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Shari Stenberg
Just last week, I turned in my dossier to apply for tenure and promotion at the university where I teach. The process marks yet another juncture in academic sanctioning, which was preceded by trials including doctoral exams, a dissertation, a grueling job hunt and the publication of a book. This final step, tenure, is the ultimate hazing; if successful, I am awarded a permanent spot (save for unforeseen budget crises) in the guild; if not, I’m fired. That is to say, if I receive tenure, I am allowed to stay exactly where I am.
It’s no wonder that I know several academics who, once granted tenure, experienced both exhaustion and depression. The symptoms stemmed not so much from the marathon toward it, but from the false promises of the finish line. These colleagues realized they had been motivated by the illusion of a professional nirvana, a blissful state of enoughness, where one can bask in her achievements, while experiencing relief from the pressure to achieve more. What came instead was a version of postpartum let-down. This is it? There were still classes to teach, grade appeals to answer, committee meetings to attend, and departmental battles to surmount. And worse, there was no longer a rabbit to chase.
I began the road to tenure with much fervor. I’m a first-born, high-achiever type, and I like to succeed. For me, success is satisfying largely because it indicates I haven’t failed—yet. Success is also a way to stave off the anxiety that walks at my heels. It provides momentary relief, like a cigarette or a bag of Peanut M&Ms.
If you met my family, you’d know I come by my anxiety honestly. My mom feeds on a steady stream of CNN and Fox News, which sustains her appetite for catastrophe. 24- hour broadcasts provide her ample stores from which to draw when she wants to offer her adult children examples of why we must be more careful, more guarded, more paranoid. After the young woman was kidnapped in Aruba: “You never let my granddaughters out of your sight, do you?” Always, subtly indicted.
My dad, too, has honed his worrying over the years, and this activity is typically in service of one primary dream: that his three kids will be “settled”: gainfully employed and financially secure. But his children keep getting in the way of his plans for them.
With the exception of choosing a career as a professor instead of a pharmacist, my dad’s preference (high-paying job guaranteed, right of school), I’ve been the child who most easily bends to his wishes. Pleasing other people is a way to slow the spin-cycle of my thoughts, to loosen the constrictive knot in my throat. Eventually, though, the remedy loses its effectiveness, or worse, the cure makes me sicker, because this particular game can never be won. No pleasing is enough pleasing. No external reward ultimately quenches my thirst.
Anne Lamott, whose writing is one of my healthier cures for anxiety, uses the metaphor of the mechanical rabbit to describe her own deflated response to finally “making it” as a writer. “I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she’d been chasing for so long—discovering it was merely metal, wrapped up in cloth. It wasn’t alive; it had no spirit. It was fake. Fake doesn’t feed anything. Only spirit feeds spirit, your own and the universal spirit.”
It took me approximately one semester as a professor (one semester and a lifetime) to begin to detect something fishy in my approach to happiness. I had what I’d long wanted: a job as a professor of English at a school I admired. The process of attaining the job had been sufficiently torturous, requiring the usual giving over of my power: “Does this person/committee/institution approve of me? Am I adequately shaping myself into their desired candidate?” Perhaps it’s my Lutheran Midwestern upbringing, but somewhere along the line, I learned that all achievements were only truly earned if accompanied by enough pain. So, check.
I spent my first semester in a mild state of panic. While some refer to the first year of the job as the “honeymoon” stage, mine felt more like the week of sorority rush I attended in college. If you want to get “in,” you follow the rules. Drink your ice water with lemon and make polite small-talk. For God’s sake, don’t mention the three B’s: boys, booze and bars. The girls will take notes on your performance and make a decision by the end of the week. I couldn’t stand the idea that these girls, who trotted like trained ponies to the manicured lawn of their sorority house to chant, “We’re Alpha Phi (fee) not Alpha Phi (fy), ‘cause Alpha Phi says E, not I,” would decide my fate about anything. I dropped out of rush.
