved was the construction of a space, identity, and voice, that allowed for her to talk about personal life things but that ultimately stripped her of all authority (and of all ability to defend her positions) about the professional.
She felt this was quite unreal. It was not authentic research. Even her professorship was faulty. There was no specific intellectual life. She tried to get all these out of her head. But to fabricate and embroider in ways that are obfuscating: that was not her forte. She had to be careful in a space that she imagined first as a space in which she could escape the pressure to be careful that she feel in her academic writing.
And so, toward the end of last semester, along came a troll. And at first she was really freaked out. This person seemed malicious. She considered how to respond. In that consideration, she also reread a lot of what she had written over the past year-and-a-half – early entries that don’t seem like anything she would write today.
She also thought a lot about what she was trying to do with herself. She thought about going on as if nothing had happened, but didn’t feel comfortable with that. She thought about stopping everything altogether, and that felt like a really bad “letting the terrorists win” sort of thing.
And then it occurred to her: the only reason she was in this predict ent was because she was terrified of people knowing who she was. As much as she had dealt with her “real” identity being revealed to others, she had also been really afraid of the consequences of being a “real” person. And so, maybe the solution is to come out – to just be in the real world.
No comments:
Post a Comment