Let’s try this again
It’s another fall season and yet again i’m sitting here wondering what to do with my life. There’s little as frustrating as not being able to decide (or is it just not knowing?) if you want to go one of several directions. I was so hell-bent on going the grad school route and teaching but then yet again the research scares the shit out of me. Is that something I really want to do? Law school almost made a strong case for a while and then it just sort of sputtered out because I got caught up in work. Then I thought, “hey, why not just get that domestic violence focused MPA in Colorado and work for a bunch of cool non-profits…you know, climb the ladder?” Then it became, well, if you’re not going to go for the full Ph.D then should I just go for the M.A.? But won’t I only be able to teach at “really, really small community colleges” as someone once told me? Will that leave me with enough room to go for the eventual Ph.D later on? What the hell do I want to know about public administration? I want to write and teach, not crunch numbers and work on policy and committees. Then, I realized that I basically want to do what Jackson Katz does for a living: talk to men and young men in particular about sexism, homophobia, racism, etc and be able to “coach boys into men” as the Family Violence Prevention Fund saying goes. I think he went Masters in Education and now he’s getting his Ph.D in something but obviously he had a pretty unique experience in the movement. I think I have an opportunity to do my own very, very small scale sort of “coaching” men against sexism at my workplace because I work closely with men who act as mentors for young men and boys but that’d mean i’d have to stick around for a bit which isn’t something I originally planned on doing because the pay isn’t so great. But maybe I should.
Renee said,
September 24, 2007 @ 8:02 pm
Try resigning yourself to the fact that you can never make a reliable living as an artist, and you’re damn lucky if you can make a living at it at all…
Truly, I think you’re uniquely placed to do just what you mentioned - reach out to boys and men about sexism, racism, homophobia - and that’s an incredibly worthwhile thing to do! Of course, I understand that you have to make a living too. And one thing that no one seems to much want to acknowledge is that one is in a much better position to be an activist if one is making a stable living. I’m not really going anywhere with this. Just try not to stress about it too much (I know, easier said than done), you’ve got lots of time to decide, and whatever you do will be certainly be worthwhile and rewarding in one way or another!
admin said,
September 24, 2007 @ 11:46 pm
Thanks for understanding. It’s been a weird mental juggling act trying to see how all these work/activism/experience, etc things will play out and I think I have to step back and remind myself to position things with my job (because as much crap as I talk I do like it) and let things settle before I go into full on panic mode.