Saturday, March 23, 2019

20190323.0430

As I've been writing in my personal journal recently, I've been working on issues of self-concept. For me, as I think is the case for many men in the United States and in the Texas Hill Country, a fair bit of self-concept inheres in professional identity. To relate a bit of my own experience, noting that it is anecdotal and may well not extend in concept beyond me in any way that helps others, I spent many years working to become a teacher, first of band music at the middle- and high-school levels, then of English at the same, then of English at the collegiate level. I technically succeeded at the last, having been at the fronts of college English classrooms since 2006, even doing so in a full-time position that seemed permanent (until it wasn't) for a while. But the "technically" falters against my current circumstances, in which I teach part-time if at all, and only as a side-line, rather than as the primary identification it had been for me.
I have had some challenge in figuring out who and what I am without being a scholar first--and it is to my shame that I was trying to be a scholar first instead of some other thing first and a scholar only after. It is to my shame that I had been so focused on a (now abortive) career that I had neglected being something outside that career, whether that something was a husband (and I am fortunate to have married a person who also sought to do scholarship, though I think she had the good sense to try to do scholarship rather than to be a scholar, and the two differ greatly) or a father (Ms. 8 learned too early the meaning of "I'm working," I think; I still hear it from her and cringe), a brother or a son (the Work disconnected me from them), a friend (I still have precious few, and most of those from work), or even simply part of a community (I am finding increasingly often that I am little remembered here if I am remembered at all).
The time I have lost, I cannot reclaim, of course. I can only work to use better the time that I still have, uncertain though it is. And part of that is working to know myself better outside the still-lingering demands of academe and the ever-present demand that I provide for my family. I will never be free of the latter, I know; being such is the only way I know how to be a husband and father, even though I feel I do far less well at being those than the model I have had for them. (I flatter myself that I am adequate--my wife has not left me, and my child has not died or even suffered much--but I do not pretend that I am any better than adequate.) I do not begrudge it; I do not seek to shirk it. But I do need to be more than just the worker; no job lasts forever, and I will still be who I am when those I work now end. Who that is doubtlessly needs some adjustment; knowing what changes need making takes a bit of time and attention, which I am trying to give to the tasks.
I do not yet know the outcomes.

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