Yesterday was the first day of classes at many colleges & universities, including the new one where I now work as well as the one where I used to teach in California.
It was a gorgeous sunny day and I went on campus just for a few hours in the afternoon after a nice swim at the outdoor pool, so my mood was pretty good yesterday.
As I walked around the bustling campus grounds and the more crowded rooms, as I sat working a bit in my own office, and when I was introduced by a colleague faculty to his class of students, my emotions and feelings felt very mixed.
During most of the afternoon, I felt a huge relief. Relief while I was working in my office as I was finally able to concentrate on technical work again (I have been noticing an improved focus that has been returning as my mind has been quieting down again over the past week or two). Relief also while walking around the bustling campus, feeling a sense of recognition for these strangers — STEM students and some STEM faculty — but knowing that I wouldn’t have to engage in a classroom this semester: the relief of being unburdened of the responsibility of teaching, guiding, performing.
On the other hand, though, there are also more complicated feelings, deeper down.
When my colleague, who is tenured faculty, introduced me to his class with generous and flattering words, there was a mixed sense of pride and embarrassment and humility within me.
In general, there is a sense of having to relearn, readapt, and of not wholly belonging: this school environment is very different both from my own as a student and from the place where I taught in California; moreover, I’m neither a student nor teaching or tenured faculty now. I’m a post-doc, a decade after having done (and failed at, in my own view) my first post-doc, and I’m the only post-doc in our department, as far as I know at the moment…
In these years I’ve learned so much but in so many different fields and directions that I really have tons to relearn in my own field of research that I’m attempting to pursue again. And this is scary and it also requires a huge amount of humility. Or the right balance between pride/self-confidence and humility. Which is tricky, especially in an environment which is new to me from the human/social viewpoint… And even more so while I’m undergoing my own personal changes and growth, especially connected to gender. In this sense, the relief and feeling of safety for not having to show up in a classroom, for not having the responsibility to teach, guide, perform constantly, is huge. But I’m also worried about getting too isolated and/or lonely or simply feeling different because of my age/experience…
And then, beneath it all, there’s still a sense of sadness, loss, almost failure even for the job & life I left behind in California. These feelings get intensified by other people around me and some conversations with them when they express surprise at my having struggled or not enjoyed it as much as expected in California, in a place that so many people see as “the best possible place to live or aim for in the world”. It’s so hard, often impossible, to get people to understand that it’s actually NOT “the best possible place to live or aim for in the world”, or at least not for everyone. And even harder to get people to understand my particular experience there, the reasons why it was so tough for me there, and how the professional experiences I had made my social/personal/emotional life so hard and eventually impossible for me to bear. I’m still struggling to accept my own struggles there, to validate them to myself, to not see them as “failures”. And then having to try and explain the situation, or my choices, to other people and not being heard makes it even harder for me to accept and validate my own experience. To actually believe myself and the validity of my own pain. To believe that I didn’t “fail” in California.
So while the overall feeling I have now is of relief and enthusiasm at being here, in this geographical location that I love and with a job that allows me to “start over” in some ways, relieving me of some burdens, I also feel a lot of pressure, on one hand, and unresolved pain and the need to come to terms with important parts of my past, on the other. Which is a whole basketful of emotions!
The Little Prince and the Fox 