What could I be if I quit academia? That is the huge question looming over me right now, and frankly, terrifying the shit out of me.
Terrifying, because I’ve always depended on the structure and pressure of a life “on track." I've always been paralyzed by those moments between tracks, when I've found myself having to decide what to do next. And my decisions have almost always been made, in a sense, for me, by whatever the strongest influence of my immediate context happens to be.
There have been three real turning points in my life, that perhaps from the outside looked like bold acts of will, but that to me felt much more like my relinquishing my will to circumstance.
1.
I arrived at college with clear strengths in music and biology, and vaguely planned to declare them as majors. In my very first semester, the highly structured environment of my “western culture” course (residence-based, inclusive of freshman English, so half my time spent on it) pulled me in while I felt relatively lost in my huge chemistry course, which was my only connection to the biology major at this point. I had no adviser or social structure in the sciences, while all my friends, dorm-mates, family provided actual or tacit support for my turning toward the humanities. And so, by the end of the year, I dropped biology and decided on literature. Really unbelievable in retrospect, considering how difficult I found writing and reading.
2.
I ended up (somehow) doing very well in my major, but I could not for the life of me develop a vision of what I wanted to do after college, short of applying to grad school (in other words, staying on the same track I was already on). I drifted a bit after graduation, moving across the country with the idea that I’d apply to grad schools while spending the year living on my own (with my best friend, actually, who, having a clear vision of her future, was going there to work in a lab), and getting to know a new place. But my context began immediately to shape me, and alienate me from my own plan. I did apply to grad school, but half-heartedly, and ended up getting in nowhere.
Instead, I got a depressing job as a university department secretary, selling myself extremely short, and ended up in a relationship with my boss, an older man who had a drinking and drug problem (which he managed to beat, so perhaps I exaggerate for effect), who’d gone to music school and encouraged me to get back to music and even apply to this same music school, since I still nurtured the dream of being a violinist. So I applied and got in and went.
I would venture that there’s no more structured environment than a music conservatory. Every second of your time is accounted for: weekly individual lessons and chamber music coachings, daily orchestra and chamber music rehearsals, coursework, homework, concerts to attend or perform in almost every night of the week, and then practicing whenever possible, often as much as 5 hours a day. It was hellish at times, but also heavenly: I never had to make decisions; I only had to apply myself to the task at hand, which someone else had determined.
It was hellish because, unlike almost everyone else who was there, I had not spent my entire childhood practicing my instrument, and so I had a lot of technical catching up to do. I nonetheless managed to be very successful, getting to play in a quartet with the best players at the school and earning the respect of my peers and teachers.
3.
However, yet again, I had no plan for what I would do next. I took no auditions, had no vision of what my professional self would look like, no energy for developing, let alone taking, the next step in my life as a musician.
So what did I do? I returned home to mom and dad. The idea was that I’d regroup, start practicing for and taking orchestra auditions, or something. To be honest I can’t really remember what I was thinking at the time. Though I do remember setting up at least one audition, and I did, once back home, audition for and get a job with a part-time, low-paying symphony in the area.
But almost immediately, the by-now predictable happened yet again. Back in my father’s academic context, I found myself drawn back into the idea of going to graduate school. I was becoming alienated by anti-intellectualism of the musical community, and feeling very lonely. I wasn't coming into contact with musicians like my music-school friends, who'd been mostly literate, thoughtful, articulate.
But instead of trying to get back into an interesting musical scene, I jumped ship and applied, once again, to grad school. I got in, everywhere and with huge fellowships to boot. I guess my musical interlude looked glamorous or something. Anyway, the rest is history. I got on the academia track, which, though much less structured than the music school track, is nonetheless very hard to get off of once one has gotten on. And the longer one stays, the harder it is to get off.
And now here I am—having met all the academic milestones of dissertation, tenure-track job and tenure--finding myself facing the void once again, but this time with no alternative “track” giving me a way to fill that void up.
(I should say that the mommy track is certainly filling the void to some extent, but now that my daughter’s in preschool, it’s just not enough. I should also say, though this perhaps is another post, that my getting on the mommy track was itself determined in a way by circumstance rather than planning. Not that I got pregnant by accident, but that I finally decided to try only when there was very little time left on my biological clock. I'd never really given it much thought before then.)
This narrative reveals some very obvious patterns (which, I think, aren't only a function of how I'm telling the story, but also of how I lived it). I run away from having to chart my own path; I cling to institutional settings that set the terms and goals of my path for me. I can be highly successful within those settings, although I tend to do only what I need to do in order to succeed. (To get tenure, I did not need a book contract, just a manuscript and articles. And so I never did get that book contract. Still haven’t. Of course I haven’t! Had I been hired by a top research university, I’d probably have two books written by now.)
So, the big question is, can I break the pattern? Can someone like me change this late in life? What will happen to me if I to step into the void this time? Am I perhaps ready, finally, to write my own script? It seems so very very scary.
