As I’ve said to many in these past few weeks as the year was wrapping up: this year felt both so very long, and so very short at the same time. Is that possible?
Ya girl has had a very eventful year that I’ll recap here:
January: Consisted of going back to work after maternity leave, choosing to teach half online, half in person. I learned that renewal of my contract was not guaranteed for the following year. I sent my baby to his first daycare, only to have it close within two weeks because of a COVID case. I learned how to have back-up plans.
February: I turned one year older, and decided to leave the uncertainty of my job for a different uncertainty, and started reaching out to friends and networks outside of academia, learning how to pitch my experience as skills. I was very uncomfortable.
March: The anti-Asian assaults culminating in the events in Georgia were especially taxing for me. I surprised myself by reaching out to friends and family, asking if they needed support, when really it was me who yearned for comfort and connection. My partner & I bought a home in a city that we wanted to live in (regardless of what the job market would bring), sight unseen and without a realtor. My family thought we were crazy.
April & May: Wrapped up teaching at my first job out of the PhD, which I loved but also needed room for more growth. I decided to take a postdoc in New York in an entirely different department. We moved into our new home in a new city, and I vowed I would never move again (this is of course not indicative of reality).
Summer: No travel abroad, unfortunately. Spent the most amazing time in New England while I channelled all of my creative energy into interior design and writing a short story. This told me that doing creative work is what brings me most joy. I ended the summer with an academic retreat in Seattle for new scholars of Vietnamese studies, which was restorative and wholesome, why isn’t this kind of support and collegiality more common?
September: We moved again, though this time not our entire apartment, just a few suitcases to the tristate area so I could commute to the city. I met people from all walks of life at the new institution and felt a renewal of energy toward academia and going on the job market again. New York gave me life. It was boisterous, enabling.
October: (Selective) job applications. This month was also an important one for figuring out what I needed in my personal life, which rules I wanted to abide by, and which rules I wanted to break. It led to hard, deep, but transparent conversations about what good relationships consist of. These conversations made me realize how porous the boundaries are between past and present, career and personal life. The things I wanted in my career were inextricable from how I was raised as a child of immigrants, the things I wanted in my personal life were not separate from the rules I had to be follow at school.
November: A blip that I do not remember.
December: A hard month. I received a large batch of rejections – from presses, applications, grants – and felt a deep sense of dread for the year’s end, simply because I wasn’t ready for what is to come. But will we ever? Yet each time I felt dejected, the universe seemed to offer me a bone. I guess it’s not over yet, but as I learned this year, I’m having back-up plans, and I’m wary of precedents.
Signing out, and into 2022. Here's to another one!
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