So, uh, Now What?

On where my writing might go from here after I achieved a lot of my goals

I graduated with my EdD last month, though it seems like a lot longer ago than that. Dotted my Ts, crossed my Is, handled all the silly paperwork stuff they don’t really tell you about, and walked across that stage, pumping my fist at the camera my family was watching.

I’m also about to release a whole, self-created book. A book that is rather uncompromising in its vision and scope yet nonetheless accessible. Who knows how many will sell or if I’ll make any money off of it, but it’s clearly the type of book that will have a small number of passionate fans, which is basically what my podcast is, and the niche-popular space I tend to sit in.

With my new job, they have sent me on a few business trips, most recently this past week to San Diego, and though the actual experience of crossing the country and coming back was exhausting to the point that I’m still pretty tired, I met a lot of folks I’d only seen in zoom screens, and unlike my last job, I really enjoyed almost everyone I met. I didn’t feel the need to mask myself (socially, that is), and there was a clear honesty that I haven’t felt before in my professional life.

My son has both of his covid shots and I took him to his first Yankee game today, something I’d been looking forward to ever since I knew I was having a child (of any gender).

Articles and chapters I wrote ages ago are still being released, and I’m occasionally editing a few pieces I agreed to write while I was still a student. Frankly I keep track of the ones that are publicly available but not really the ones that are inside of expensive edited volumes, so my CV will be outdated soon enough, but let me tell you, I truly don’t care?

Fact is, all the articles aren’t much when people can just read the book, so at this point I’m just waiting impatiently for that to be released. Nothing else I think about writing feels compelling, and I’m slightly worried that I was only able to be so furiously productive because I was so frustrated and stressed.

A few months ago, when I got this higher-paying job, I decided I was tired of shaving my own head as I had been since the pandemic started, so I booked a haircut. In order for that to be worthwhile I had to let my hair grow out a bit, and I noticed that my entire chin was gray.

It would be simple enough to assume it was raising a child that had turned my chin hair gray, but I actually bought headshots a year ago, and it’s really not gray there. No, the pressure of writing a book, and a dissertation, and working a job that really upset me, was what was having an effect on my appearance. It even affected my weight, slightly. And to be clear, with few expections, I enjoyed writing most of my articles and essays, but the job and the graduation timeline were a lot to handle all at once. People who aren’t working full time run into obstacles trying to finish, so it wouldn’t have been shameful if I needed to breathe. I decided to hold my breath until I was done, and then… I made it.

So now, without what feels like a lion chasing me, I’m not sure what I’ll write about. I have a few directions I could go. If the book, which you can buy here, sells extremely well, the language folks will want me to keep that work up, and I know a lot of people in that arena so there’s always an audience, but frankly what more can I say? The book and the related articles are all of a piece, and the central message is, “I am providing you with a roadmap to build brand new institutions, because what we have doesn’t work.” There’s nothing left to tear down (rhetorically). And I’m simply not a language teacher these days, so my frame of reference will grow less and less relevant, in my view.

The other possibilities are more intriguing to me. I do want to write about parenting and neurodivergence from a Black perspective, but I am by no means an expert on this, just someone experiencing it, so I would rather wait until Ezel is older to have more to say. That’s a really compelling angle to take but not just yet.

I could also stay connected to the Disability Justice work that is threaded throughout my book. Of all my avenues, I think my pet theory that neurodivergence can be a powerful weapon against whiteness and other hierarchies is something worth exploring.

Perhaps most lucratively, though, I could probably get a publisher interested in a book on organizations failing to practice “DEI” effectively. I can be funny, acerbic, insightful on this, and unlike language, I could contrast it to my actual work which does a much better job for reasons that are immediately clear to me.

The point is, though, that I can choose, and, once my book actually comes out and the dust settles, I hope that by early 2023 I’ll know my next big writing project, and that I’ll find a way to push myself again.

The en-

Yo, fuck that. Let me tell you all the truth. I’m kind of sad and angry. Not about The State of the World — I mean, sure, but that’s not my point — but because of what I ultimately learned from all that work I did.

These legacy institutions are not built in a way that allows them to truly pursue justice. I suppose I knew that, but to feel it deep in my bones is a new, heavier feeling. It does not, to be clear, mean I am without hope, because I really do feel, oddly enough, that writing, speaking, podcasting etc can reach people in ways that organizations never really can. My dissertation interviews made clear to me that even if populated by committed individuals, it’s nearly impossible for institutions not to perpetuate harm, and so the best they can do is be honest about their destruction and minimize it without pretending they are beacons of perfection.

I basically won, right? I took a massive gamble on my stamina while dealing with a job that was tangibly bad for my health, and I succeeded. I finished all my projects and got a job I enjoy and that I mostly feel like I’m good at, though the learning curve is steep. It just feels like a pyrrhic victory because, ignoring my old job, I really was — and am — trying to get things a little closer to justice. Yet ultimately, without resources, what justice is possible? So I got a job that’s more about providing people with resources to shift power to racialized communities, and somehow they’re delivering more actual changes than all the academics arguing in journals will. I said that in our staff retreat this week, about academics wasting time, and everyone laughed, but I wasn’t really joking.

I feel like my victory was a little ironic, because I started with a cynical idea to improve attendance and moved into what really was an attempt to teach people about whiteness and how it impacts so many different facets of life. In doing this work, more people wanted to hear from me, and so, in trying to do something for others, or really for my son, it might end up being the case that I just ended up improving my own station because people enjoy my writing and speaking. It would be easy to just coast on that and pat myself on the back, but I am not fucking satisfied. I’m not.

One good thing about my current job is a lot of my colleagues have side hustles that they talk about openly, so my spending my time just writing and thinking isn’t frowned upon, unlike my last job where almost none of them knew I was even graduating until I left. It’s… strange to be at a place where we’re encouraged to grow. What we do is well-funded and I’m leading projects with large price tags after being mired in petty office politics for years.

My experience in academia mostly made me rather disgusted with the overarching system and its persistent belief in its own inherent goodness. There are thousands of wonderful people in the industry, and the act of teaching should never been dismissed as lacking value, but god, if I had the money, I’d find a way to hire all the wonderful but struggling scholars I know into work that will allow them to live less stressful lives, where they’ll only be wondering what to write next instead of how much they’re being forced to write all at once.

I dunno, man. I’m not worried about my writing. Even if I only write the one book, it’ll stand tall enough for what it is. I just want the people I know to be treated better than they are, and I don’t think they really will be with the way it’s all set up. And the very small part of me that’s sad he wasn’t interviewed for professor jobs is only operating on wounded pride, because every single thing about that career choice would have been worse than where I am now.

Mostly though, I’m just going to try and stay relevant until the next project presents itself, and I know I’m in a good position, and that many people aren’t through no fault of their own, and that these institutions prefer it that way.