thank god for the decomposers

I took two days off from writing. Working on shame has made writing hard. I am naming many, many things that I hold and hide from the world. Things about my body yes, but also about my career, what I eat, what I desire. The closer I look the more that I find.

I invested many years of my life in a career. I took on the belief that my career was a manifestation of my self worth, that my self importance was directly related to my job importance. I always took the most challenging, the most esteemed job that I was offered. I never quite believed that I belonged in those jobs. The silent, hidden self never believed that I deserved those jobs. Academia is well suited to high achievers and praise addicts. Praise addicts are people who get their self worth from the praise of others rather than from within themselves. The long intense tenure review process is a grand exercise in self-indulgence, self-doubt, and self punishment that feeds the praise addict. It feels like a food binge: short periods of intense gratification followed by remorse and self loathing. What fun!

It has taken 5 years of deprogramming to get my mind out of measuring success from the academic viewpoint, to get over needing to be important. And even with those 5 years of time I still find it difficult to say “I failed. They fired me. I was denied tenure by those bastards at Vanderbilt.” I don’t often use that profanity as I don’t want to blame anyone one besides myself. I’d rather internalize the shame and justify. But the truth is: they were nasty and ugly, the Department Chair was incompetent, there were one (or more) faculty members who didn’t want me around, and the Dean had an agenda to cut faculty. The truth is: I didn’t play by the rules, my publication record was less than stellar, I always held part of me back from the job, I nursed my son in faculty meetings, I did research that did not fit into a clear box and so was easily discounted. The turn is: The Dean had waited until the very last possible minute to give me the news even though he had made up his mind months before, the Dean acted was unnecessarily cruel in the way he went about the process, the Dean has since admitted he acted incompetently during that year. The truth is: I was speechless, deflated, stunned. I wept. Anger didn’t come until much later and even then in insufficiently; the process just confirmed my self doubt.

When I talk about my academic career I still have mixed feelings. I know that I did some really good work and that I worked really hard. I know that I never quite fit it and I didn’t want to play by their rules. I didn’t sacrifice my self to the job. I know that I am very smart but that I am not brilliant. I know that I always struggled to write and that by the end of things the field I was a specialist in was so narrow that I was bored with it. I know that I cannot physically do that career any more; I can’t sit in a chair for more than a couple hours a day. For all these things I feel relief that I was fired and forced out because I can’t imagine I would have ever left on my own. On the other hand, it is still excruciatingly hard to say “I failed.” It is still hard to claim my failure and not fall into shame.

These days instead of leaving my shame in puddle on the ground for you to step in, I am feeding it to the decomposers of the soil. I take long walks in the woods and I imagine my shame slipping into the depths of the earth and I let the worms and fungi have their way with it. It is their job to decompose that which needs to be removed from the earth to release healthy components back into the world. Thank God for decomposers.