Maintaining Momentum

This week has found me struggling to keep up the positive momentum I've felt since resigning from YSU.  No one thing is the center of blame, but I have known for the past few days that I've felt kinda crappy.  Among the top things I can blame:  today would have been payday.

It's not that I haven't had forward movement.  I have a second job interview tomorrow with Sur La Table in Pittsburgh.  It's retail, sure, but getting that job would accomplish the following:  1.)  It gets me to Pittsburgh; 2.)  It brings some income hopefully above and beyond what I'm getting at the cigar shop; 3.)  It allows me to show that I have no gap in my work history, even while not teaching.

I know I made the right decision to leave Youngstown State.  I had to open my email from there the other night to find a contact and found a few emails that needed reply.  Almost immediately, I felt the same anxiety, the tightening in my chest, the stress response that has so characterized my teaching experience in recent years.  No measly $400 paycheck for two weeks of work is worth that sort of harm to my body.

Yesterday, I had lunch with an old friend who I haven't seen in about three years.  We sat around for two and a half hours catching up.  During that time, she asked where I saw myself going outside of education.  Sadly, I couldn't even come up with a solid answer.

My life since the age of four has revolved around the classroom.  As undergrad, graduate student, and then professor, my existence has centered on semesters, spring breaks, and summers off since the end of the Clinton administration.  It's tough to shed so much of one's identity all at once and then immediately know what's supposed to come next.

I legitimately felt bad that I couldn't pinpoint a direction in my life.  While it's difficult to identify that off the top of my head, it's probably well worth it to figure out some things and chart how I get to them.

The simplest thing that I need to remember is my own worth.  I am worth more than Youngstown State University paid me.  I am worthy of job security, health benefits, and a sense of well-being in my career that I didn't get any of there.  While I might be a wee bit adrift at the moment, I think the biggest landmark I have to try and identify as a mooring point is that I deserve better than they were giving me.

I wish I could sit down with humanities undergraduates and tell them the truth.  Yes, you get to spend your time thinking pretty thoughts, analyzing pretty writing, juxtaposing pretty ideas with your own oddly-conceived notions.  But like the tens of thousands of high school football players who dream of someday playing in the NFL, there's a similar likelihood that you, my dear English major, will get that PhD that seems so meritorious and for the good of humankind and, even then, there's a smaller chance that you will get the tenure track job of your dreams at that ivy-clad Oxford Gothic designed university, the image of which floats through your head like so many sugarplums.

That, my friends, is winning the Super Bowl.  And you can ask a whole lot of NFL players how many ever made it to the big game, let alone winning it.

The best I have to offer today, I guess, is to let this cloud of negative energy and inertia pass and then, as I have so many times before, move on.