The Goddetc* in the Pink Tiara

I was invited to write a short piece for Composition Studies' special section on Leaving Academia. This is the pre-edited version of that piece, coming out later this fall.

I was in the middle of going up for Full Professor in late 2017 when I decided to step away from tenure-track faculty life, move institutions and professions, and fully focus on open-access scholarly publishing.

I had been having stress-induced health problems and wanted to step away from teaching for two years so I could focus on the large public-facing, grant-funded research project taking up most of my attention. I was already on a reduced load, so my (perhaps, faculty-focused) logic was that they wouldn’t be missing me much. It was widely recognized in the administrative buildings that my grant funds helped the university achieve R1 status, so I felt confident asking the dean for a temporary teaching release. He said no, which was only mildly surprising and definitely shortsighted. I quit a month later. 

 There’s a few more details to be sussed out in that story, however. I had a new administrative job lined up making a lot more money, but I wasn’t negotiating a counter-offer pay raise at the current school because I didn’t need one and didn’t want to be wholly out of line with what my colleagues were making. I just wanted the teaching release. My dean assumed, when he turned me down, that I would never leave a tenured position. But he had pushed me to my physical limits, and the new dean at the new university was trying to give me everything I needed to work on my research project.

Still, I wrangled over this decision. I was hesitant to make the leap to the new job. It meant giving up the golden ring of tenure, of Full Professorship—the thing every PhD in the humanities is brainwashed into thinking is the key to happiness and success. It took me three months to unwind that egotistical logic from my brain to accept the new administrative position. I left the old job mid-year for a 9–5 staff position in an academic library, and for several years, I was the happiest I’d been in decades because I got to work on all the stuff I did on nights and weekends—research about publishing, editing journals and book series, mentoring new editors, running an organization full of editors, building editorial professional development curricula—during work hours. I was being paid to serve, and I woke up with glee each morning.

When I transitioned to work in an academic library, I was surprised how many of my writing studies colleagues referred to my having “left academia.” :/ I didn’t leave; I still worked full-time in academia, but I could see their egos mistaking the full-time service work of librarians as lesser than the book-lined offices and research-filled work that the tenure-line faculty of their imaginations performed. In reality, when I had their jobs, it felt like 90% service, but I was only getting paid for 10% of it. It was no wonder my heart was giving out. I had lived 42 years not knowing I had a genetic heart defect, until I did. The symptoms came with a bang, and I was forced to slow down and confront that voice in my head hollering more, more, more. I am grateful that wake-up call came while I was at the old job, because it provided physical evidence that I needed to leave. I’m not sure I would have otherwise. The ego is hard to tame.

So I made the leap to libraryland, as librarians call it. It does seem like a magical place compared to the everyday nonsense of most English departments. More radical, more inclusive, more income (at least in my admin position), with way fewer meetings and zero fights over curriculum. At least it seemed that way initially. When I first started in the library, I gave myself five years—as that’s what my (renewing) contract was for—and told myself that if I hated it, I could go back to being a professor somewhere, no problem.

Three weeks in, I gave up on that idea, already realizing how much better working in a library is than being a faculty member in a department full of literature and language colleagues, most of whom have no idea how universities work, how to collaborate, how to Get Shit Done, or how to put work down at the end of the day. (Spoiler: Libraries are barely better than academic departments at any of this, but even that smidge of difference made my working day infinitely better. My employment no longer relied on some outdated, old white man in another discipline holding up my tenure case.)

I learned two critical lessons while working in an academic library:

1. Work stops at 4:35pm sharp because you have a bus to catch and family and hobbies to attend to. [WHAT?!] This was a subtle, unspoken movement I witnessed daily on the part of my unionized colleagues that I soon found myself replicating.
2. “Work is not the crown you wear to show your value.” [WHAAAT?!?] “The university will not hold your hand when you are sick in the hospital.” [Uff da.] This quote is from my amazing colleague Joshua, which he relayed to me as I fretted over a series of past-due items during my first few months on the job. That moment irrevocably changed my relationship to work.

For the first time in 20 years, I began leaving work at work at closing time (I didn’t have building access after hours), taking weekends off, exploring the city, dating, and focusing on hobbies and relaxation. Whenever I began to hear someone else stress about workload, or bring up their imposter syndrome, I channeled what my colleague had said to me and reassured this person that, indeed, they were doing enough and that it was great. Anything they could do was what they could do, and so that would be their measure of excellence. Not fear-induced annual reviews that left them wondering whether they’d have a job. Not annual productivity increases for the sake of it, with no accompanying compensation. No Virgo-induced “I work harder than you” ego trips as a fellow faculty member. No guilt and no shame. Academia had so trained me to suck it up that, for 20 years, I did, and it meant I was working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, never stopping. Fear makes us do a lot of things we have no business doing. And it took leaving my faculty position to begin to recognize how the emotional stranglehold of academia had taken over my nervous system.

Two years after I started in libraryland, the pandemic hit the US. My new job was in Michigan, and we immediately went into months of lockdown. The digital publishing unit I worked with never went back to the office while I was there. For two more years, I did my job from a cream-colored recliner sitting six feet from my then-partner, who worked remotely in her recliner, while her teenager worked six feet behind us doing high school online. I continued to remind my colleagues who had significant others and offspring and animals and other neighborly duties that were far more onerous than mine to do the bare minimum at work for the sake of their mental and physical health. If they were working 20 hours a week, consider that full-time. And if they weren’t, it would still be OK.

