Letter Thirty-Eight: Dear Academics in Suspended Adolescence

The life of an academic, whether you are in a liberal arts subject, medicine, or beyond, is rife with rejections, being underpaid, cruel comments disguised as feedback, a manufactured sense of urgency, and an instability for funding, for courses, for tenure, for location.

I can’t say those conditions bring out the best in anyone.

In fact, one could say, those are conditions that activate people’s fight/flight/freeze systems and color the world as less safe and the people around them as more dangerous. And what happens when people don’t feel safe and the world feels dangerous? The answer is certainly not know how to navigate relationships, power, and repair with a sense of maturity, kindness, and accountabilit

Letter Thirty-Six: Dear What if My Mental Illness is What Makes Me a Great Academic?

I think both you and these artists were resourceful and creative, finding ways to get connection and encouragement from the world around you through your external accomplishments. You through a publication record and them through the showing or purchasing of their art.

Letter Thirty-Four: Dear Does Everyone Hate Their Work By the End

I do believe everyone goes through a stage - or many stages - of feeling disenchanted, confused, disappointed, and disliking of the thousands of words they have to output for a dissertation.

Hatred could be and definitely has been a part of it for people (it’s such a recognizable experience that there’s a meme I’ve seen on academic accounts that reads something like “I know a paper is ready to submit once I hate it”).

As could feeling disconnected or apathetic. So I don’t want to say that all the emotional experiences of this stage look and feel the same to people, but it appears as though it is a part of everyone’s journey.

Letter Thirty-One: Dear Please Help with Embarrassment

Embarrassment is considered a complex emotion, meaning its root emotion is one of the major five: happy, sad, anger, disgust, and fear (otherwise known as the characters from the first Inside Out).

Which I think allows us to consider something important here: what feelings were also present while you practiced your symposium work.

Letter Twenty: Dear Rejected

Academia can, frequently, be a place that people try to characterize as objective and emotionless. I have always been confused how people can celebrate the science of emotions or the science of human behavior, while at the same time trying to frame research & science & academia as a place devoid of emotions or humanity.

It is normal and okay and important that the experience of academic publishing has an emotional impact on you, because you’re a human. A process for navigating this system is something to be developed; be gentle with yourself as you figure it out.

Letter Sixteen: Dear Dissatisfied and Tired

Particularly in the space of academia where there’s always another degree or position or grant or one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to share your work to strive towards, I think celebrating is one of the most crucial things to do. It forces you to stop and take a clearer look at all the work that you have done and recognize it as worth honoring. To acknowledge all the energy and effort that brought you to completing a masters.

Which brings me to, of course you’re tired! How very human of you to be exhausted at the end of years of learning, researching, and writing a comprehensive piece of original work!!! (Emphasis for normalizing, not for yelling or judgement). It makes all the sense in the world to me.

Letter Fourteen: Dear Emotionally Overwhelmed

Here’s something I know to be true, shame thrives in silence. The quieter we are, the more hidden our feelings become, the more isolated we make ourselves, the worse off we are. I am here naming shame for you, as I recognize that you didn’t use that word yourself. Because what I hear in the fear of being a ‘waste of time, money, and energy’ is not being enough, not having a sense of worthiness to be there if you aren’t showing up emotionally in certain ways, of you not being ‘good’ if you aren’t productive and producing.