20190822.0430

Ruminations on my office situation are not new for me, as I've shown in a few places (here, here, and here, among others). Given events, I am likely to draft another one soon; I have noted, I believe, my impending shift in job, and the shift comes with a new office I've not moved into yet. After I do, though, it will be time to sit down and write more about my office spaces; I welcome the task, not least because I like having other things to put into the webspace where I make such comments. But I am not in that office yet, and I am in something of a liminal position for another week or so, until the current occupant moves out and I move in. The situation is a strange one I've not really been in before.
To be sure, I've lost office spaces. I've explicitly spoken to such losses, in fact, such that I do not need to rehearse my feelings about when it's happened before. The current situation, though, has me still in occupation of my current office space, but sharing it with another who is training to take it over as I move into the office my new position will afford me. I drift between the two, going from my desk in front to the office desk in the adjoining room. And I feel the drift; I feel myself unanchored, though it is less a feeling of being underway than it perhaps should be (and if I may, landsman that I am, use such metaphors as that).
I am aware that I am not cast out, as I have been more than once. I know that I still have a place and that I will continue to have a place. But I think it is the case that my earlier experiences being moved from office to office and being forced out of office after office have left me anxious about things this time around. I learned later than I ought to have that I should not be secure in my academic positions, and now that I am in a position that is more stable than those (because things could still happen that I would prefer not to have happen), I cannot escape it; I cannot unlearn what I have learned, or I have not yet done so, and it leaves me feeling...strange, and not in a way I enjoy. (I admit to a certain amount of strangeness and to enjoying the same, but not all strangeness is the same.)
I will persist, of course; it is only for a bit more than a week, now, and I can deal with that. It is simply a strange thing for me, and I thought I might remark upon it a bit.