[There is much more to write here about the intervening years of 2020 and 2021, the way my focus—many of our foci—radically shifted to repairing the wounds of racism and capitalism in our country and our daily work. But, sadly, I do not have the room for that part of the story, even as its relevance, and my desire to enact anti-racist and anti-capitalist approaches to scholarly publishing (as one sphere of influence I know well), underlies much of what follows. Please take a moment to imagine the mental and emotional energy that an activist wellspring of justice-oriented actions produces in a person, and you’ll sense my growing discontent with sitting in a recliner, working from home.]

My university had skated through the pandemic budget crisis in a fiscally responsible way to save as many jobs as possible. I was grateful in my middle-management job to only be furloughed, but I knew my contract would not be renewed in December 2022. So in September 2021, I took my mandatory 10 days of furlough and began the intellectual work of transitioning to self-employment. I had 16 months to figure out what to do with my life. I knew I wanted to help people who needed publishing support from an independent position instead of being hindered by an academic one, as the confines of working for a university—and with a fiscal officer whose dharmic calling was to ensure that I no longer worked there—began to grate on me.

My relationship ended weeks after my furlough, and I didn’t know where to move but knew that movement was on the agenda. I felt called to hit the road to work remote remote, not telling anyone other than my ex-babe and one of my best friends where I was headed: the desert. I was having my own white lady’s soul journey, trying my best not to Eat, Pray, Love my way through it. I didn’t stay with anyone, didn’t see friends in towns I passed through, didn’t speak to anyone I didn’t have to, didn’t have any love affairs, and didn’t stop working my ass off, regardless of how I was counseling everyone else to behave. I did learn to hike, read tarot professionally, communicate with horses, live off-grid, and journal myself silly.

A lot happened in that five months that changed my understanding of myself, my internal vs. external needs, and my desire to live simply. That is a whole book in the making. The tl;dr: These changes were in conflict with my still-present academic ego and misplaced need to feel involved and get “credit” in a way that used to fill my extroversion. I hadn’t completely gotten rid of that need—it was still present in my life through all of the things I continued to say yes to when I secretly wanted and needed to say no. (I definitely was not taking my own advice of https://cherylsays.no to its fullest! 

Five months after starting my soul journey out west, no one was any the wiser at work. I had exceeded all my work obligations, sometimes getting up at 5am MT to take early meetings, making sure to check the local weather in Michigan to be aware of any watercooler chit-chat I might need to make on those Zoom calls, and drawing the curtains on their cloudy days so they wouldn’t notice the sun beaming in wherever I happened to be—Wonder Valley, CA; Mesquite, NV; Tucson or Sedona, AZ. I was putting in over 60 hours a month on editorial and community service work alone. I had also been taking business coaching courses and had built up the basics of my consulting business, with a roll-out plan for later that summer.

In early April 2022, I met with one of my closest colleagues to lay out a transition plan for our mutual long-term projects, under the guise of preparing months and months ahead of my December 2022 nonrenewal of contract. I dropped the news then that I’d been living in the desert for five months, and he—having early on in our work-friendship vocalized how his attention focused on certain things and not at all on others—literally fell sideways out of his chair! He’d never noticed the background of my Zoom calls were always different, a liberty I indulged only with him because I knew he wouldn’t notice. I also knew he wouldn’t say anything if he did: This is the same person who neither noticed nor commented on the multiple days I accidentally came to work with toothpaste on my face nor on the fabulous rose quartz tiara I wore to work on occasion. I did not tell him that day that I was only a month away from resigning.

The following Monday morning, in the early bright sun of the desert, I woke up to go hiking. As was my routine, I sat on the toilet, skimming weekend emails on my phone, until one struck me cold: a mandatory Human Resources meeting, CCing my boss, at 11am eastern THAT DAY. After the initial shock, I chuckled to myself, “So today’s the day I get fired?!” Alrighty then.

Through a series of bad wifi connections and multiple failed Zoom attempts, two women from HR informed me of my termination status. The dean never showed. I laughed through the whole event. When they finished their boilerplate lecture, they remarked at how jovial I was. They didn’t know I was weeks away from a gigantic financial leap of faith, and they’d just handed me  severance (and the university’s requisite nondisclosure agreement). THANK YOU, UNIVERSE!

There are more layers to this story—like I said, at least a whole ‘nother book’s worth—that have led to so many changes in my life in the last two years. A more intense revision of my remaining academic ties to disconnect myself further from unpaid labor, even when removing myself from some of the academic projects I have looooved has been difficult and sometimes brought tears to my eyes. Stronger attention to my spiritual journey and how events and signals and pauses for reflection (that I didn’t allow myself when I was working full time) have helped me uncover who I have been and am meant to be in this life. A reorientation to anti-capitalism and minimalist living that I desired in prior iterations of this life but have been able to more fully explore as a digital nomad. (Many things make this nomadic transition slightly easier for me, including that I have no kids and no pets at the moment, but those entities aren’t dealbreakers for many who pursue this lifestyle, so don’t let that deter you if you’ve been pondering it!) I’ve learned a lot about how I used academia to give myself language and permission for things that were intuitively part of me all along but that I didn’t have language for or feel like I had permission to make obvious.

Two thousand words (my editorial-assigned limit, for which I have already broken) is not enough to delve into the outcomes of this change—this unexpected, radical upheaval that makes it seem as if I am a wholly new and different person, unrecognizable even to myself sometimes—but this change gives me time to write about it in ways I was born to do and didn’t even know it. It’s given me time to pursue activities and desires that lay dormant inside me for decades—carpentry apprenticeships, plans for building a tiny house retirement community, intuition-focused teaching and mentoring—as well as mend relationships that needed mending and letting go of others I no longer needed, including a recognition that my lust for academic accolades never propped me up emotionally or mentally in the ways PhDs in our field think it “should.” Work is not the crown you wear to show your value. Your crown, my friends, is you. 

 *This is a gender-inclusive term for god/goddess.