u/Oduind

I’ve made peace with the fact that those who are full-time professors got on a boat that’s now left the dock, but those who are my friends and colleagues just can’t accept my resignation. They go, “You just have to adjunct/work part time/volunteer (free labor!) until the right position opens up, that’s what I did!” They send me adjunct pool positions and per-hour tutoring jobs even after I make it clear that I’m only interested in full-time work and thus applying outside of academia.

They think I’m throwing my career away because for them they hustled a few years and then got the position they work now. So if I stop trying after a decade of stringing together contingent contract gigs, I’m giving up! How many doors do I have to put feet into before they believe me that the FT (let alone TT) roles are just not there??

It makes me think of survivorship bias - those bullet holes in returned planes actually showing what can be endured - but also whatever makes gamblers believe their success is inherent rather than pure luck. Like I’m letting down the team by not suffering through another year of insecurity.

After three annual job searches across two continents resulting in multiple “almost, but no” interviews and a VAP at a place that decided to eliminate my entire department… I’m done.

I cried a lot and then contacted my county labor office for advice. They’ve been awesome and pointed me to where to find entry-level state government listings. I know I’m lucky to live in a blue US state with a very well established civil service, even with its HCOL. But I cannot believe how much trainee positions intended for people with a Bachelors or just experience are going for.

I assume this is also going to be difficult to get my foot in the door. But just a cursory look at the listings reveal multiple entry-level clerk positions, basic administrative roles, and will-train desk jobs open to anyone with a Bachelors which pay around, or even more than, what I made at a private university with my mandatory doctorate. I know the reasons, but whyyyy??? Howwwww????

People ask what I’m going to do now and I say “go wherever is hiring”. I followed my dreams for two decades and got nowhere. Time to “fail” out of academia and actually make some money.

My partner and I picked this for our Friday movie night as it leaves Prime on June 1. It’s a tepid narrative with stilted acting, but the dark academia aesthetics are on point, somehow simultaneously 2022 and 1922. I mention it in case you’re craving some dark wood bookshelves and English country houses this weekend.

I am a forty year old parent of two and professor with a PhD and a book on shelves across the US. My partner and I are celebrating twenty years together this summer. But since I reduced contact over my adult life to full NC three years ago, my mother believes I am not a real adult/must be brainwashed.

I still have a weekly telephone chat with my aunt, my mom’s sister, where we catch up on what we’ve been up to and that’s about it. She lives far away. My mother haaaates that I still have a relationship with her sister, but she treats me like an adult and listens to what I have to say, sorry??

Turns out my mother is convinced that my aunt being in regular contact with me is why I haven’t tried to make things up with her.

Ready for the ‘logic’? Because I have my aunt, I don’t have to talk to my mother. If I didn’t have my aunt, I would have no choice but to talk to my mother.

As if there are precisely two older women in the entire world and conversations with them are mutually exclusive…

Besides, my aunt is a voice on the phone. If I need maternal vibes, my partner’s mom is a nearby regular in our lives. 🤷🏻

But isn’t it funny how the logic is never ‘my child has independently decided not to talk to me’, rather, it must be someone else pulling the ropes…