But I regarded tenured faculty members with much more respect than the sorority sisters. This was a house in which I wanted membership, my own office with a nameplate. My university offered its version of rush, in the form of 7 a.m. “new faculty breakfasts,” where we sat bleary-eyed and eager, nibbling starchy bagels and absorbing information about “faculty life,” including, of course, the process of and requirements for tenure. These gatherings, the administrators explained, were designed to promote community among new faculty, and to offer information that would at once decrease our anxiety and encourage us to begin working for tenure now. That message was reinforced by informal conversations with colleagues, who repeatedly shared the cautionary tale of the English professor who spent too much time on service and not enough on publishing. Everyone liked him, and he was an inspiring teacher, but he was denied tenure because he didn’t research and write enough. The moral of the story: you may have gotten the job, but you’re going to have to stay on your toes to keep it.
I soaked in these stories like an A-student sponge; by December of that year, I had insomnia, worrying about my student evaluations (and what they would mean for tenure), fretting about getting my book published (and what not doing so would mean for tenure), and desperately missing the feedback loop of being a student, where praise and approval were a regular part of my diet.
Those of us who have issued a restraining order on our anxiety are taught to manage it by asking, “If the worst-case scenario happened, would I survive?” Would I survive if I lost my job? I wasn’t so sure.
But if this anxiety that jarred me from sleep was destructive, it also had a more positive side: my unhappiness led to my hunger for, and thus my openness to, something else. The upside, I’ve found, to times of intense turmoil is that I become a seeker. In the words of Rabbi Abraham Heschel: “Rushing through the ecstasies of ambition, we only awake when plunged into dread or grief. In darkness, then, we grope for solace, for meaning, for prayer.” The groping is the gift of the shadow, if we welcome the darkness, if we trust that light can, that light will, emerge.
I spotted a glimmer on a crisp fall day, that same year, when my husband and I traveled to Des Moines for our goddaughter’s baptism. It marked the first time I’d been to church in years. While the theme of the sermon now escapes me, this moment remains vivid: the minister asked us to consider how much time, energy and commitment we dedicate to our jobs, to institutions, in this culture that cares so much about work. The answer: plenty.
“But the truth is,” he said, leaning into the pulpit, “institutions don’t love us back.” Institutions don’t love us back. When I would later learn that our university president froze our (meager) salaries due to budget constraints, I felt betrayed. Here I had given this institution not only most of my time, but the greater part of my psychic energy. I let it lure me away from a lazy Christmas day with my family, upstairs to my childhood room, where I feverishly typed my annual report, rewarding its merciless petitions for attention with my worries, enticed by its seductive need for me. If I didn’t answer its calls, catastrophe would ensue. It was the holder of my worth, the determiner of my merit.
Institutions don’t love us back.
A second glimmer. That December, I dragged myself to a gathering at the home of a new friend, Amy. I’m an introvert, and when socializing will require small talk with strangers, I have to fight the urge to recoil under a blanket. But I made myself go, and I enjoyed my time there. Just as I put on my coat to leave, Amy’s kids and their babysitter bounded through the door. It was a lovely reunion after, at most, a few hours of separation; Abby and Gabe lapped up their mother like thirsty puppies. She chuckled, delightfully taken aback by the power of her children’s physical force and their hunger for her. Gabe’s mommy need met, he rubbed his eye and nestled into Amy’s chest. I busied myself with my coat and gloves, embarrassed to find tears in my eyes.
Years later, I would hear from the spiritual director at my church, “When tears emerge, God is near. Let them come.”
In an email to Amy, thanking her for the invitation, I confessed my teary moment. “You’re ready,” she predicted. “It’s time.” Time, she meant, to think about my own motherhood, my own children. And indeed, in two months’ time, my daughter would find her way into my womb. She would teach me about the kind of love I witnessed in that moment.
Shari Stenberg lives in Nebraska with her husband and two daughters. She teaches writing at Creighton University, where she is Associate Professor of English and director of composition. Her essays have appeared in College English, Composition Studies, and Symploke, and her book, Professing and Pedagogy: Learning the Teaching of English was published by NCTE in 2005. Though she is now tenured, she still considers Wednesday night choir rehearsals her real job.
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