20181126.0430

Today will see me return to work and some semblance of normalcy from the last of the fall holidays and the first of the "winter." (It is not as if the season has changed here; indeed, in the Texas Hill Country, it was more like fall after Thanksgiving than before, but Thanksgiving is reckoned a fall holiday and the shopping sprees that begin after the leftovers are portioned out are assigned to the Christmas season.) Objectionable as I may find things to be reckoned as they are, I know that they are so regarded. I know also that I will be glad to get back into something like a routine again; I do not do well with too much time left to my own devices.
I've noted with some bitterness my obligation to leave academe. I recall noting, too, that no small part of that has been my own fault. While I was enrolled in graduate school, pursuing my degrees, I had definite end-goals in mind--and clear paths toward them. Take the classes that needed taking, sit for the exams that needed taking, write the thesis or the dissertation and submit it for committee review, and the thing would be done. With the master's done, I had the doctorate to begin in earnest. With the doctorate done, though, I did not have a clear path to follow; I thought at the time that the job I had--which was a good teaching job, if a remarkably busy one, until it wasn't anymore--would be the job in which I'd remain for quite some time. I did not look forward, therefore, to getting a book written from the beginnings of it in my dissertation (and I still need to do that bit, though I am far removed from the work I once did). I did not look then at getting pieces into print, for the school at which I worked honored seniority over the traditional concerns of tenure. I did not look at finding other work, for I thought I had work that would sustain me.
In short, I trusted that things would be well, that matters would fall out as I expected them to do. I did not take care to have a backup plan to sustain me in the event of things failing and faltering, as they ended up doing. And, when I was given some semblance of a tether to academic work, I did not attend to the research that I ought to have been doing to secure a spot as a tenure-line professor, making what I now recognize were feeble attempts to teach decently. (It is only now, after I have resigned myself to not having a full-time teaching career, that I feel like I am doing decently at that work; there is still a part of me that hopes some outside force will see it and open a door to me as is done in some of the works I study, but I know that part of me is a damned fool.) I did not do what I ought to have been doing if I was going to call myself a contributing scholar. Now, I will not be one.
If I let myself wander away from the path I ought to have been treading, based upon the training I undertook to sally forth, I did so because I did not look ahead as I ought to have done. I did not think of what goal I should pursue next, what steps I would need to take to reach that goal. I have no intention of making that mistake again; I know what goal I am pursuing at this point (eliminating my debt-load), and I know what steps I have to take to make that happen (work more, earn money, pay down debts, save what remains). I do not always succeed at following those steps, at adhering to the disciplined routine I know I ought to heed, but I do a damned sight better at it with an idea in mind than I do without one.