20181107.0430

In many ways, I am a failure. Time and again, I have set a goal for myself and have not achieved it. I started my undergraduate studies in an attempt to become a band director; after my second year of college, I changed my major, having not succeeded in my stated goal. When I changed majors, I did so with the intention of teaching high school English; when I applied to do that work, I was rejected from it. When I went to graduate school, I did so with the thought that I would become a professor; I may carry a title with the work "professor" in it at present, but I know and the institution that employs me in that capacity know that it is a courtesy only, that I am a temp worker kept on in eight-week bursts that could end at any time. And while my current full-time job is one that does good work and helps people who need it, and it treats me reasonably well, it is difficult to look at it against my credentials and earlier career goals and not see it as a failure.
For all of that, though, I am in a good place. Again, my current job is a reasonably good one, and if it necessarily imposes some humility upon me, that is likely to my benefit; those who knew me when I was much younger than I am now (insofar as there is a "much" younger) know that I was a cocky little ass. Too, I am still able to do the kind of work I was trained to do, though I am not dependent upon it or upon the notoriously tight and capricious academic labor market to support myself and my family. I have my family, both in my home and in my life; I do not have to give them up to do the work that I am still very much called to do. I do not have to be away from the people I love, whether from being on the road or from being so buried in what I do that I cannot exhume myself for their benefit. And I am in a place that, with all its faults (and the Texas Hill Country does have problems, to be sure), is one with which I am familiar and one in which I and my family can flourish.
It helps me to remind myself of such things every so often. I often find myself dwelling on the materials in the first paragraph despite being surrounded by those of the second, and such dwelling is not a comfortable place to live. Nor is it uncomfortable in the useful way that spurs action and improvement, but is instead the kind of uncomfortable that prompts a recourse into lethargy and the concomitant self-rebuke for doing nothing to make things better. Taking the time to think about the second does not make the problems of the world go away for me or for anybody else, of course, but it is helpful for me to remember what is good in my life and what gives me reasons not to answer the bean sidhe's call.