new year’s resolutions, academic-calendar-style

These turtles look chill.

I don’t do ‘new year’s resolutions,’ partly because the whole phenomenon seems gimmicky and failure-inviting (and strangely tied up with weight loss) and partly because I’ve lived my whole life on an academic calendar. A new year most certainly does not start in January; it starts in August. And on this schedule, believe me, no one has time to sit around making new year’s resolutions in the middle of the freakin’ year (aka December or January)–we’re grading and planning new courses, and trying desperately to nod in passing at the holidays. Many of us who are job-seeking also spend that season having super-festive panic attacks that preclude much of a ‘resolution’ other than ‘I will somehow survive this year.’

Instead, I do intense short- and long-term planning–and aspiring–sometime each summer. Throughout and after graduate school, I’ve maintained a document literally entitled “masterplan.doc.” But this year, I’m jumping off the master plan. This is a time of great change, great financial insecurity, and great excitement in my life. I’m leaving behind my old career–something I’ve been running wholeheartedly toward since I was fourteen–and moving toward something new. As of the last week of August I will likely be unemployed, with no concrete promise of future employment, for the first time since my college graduation eleven years ago. That’s scary financially–I’m my family’s primary wage-earner, and we have virtually no savings–but wildly promising in other ways.

You see, my life has been totally out-of-control busy and full-to-bursting for the past seven years … crushingly so for the past five and change. Those five years involved:

• publishing my second and third scholarly articles,
• a nine-month period during which I read 33,618 pages of fiction and theory plus 205 poems (and reviewed 13 books I’d read in the preceding years), and took (and then studied from) 400 pages of notes on those books and articles for my Ph.D. written and oral exams–while teaching and (for part of the time) taking classes,
• taking those exams,
• sometime amongst the two written exams and my oral, getting pregnant (how the hell did that happen?!? it was on purpose, but still … my body didn’t get the memo that stress reduces fertility), which resulted amongst other things in me vomiting multiple times in the morning before putting on my suit and pretending not to be pregnant at my oral exam,
• not having an opportunity to go out drinking and/or take a month or two to recuperate mentally, physically, and emotionally from the exams process before beginning the dissertation (because I had to keep up with time-to-degree requirements and I was going to have a baby!),
• not being eligible for any form of maternity leave,
• writing the prospectus (proposal) for my dissertation during the exhaustion and nausea of early pregnancy,
• defending the prospectus and drafting the first few chapters of my dissertation while creating a human being inside my body,
• giving birth to and falling in love with said human being,
• co-parenting a newborn/baby/toddler/child with another busy grad student,
• drafting the remaining chapters of my dissertation while breastfeeding,
• revising those chapters into a coherent 250-page project while traveling back and forth (with a nursling) from North Carolina to Kentucky where my beloved grandfather was dying,
• grieving,
• witnessing the birth of my best friend’s baby and, as a result, training as a birth doula,
• starting and maintaining a blog that started out quite informal–a way to think through my new interest in childbirth–but eventually turned into a fairly big time commitment and then this web site,
• researching, writing, and traveling to present six academic conference papers,
• teaching full-time at the university where I completed my doctorate, then making the always-challenging transition to a totally new institution and teaching full-time there for a year (during these five years, I’ve taught about 23 courses [about 16 of which were totally new and which therefore had to be designed/prepped/etc. in addition to taught/graded/etc.] plus three independent studies),
• doing service (serving on committees, contributing to professional development efforts, going to meetings, etc., etc.) at both institutions,
• preparing job materials, and continually revising those and creating new materials for particular positions,
• applying for literally a hundred jobs during a two-and-a-half year period, and interviewing (over the phone, via Skype, at conventions, and on campuses) a dozen times,
• moving multiple times, including a hellish move from North Carolina to Minnesota which we did as cheaply (and therefore effortfully) as possible because I wasn’t being reimbursed for moving expenses,
• deciding to make a career transition, researching my options, requesting and carrying out informational interviews, and making hugely-important decisions that affect my whole identity and my family’s future,
• and a bunch of other crap, but I think you get the idea. Busy little bee. Tired. Hit the wall a few years ago and just kept going. That sort of thing.

Do you see some patterns in what that list does not include? (Hint: not much by way of pleasure–outside my interactions with my son–or relaxation or ‘self-care’ …) These, in contrast, are my new year’s resolutions:

• This year, I would like to read books that I’m neither writing about nor teaching. I started doing this a few months ago, and I have to say, wow! That’s some fun stuff, reading without taking notes. Boy howdy.
• This year, I would like to make things, beyond whatever’s-fastest-for-supper. I would like to start baking again and maybe doing some simple crafts: I hardly even remember how to sew or knit or bead or paint, all things I used to enjoy.
• This year, I would like to write things. I’ve very much enjoyed crafting my articles, written exams (yes, really), prospectus, dissertation, and conference papers. And I fully intend to continue writing scholarly articles, conference papers, and eventually books. But that one kind of writing–the kind that you do out of intellectual curiosity but also and emphatically so that you may someday get a job, and the kind that speaks pretty exclusively to other scholars in a particular field–has taken over what used to be a varied and lively writing life. At least I started blogging, right? I can hardly even believe I used to write poetry; I’m sure they were crappy poems, but they existed. And guess who has a detailed outline for a very interesting-sounding novel, and the first few pages of that and several other fictional projects, sitting around all lonely-like? I don’t mean I want to write all of that stuff right now. At the moment, I would just like to get started with a memoir that’s been bouncing around in my head for a couple years and would really like to be let out. I want to write about some of my experiences of being intertwined with my first baby before I lose what I’m hoping to say.
• This year, I would like to continue learning about librarianship and computer-y tech stuff, volunteering in libraries (I’m interning at the library of the college where I’m also teaching this summer), and becoming a better candidate for library school and funding … and ultimately employment. Because right now I can noodle around and learn without being on any sort of a clock, and without any possibility of failure.
• This year, I would like to continue blogging here, finish writing content for the information/resources pages of this site, and think of simple ways to introduce what I’m offering to new readers. I would like to stop feeling guilty about every moment I spend on this project instead of doing ‘my real work’–because this is a meaningful part of my real work.
• This year, I would like to put myself out there again in hopes of attending a few births and helping a few pregnant/birthing/newly-parenting people in person. I trained as a doula and then lived a life where I couldn’t possibly commit to attending a birth, given my and my partner’s demanding schedules, traveling, moving, caring for our own child, etc. Perhaps, if I do have a period of unemployment, I can use that flexibility to good purpose in this long-neglected calling. Perhaps I can find a doula in the Twin Cities who’d be willing to have me help out at a birth or two. Who knows? (Are you out there?)
• Perhaps most importantly, this year, I would like to give myself a fucking break. I would like to get a reasonable amount of sleep at least some of the time. I would like to continue shedding and living without the huge anxiety that’s built up over the past few years, a shift I’ve started during the past few months. I would like to spend some time each week as downtime–hanging out with my partner and enjoying our child and even sometimes just being by myself in the sunshine with a cup of tea (is that even legal?)–the sort of thing that has not been a regular part of my life for years.

And, in that spirit, I would like to regard this list of I-would-like-to’s not as a to-do list but as an invitation to enjoy and enrich myself and my little family in ways that feel good. Because feeling good sounds really good right now.

[image credit: photo by flickr user Carolinadoug, made available under Creative Commons license]