Hello everyone!
So, first I need to apologise for my sudden disappearance from LitNet. I hope nobody was worried. It was never my intention to stop coming to LitNet. It was just that, one day, when I was (as usual) crazily busy, I thought to myself ‘I won’t check LitNet today, I’ve just don’t have enough time’. I didn’t check-in the following day either. Or the one after that. And so on. It’s been months and months since I last logged on, and I regret that.
But the truth is, I’ve been absent from LitNet in a meaningful sense for a couple of years now. For those years, my workload kept escalating more and more. It became a daily ritual for me that I would log on to LitNet, see plenty of interesting threads, and then realise that I didn’t have time to contribute to them in the way I wanted. Heck, most of the time I didn’t even have time to properly read most threads. When I first joined LitNet, it was such a warm, welcoming and vibrant community – I wanted to be part of it, and to contribute wholly in turn. I regret that, for years now, I’ve not been able to. Sometimes I’d force myself to respond fully to a particular thread, but I’d usually pay a price for doing so (like losing the 15 minutes of the day I would try to reserve for reading for pleasure).
So where is this heading? Well, there have been some major changes in my life. As many of you know, I’ve been working at a university while completing my PhD. While I have, on occasion, made known my personal reservations about the stresses and difficulties of academic life, I was nevertheless aiming in the direction of professional academia. As the PhD went on, however, I began to realise that these reservations were well founded and began to think seriously about life post-PhD. Due to some of the eccentricities of my situation, I was in fact pretty much acting as a full academic over the course of the last two years – I had a teaching burden well in excess of any other person in my Department, and a considerable administrative burden alongside that as well. All this on top of trying to produce the untenable volume of research that is nowadays demanded. For the last two academic years, I have had a 70-80 hour working week. I’ve been used to sitting down at my computer at 8:00am and, barring 30 minutes for lunch and an hour for dinner, not finishing work until gone midnight, or even later. I’ve been used to being given enormous tasks, totalling dozens of hours of work, and only a couple of days in which to get them done. In the academic year 2013-14, I had four days off in the entire year. This last year was worse. I realised how sick I was of it all when I found myself feeling guilty for taking Christmas Day off.
This, furthermore, was combined with an annual wage that was laughable. It didn’t even come close to paying the rent on my tiny two-bedroom semi (in one of the cheapest property areas in the country), never mind paying for gas, electricity and food. A friend of mine, who is a pilot, worked out that under certain circumstances he could be paid more for one day’s work than I got for a year of hard graft. I was living on what little remained of my savings and my scholarship. I tried to do some part-time private tutoring, but had to give it up because I couldn’t handle the extra workload on top of everything else.
There were some other issues as well, of a personal nature – I won’t get bogged down in those here. I came to the conclusion that academia and the academic life were not for me, and so I have left it behind. It was a hard, stressful slog, with minimal rewards (financial or otherwise) and minimal appreciation. Once my PhD was in the bag, and I’d finished my commitments for the last academic year, I left – much to the horror and surprise of some of my friends in the ivory tower.
I’m much happier for it. For the first time in years, I no longer feel like a prisoner in my own head. Since leaving, I’ve taken a bit of a break and been leading something of a nomadic existence – travelling around, catching up with friends and family who have barely seen me for years, and helping some of them with their various trials and tribulations. I’m still academic in the ways I want to be – I’ve just had an article published in a major journal – but from now on, it’s a part of my life that I dictate on my own terms. Next month I move back to England on a more permanent basis, and look forward to starting a new life, with new challenges.
Part of catching up also involves renewing my acquaintance with LitNet. I want to get back into being part of this community. All I ever wanted was to talk about literary things, read the creative work of others, and occasionally have my own work read in turn. So, that’s what I’m going to do.
Once again, hello LitNet! Pleased to meet you!
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Originally Posted by Scheherazade
