I am afraid of zombies. This is perhaps a strange thing to share publicly because I take pride in rejecting concspiracy theories and myths as truth. Zombies do not exist in the real world, full stop. There is no reason to be afraid of them… and yet I am. I am afraid of becoming a zombie because of a freak accident, I am afraid of my loved ones becoming zombies and being forced to confront the choice of killing them or letting them eat other people's brains. I am afraid of zombies.
The first time I felt this strange, foolish fear diminish was when my favorite podcast, Good Job Brain!, shared that one of the biggest problems with zombie movies is that scavenger birds would almost certainly eat all the zombies before the zombies could get to brains. I remember exactly where I was when I heard this tidbit; I was dogsitting for friends who lived in the suburbs and was driving from their house to a coffeeshop to get homework done. I breathed a sigh of relief. If zombies do come to be a reality, I told myself, vultures will save us. Some months ago, a friend explained that she was a catastrophizer. I immediately identified with this term. I assume my quick attention to worst case scenarios is connected to my fear of a zombie apocalypse. I now catastrophize thusly: if I do not land a faculty position in my field this cycle, and am not hired for a postdoc or an administrative job either, then I will move in with friends and/or family near my hometown and work as a barista. (Do you think Starbucks will recognize that summer I worked for them eleven years ago?) The faculty job market has been written about ad nauseam and for me to just type that it's exhausting and demoralizing is exhausting and demoralizing in itself. I am on the faculty job market now. I submitted my first batch of applications last month. When I told a friend that, for a variety of reasons I expected to hear nothing in response to those applications, she was aghast. How dare they? Why is this process this way? Her words helped me realize that, hey, this isn't okay, and it's okay to feel exhausted and demoralized. Nevertheless, I keep applying to faculty jobs. I get advice on Twitter, I write document after document (including cover letters, teaching statements, research statements, diversity statements, and even the occasional hybrid specialty statement requested by a search committee.) I would like to be an assistant professor, I would like to teach and research and have a little office where I talk to students about their big ideas. I even get excited about the mundane, like wearing a cute outfit to my first faculty meeting and printing something from the department printer. It's all silly, I know, but these are the things I think about as I write my cover letters and research statements and the like. In my moments of despair and frustration and confusion, I also read quit lit. Quit lit is the umbrella term for the many essays describing departures from academia. I sense that most of these are from undervalued fields such as those in the humanities that have disproportionate crises of precarity. However, I acknowledge that quit lit comes from all over – STEM, arts, and in my own field of education. I imagine quit lit does a lot of different things for a lot of different people. For the writer, it can be catharsis. It can also be a blog post to point friends and family to instead of explaining every time the "quitter" is asked why they stopped adjuncting or left grad school. More broadly, in the words of Douglas Dowland and Annemarie Pérez, quit lit requires a level of "vulnerability" that can be used "to expose an injustice, to reveal an insecurity, to show how a personal problem may also be a political one." Quit lit can thus be a call to action, a naming of harm that demands remediation. For me, catastrophizer that I am, quit lit is a relief. "What if," I ask, as I do about the preposterously unlikely case of zombie apocalypse. What if I am subjected to contingent position after contingent position, what if I am rejected from a hundred jobs and a hundred more? What if the day comes when I realize I will be, and decide to become, a "quitter," and write quit lit of my own? Quit lit answers those questions in a way that somehow comforts me; it responds simply, "you will be the author of a piece of quit lit." And, afterward, I will be one of many who the system failed – because that is how this works, it is not the failure of individals that leads to precarity and drop-out so much as it is the failure of an exploitative and harmful academy. And then, who knows? I can start by being a barista who lives in my brother's attic who cries sometimes and reads books and maybe writes. Or whatever else. Quit lit taught me that I can leave academia and… The rest is a mystery, but it's tangible for many. That tangibility means it can be tangible for me too, that I can have a life even if this faculty job search doesn't work out for me. Leaving academia is not death, and although it is a kind of end, it does not have to be my end. If worst comes to worst – whether it be the failure to find a job or the imminent threat of zombies – the vultures will save me.
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AuthorI am a higher education professional and sporadic blogger. I have opinions and tell puns. Archives
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