freedom

Hello and welcome to the rest of my life. August was the final month of my cursed three-year term as Director of my program. It's been a very bad three years for the post-secondary sector in general, largely due to new restrictions on international students and stagnating provincial funding for our so-called public institutions. This crisis has manifested in different ways at different institutions, but in general it looks like mass staff lay-offs, reduction in TA and contract instructional support, larger class sizes, and increased workloads for everyone lucky enough to hold onto their jobs. For me, it's been akin to trying to stop up holes in a sinking ship while my own institution keeps lobbing canon balls my way while shouting "PIVOT! INNOVATE! DO MORE WITH LESS!"

So, you know, bad. Harrowing. But as of September 1, I am on eight months of administrative leave, during which the largest task I have set myself is right-sizing my relationship to work through hobbies, community, and rest.

You know what I actually never want to rest from though? Making frickin' podcasts. I love these things! Here's what we made this month.

I had a particularly good time researching our episode on The Oydssey and revisiting the sprinkling of classics education I got in my undergrad. Unfortunately the Nolan adaptation profoundly did not do it for me. I can only conclude that I dislike Nolan's work so much that it can ruin even one of my favourite stories, and commit to avoiding his movies going forward! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What I didn't hate and in fact loved very much is Jane Schoenbrun's new movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. If you want to know why, you'll just have to wait a couple of weeks for the Material Girls episode we're about to record!

Yesterday, whilst frolicking in fields of dahlias and sunflowers, my dear friend Lu and I had a long conversation about ambition. Lu and I met when we were both early-career Canadian literature scholars, and we both moved through the process of becoming disillusioned with CanLit and pivoting our careers in unexpected ways. While our careers have ended up taking very different directions – Lu has become a health researcher and is in the process of finishing up their Masters of Public Health – we still love to write and create and think together. And yesterday, we were thinking about the idea of making a mark.

I've worked on my relationship to work a lot in therapy, and while it is a work-in-progress (wow I've said work a lot in this sentence, huh?), I've certainly come to understand it better. For me, work equates to safety, both financial and emotional. The financial part is pretty self-evidence (you need money to live), but the emotional part is trickier, as emotions so often are. My drive to productivity is entangled with internalized fatphobia, the pursuit of external validation, and the desire to turn my life into a series of projects that can in turn become a series of to-do lists. But I also keep myself busy with work as an antidote to the possibility of rejection. If I'm always working then I don't have time to worry that all my friends are hanging out without me. I couldn't have made it anyway. I was busy.

The deliberate decision to render myself less busy, to become more available to my community, comes with a new kind of vulnerability: if I'm legitimately free, the FOMO hits a lot harder. I often joke that I'm happier at an event when I have a job; it takes the uncertainty out of socializing by giving me clear parameters for what I'm supposed to be doing. I've only recently realized that I've basically organized my whole life that way. That means that, if I want to stop working all the time, I need to get more comfortable with not only the vast uncertainties of being a person in the world, but the smaller day-to-day uncertainties of emotional intimacy.

That's where Lu and I arrived: that so much of ambition is actually fear. Fear of being left out, fear of being forgotten, fear of dying without leaving anything behind. And it would be nice to live a life that is driven less by fear and more by joy.

I'm working on it.