Bravery and Milestones

By all accounts I have had a “productive” year so far. What I mean by this of course is by academic accounts, or what is used as the yardstick for being part of, and sadly for some being “valuable” in,  academic spaces. How have I been productive? How have I been valuable? Well, so far this year I have had 2 articles published, and wrote and sent of 2 more articles with colleagues for review. I also wrote a response piece that was solicited by a journal and sent for review. One of those has received a favourable revise and resubmit which we completed, the others are in academic article wait and see land. 

I also went to one conference before all this pandemic lockdown happened where I gave one paper and facilitated a workshop on instructional design that was well received. I also have an essay collection that I edited coming out in October. All good things yes; look at me checking off the boxes, right? And yet….

And yet I acknowledge the fact that any of my productivity is largely on the back of me having almost zero other responsibilities in my life besides work which is academic work. I take care of a cat, I feed him and provide the appropriate affection and that is it. No other direct responsibilities intersect in my life. My parents live many hours away, and yes I check on them every 3 days or so, but they are sadly outside my daily ability to be responsible for. I check in on friends and provide the support that I can at a distance but again most of that is textual. I make sure my rental unit does not flood or catch on fire, but is that really a responsibility? It’s also a very old home and things break that I can’t fix and it isn’t really my responsibility, but rather that of my landlord who can’t really enter my unit because of social distancing. And yet….

And yet at the end of March exactly when all this pandemic lock down started I received a 10 page single space peer review of my monograph draft based on my dissertation. A dissertation I defended in 2011. A dissertation that has haunted me, since it started in it’s nascent form in 2007. 13 years of tactile haunting. 10 pages of feedback, very generous feedback, very necessary feedback. But 10 pages! Single spaced. I opened the file in March and promptly went “nope.” I had no emotional capacity to deal with what was written there. April came and I was so busy with work those 10 pages sat in my inbox collecting virtual cobwebs. Then in May I said to myself okay breathe open the file and read it and see. Is this some kind of bravery? That despite all the apparent successes, the publications, the apparent successes at work in supporting faculty through thoughts about course design and remote delivery, despite all this, I needed a huge dose of bravery to open that file and deal with what was written there. And I have been slowly. 

Academia asks a lot of us. It asks us to be present, it asks us to be brave, it asks us to be patient, it requires us to be kind, to be empathetic. Sometimes we give a lot, and we don’t get much if anything in return. Many question why we do it at all, our love of teaching, or our love of research is so foundational to so many of us that we keep going. Some who have been in this  line of work for a while have learned to embody that tension, and it comes out in sore backs, shoulders pinned to ears. Reading those pages was hard, but also a little funny, especially when the reviewer tells you to cite yourself (I guess that means I’m at least known in some ways in my field). 

So I am working through the suggestions; every Sunday I sit and review and edit a section. I have an August 14th deadline. And then I sit and wait again to see if they will publish. And yet….and yet if they don’t decide to go forward I have made the decision to just be okay with it, file it away, pat myself on the back for trying. The monograph is kind of like the academic holy grail; we strive for it, but with this particular project it has been years in the making. The original manuscript was lost so close to seeing potential light when Ashgate folded. Now it is in the hands of another potential publisher. But I have to be okay with whatever happens because you can only carry the albatross so long, regardless of what academe tells you. You can only be told so many times your writing style is a bit odd, and you sit and contemplate how much your bilingualism and trilingualism has affected the way that you write and how no one ever takes that into account. Because there’s a way to write as an academic, however that way is usually very far from the way we all do write.

There’s bravery and then there’s chasing milestones only for milestone sake. A lot of the work in academia is often milestones, for milestones sake. This monograph is very divorced from where I am right now in my academic work. I mean it is but it isn’t. For me, it always starts with touch and the sensory; touch and the senses are what inform my accessibility advocacy, it is what informs my passion for Universal Design for Learning. And even though my PhD is in Victorian literature I have a lot of difficulty defining myself as a Victorianist any longer- this is mostly because I don’t think I ever fit in that mold to start with.  I am much, much more concerned about pedagogy and accessibility, than I am about 19th century literature at the moment. So that is why I will make my valiant try but it will be important for me to put this to rest, regardless of what happens. I have much more exciting projects on inclusive pedagogy and academic integrity that I want to explore. But first this.

Milestones for milestones sake, requires bravery, but it also requires a deep belief in the system that those milestones are a part of. My bestest friend in the whole world is deep in dissertation writing at the moment, and it is nice that we have an opportunity for a writing community, as she writes and I edit this monograph. All of the things that I worked through when I was writing my dissertation she is now working through- timing, keeping things focused, figuring out structure for certain sections. And we text, and we talk, and it’s great and I love it so much. Both of us are reaching for different academic milestones. Marking the distances we have travelled, word by word, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. Academia is a field that requires so much of us...and sometimes being brave is just saying “nope, that’s it enough, no more” and that is so necessary and completely okay. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but there it is,  and I hope it helps in some way.