I started my very first post of this “year” (going from birthday to birthday– sorry if I’m selfish,but this is when my year starts :P), I quoted El-P from Run the Jewels, thusly:
Brave men didn’t die face down in the Vietnam mud so I could not style on you
I didn’t walk uphill both ways to the booth and back to not wild on you
You think baby Jesus killed Hitler just so I’d whisper?
And you’re safe and sound and these crooks tapped your phone to not have a file on you?
I believed that sentiment encompassed my fear of the year to come in Trump America. It was an interesting year.
Here’s what I did.
I blogged every single day. This is the end of that chain– 365 days. Goal achieved.
My book has been fully accepted for publication and might be out as soon as April.
I moved into a tenure track position at work.
I lost some weight, then I stalled, then I gained a little back, and now I’ve lost a little again.
I made some stuff.
As the year ends, I feel the need to set new goals, but I also feel like, at least for today, I should take a victory lap. So I asked myself what I wanted for my birthday.
And you know what I’d give myself? I’d give myself the freedom to just flat out tell any story I wanted, no matter how “risky” it might be, no matter how “afraid” I should be of calling out people or practices.
I shared, back in post one, this story:
That moment in my PhD came when I was at my lowest, emotionally. And the part of the story I rarely share is that I was reprimanded and silenced because people from outside my program had mentioned the post to people on my committee. It’s confessional time: I wasn’t ashamed that I made that post. It did exactly what I wanted it to do. The people on my committee weren’t listening to me. They listened when other people called them out. That, my dearest readers, is how you protest something. Now it didn’t end up the way I wanted it to end up. Instead of opening a dialogue it slammed the door to any dialogue happening. But as a rhetorical move, it did what I wanted it to do.
I was also scared, and scarred, by the aftermath of that incident. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get back to feeling like I could speak knowledge to power again (I feel like that phrase is cliche and hackneyed, but it’s what we all mean as academics). I know that people do– not enough, but people do. I just didn’t know if I mattered enough to be one of those people.
In a meeting with some students, discussing the oddity of tenure, a much more experienced, far my senior full professor defended tenure to this group of students by saying “it’s important that someone in our society has the security to speak [wait for it] knowledge to power.” And that made me stop and think, again, about the things I say and the things that I don’t, the hills I’ll die on and the water I hope will trickle away under the bridge.
To memorialize the one-year mark here on my blog, to fully embrace that I spent a whole year letting myself walk to various points on this limb and look around to see if it will crack, I feel like I should vent some of the things I keep tucked away in the back of my head. But instead, I’m just going to offer a reflection.
I logged into World of Warcraft today. I need a screenshot to send as a potential book cover. I looked around and noticed that my old home server is fairly empty. I looked at my little goblin toon, Ravenos. That’s his real name. I use my own first name for him in my writing, but the guild I researched has disbanded, so you can’t track back to them by knowing my in-game name. Lint, Salty, Iceman, Leah and the crew are safe with the Raven out of witness relocation. In fact, they’re all even on different servers now. They left me the guild, it appears, as a goodbye gift. So I re-named it. I almost renamed it to what I called it in my research notes. But I needed to de-identify it, of course. Last stage of good research work.
As I bounded around the city, I stopped to marvel at how small Ravenos is. In the game world, he’s the tiniest thing walking around (save a few environmental flourishes like mice). On my screen, there on my laptop, he was about the size of a quarter in the middle of a sprawling city.
Just an itty-bitty pocket goblin.
He’s the opposite of me in the real world. I’m enormous. It’s hard to miss me, even in a crowd.
But I thought about that little tiny goblin and how he’s my gatekeeper. He’s huge in my life. When my book is out there, even if it only gets read by a handful of people, I have a new legitimacy. It means I “did” it. And by did it, I mean that I did the thing that stopped some of my peers from getting tenure.
I’ve wanted to write a book for as long as I knew people wrote books.
Soon, I’ll have a copy of MY book. I already have books I’ve been published in (also cool), but this one will be mine. And at that point, I feel like maybe I did something.
But for now, this is the end of my 365 day trek. Tomorrow… I think it’s just become what I do, so I’ll probably post again. No more need for numbers, though.
This is Jack’s torn finish line tape.