I’m now kind of really happy I’m getting fired. Because get this. Like you probably know, I don’t get to teach literature. It’s a very bizarre situation where everything I research and publish is aggressively not in demand where I work. My teaching is completely divorced from my research. This means that I never, not for one day, was what I went into this profession to be. I wanted to be that person who goes into class to talk about books, and we analyze them together, and I go “so on page 126 when she says XYZ, what does it mean?” And I had to accept that I’ll never be that.
I made my peace with this and it’s fine. I thought, hey, maybe I wouldn’t even be good at it. I never tried, so I might just as well turn out to be a total fail as a literature professor.
Today, however, I was invited to give a guest lecture about my new book at a university that has a graduate program and that does teach literature. I decided to talk about the novel that’s currently my weakest. Where’s the fun in going in with something where you know you’ll shine? No, I chose the book for which I don’t have that much enthusiasm or much to say.
And I absolutely slayed. I finally got to do the “let’s go to page 93” and it was glorious. And guess what? I now know what I want to say about this novel in my book. Talking about it with students, listening to their comments and answering questions really helped. Only to think how much I would have published if I could do this regularly.
So now I’m thinking, fuck this job, you know? It’s not even that good. I finally get forced to look for something better, something where I can finally do what I always wanted to. Sixteen years of telling myself that it’s fine that I don’t get to teach literature, that I don’t have a community, and for what? I get pathetically, slavishly attached to the communities of scholars I sometimes meet at conferences. It’s embarrassing but I sit there looking at photos from back in 2018 when I was part of such a group in Germany for a week. It happened twice in my whole life, in October of 2018 and January of 2023. And then today. Without you, wonderful people on this blog, I would be completely alone in my intellectual process.
So yeah, I have just experienced a big, unexpected awakening, and I’m feeling great relief. Now I need to go and rewrite the chapter on that book based on my new insights.
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