At An Impasse

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Given the machinations of social media, the ways many of us attribute value have become contingent on how many likes, shares, comments and plays a piece of content gets. My outputs attract relatively few of these. While I appreciate those few engagements immensely and am humbled that anyone is watching/reading/listening at all, I often have to catch myself on when I get annoyed that my hard work isn't reaching more. That's when I have to question my motivations for making work and putting it out there at all. What it ultimately comes down to is a feeling that my chance to deliver top-class arts & humanities education and research was taken away from me, and - realistically - I was in a toxic profession (academia) that is unrecognizable from external perceptions of it anyway. The ideal so many of us had going in and were rarely, if ever, corrected about, simply doesn't exist. And I didn't want all those years of graft, training and knowledge to go to waste. I was just getting started when it all went wrong, just getting really good, when I broke. I have folders, digital and physical, and a mind full of unfinished business. While I'm in a privileged enough position to be able to, it's better to get it out there in some fashion than it languish in faulty brains, dusty shelves and portable hard drives where it's no good to anyone. It is that sharing of ideas and knowledge that ought to be the primary motivator. The rest may or may not come, and either way, that's fine.

A deceptive image: these poor nestlings didn't last the day.

I received a suggestion recently about making a podcast about abusive and toxic cultures in academia. While looking into this, I came across a few podcasts and websites with relevant concerns, with none so far focusing specifically on that theme. I cannot vouch for these, but what I found was:

  • End Workplace Abuse who are working towards introducing the Dignity At Work Act in the USA.
  • #AbuseTalk, a UK-based podcast about all kinds of abuse discussed from a range of experiences and perspectives.
  • A few on academic survival that seem more to do with getting through postgraduate studies and embarking on an academic career.
  • And Recovering Academic, among others, about post-ac careers.
  • Workplace Bullying is very new and is probably the most appropriate example I've come across, although covering a broad scope.

Whether or not I would want to risk re-triggering the trauma I went through a tough course of therapy to get control over, I cannot say. It could also be a good topic for a limited series rather than something ongoing. I am at least open to conversations. I don't think I can or should do this on my own, and I never intended Audiovisual Cultures to be the one-woman show it has turned out to be thus far. I also worry that I am entertaining this at all as a means of procrastinating. I am very scared of the publishing world lately. I have more ideas for book topics than I can keep up with, but I've had so little joy with publishing, and waves of rejection in general, that I feel great trepidation at trying at all any more. This ties with my initial point, too. Before the pandemic stopped me in my tracks, I was using this blog as draft space for a book I was planning on Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. I had hoped that the blog analytics could demonstrate an in-built audience, but I'm not sure any publisher, academic or otherwise, would be convinced by my current view counts on those 24 posts. I haven't found my way back to it, anyhow. Other things keep rearing up. 

I do wonder in earnest if I have ADD (apart from hyper-focus, I'm much too sedentary for the hyperactivity part). But I've also been living with precariousness for 9 years. Not since my PhD when I had funding and treated it like a 36-month contract have I felt in any way settled or secure in what I was doing. Even now, I live in a good home and have a degree of freedom, but these are only afforded by and contingent upon the homeowner. My early life was so punctuated by the deaths of loved ones that I have never felt a sense of permanence - it can all be ripped away so suddenly, or life will change dramatically for a temporary but indeterminable amount of time. So perhaps it is not a condition that is within me, but the effects caused by the things that have happened around me that are at the root of my lack of focus and risk-aversion.

So, what to do about it? There is only so much comfort I can draw from Samuel Beckett's words: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' There is only so much faith I can have in my generous partner's assurances when I have experienced the worst-case scenario more than once before and I continue to feel like a freeloading down-and-out not for want of trying. I don't really know what else to try, but I keep trying stuff because I don't know what else to be at.

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