New Year, Who This?
on writing, leaving education, and striking out on my own: 2022 was a year that happened, but didn't make much sense.
Oh hey folks,
I hope you all survived the holidaze, and a year that felt like a re-traumatizing version of 2020. The latter part of 2022 felt like slowly slouching towards Bethlehem, to borrow a phrase from Joan Didion.
Sometimes writing feels like walking into a room and forgetting why you're there. I've found myself bouncing between two completely different forms of writing as NSFS continues evolving; one sardonic and revealing of the colloquialisms of contemporary culture and the other rooted in my Post-PhD style of activism in education. Leaning into humor is thrilling, but the subject matter and rant-oriented range feel unproductive. I've also been contemplating the discourse I'm creating, the conversations I'm having, and what it all means.
The dysfunction of digital media forever interrupts and demands our attention. To quote Paul Simon, "it's a wonder any of us can breathe at all." This is especially relevant as Twitter continues to devolve into a flesh-eating tapeworm eating its tail we all thought it would. This may mean a comeback for newsletters and blogs to supplement the loss of validity in social media content. With this being said, your readership has pushed my writing ability and allowed me to experiment. I am beyond excited to see what direction my writing goes and grateful to have you along for the ride!
Throughout 2022, I've become more comfortable with identifying as a "former" teacher despite the pain and bitterness of my decision to leave. I've also faced my crippling anxiety-self-esteem-classic-writer’s-life by leaning into my organizational drive and embracing project management. I began by building a complete archival of my content, then moved on to doing the same for others. Since then, I've made my freelance client business with fantastic clients, diversified my income, and performed several services rooted in my writing and Ph.D. education.
Yet, like all anxious over-achievers, I still have my feeling of failure over the past year. After spending nearly as much time and effort on my queries for my non-fiction book proposal as I did on my dissertation, I ran out of steam. When my first round of querying about twenty agencies fell flat, I realized I didn’t have the insight and editorial direction to know how to improve my proposal and manuscript to re-query. But my writer’s block went a bit deeper than that: after five weird-ass and relatively traumatic years spent writing and building up a freelance hustle from scratch, I felt completely at a loss as to what I was doing (as a writer). 2022 was a year of forced reflection, where I did more observing and healing than I did writing (which I now see as a good thing).
My de-transition from academic to teacher to normal human has actually felt more like a five year-long break up process with a toxic partner, where I keep coming back, thinking I can change them (waaaamp, waaaamp). After leaving academia in 2018, I jumped from the pan into the open flames of education, and became a public high school teacher. And then, following the pandemic, I made the decision to leave teaching--and education-- for good. The reasons were good enough, and wide-spread enough, to warrant a natural shift in my public writing. I left behind Post-PhD, the blogging format (RIP), and a broader discourse about higher education, reform, and academia despite feeling like I was turning my back on my original audience. Still, my pandemic baby of a newsletter NSFS is more of a natural reflection of my updated life and interests. And now that it’s two years old, it feels time to reinvent and reinvigorate.
It's liberating to build a new life from the rubble of my first career, and I am currently living my best post-PhD life. Entering the New Year, my dream/ obsessive goal of being a book author is further off, but I'm at peace with it (at least trying to be). Instead, I want to have more fun with writing. And that might very well mean leaving the topic of education, because it’s pretty bleak and I don’t think y’all need me to tell you that.
Nietzsche wrote about the one "uber menschen," or the "over man" willing to re-live his life exactly how it happened without change. I've thought about this a lot during my transition from teaching in the classroom to teach through my writing. The irony that my most traumatic life events have all been education-related and that is what I write about means that I’ve had to prioritize my mental-health (and healing) above everything else-- including (for the first time in my life, my writing and my career).
This year, perhaps we can think about leaving behind the things and topics that aren’t enriching us, but to do that, taking some time for self-reflection (and self-awareness) is key.
With NSFS, I've focused on the intersection between academics and secondary education teachers; and the thing that I keep coming up against is their (mutual) disinterest in knowing that the same issues arise on both sides. If you haven’t made less than 24k a year while pursuing your PhD while teaching a heavy course load for more than two years of your life, it’s hard to imagine the cognitive strain of endless work loads, exponential pressure to be excellent, and low wages can do to someone. Suppose you haven't taught in an urban, public, or charter school. In that case, it is near impossible to understand just how dumb and mean far too many of its teachers are, and how utterly unprepared (and racist) teacher’s training programs leave you. Unless you’ve been in the trenches, using faculty bathrooms with locked toilet paper holders and no soap, it’s hard to understand the financial deficits faced by public schools, which are also segregated even more than they were under Regan. This to me is a glaring, screaming indictment about how little progress we've made towards equity, and just how far public education has fallen (thanks to deregulation and every greedy idiot who still thinks Neoliberalism is a good idea). The worst part- it's all bound up in white supremacy and we’re all too busy fighting over whether drag queens can read books to kids and how Kanye West is anti-semitic (do not get me started on how he got to say all that racist trash about Black people, but people didn’t get ruulll upset until he came for the Jews).
Discourses about whiteness are our way of seeing through the breakdown of education (et al, really) reflected in media headlines. Finding my place as a writer has me facing the evils spawned by social media; I can’t handle Twitter anymore even though I know that I should because #writing. It's hard not to feel like I'm screaming into a void during an all-time low in public discourse.
As a result, I've steered away from education and began talking about current events, pop culture, and generic white people. I've been told this alienates my newsletter and feeds into disdain, so I am faced with deciding whether or not I should care about this. I've considered its impact on the quality of my prose and if it is an overall selfish writing objective. I am finding a way to recalibrate my writing approach and refine my old posts to match my new purpose.
I want to focus on evaluating existing power structures still based on white supremacy and its impact on everyone within it despite demographic. Stick around for some self-deprecating callouts and discourse on the manifestation of white supremacy in social structures.
So, thank you all for still reading & happy New Year’s to all,
Allison