dreams

I was recently driving around the UC Santa Cruz campus. It's a really striking campus, sitting high above the city/ocean/monterey bay, there's an expansive field with great views and then you enter a thick forest and the school is in little clusters of buildings connected by roads and trails. It is just powerfully peaceful and beautiful and I've never been on an campus that remotely resembles it.

Not only that, they have what I consider one of the best linguistics programs in the world (imo probably something like: ucsc, umd, mit, umass). this is largely the result of the efforts of sandy chung, jim mccloskey, jorge hankamer, etc. who developed a beautiful socratic style of teaching linguistics, syntax in particular. 

coming up in grad school, you internalize the idea that you don't get to choose where to live and that it's a roll of the dice to end up somewhere nice (or at least I internalized that). I never dreamed of ending up at a place like santa cruz, but then in 2016 I was a new trans woman living in iowa and was invited out there for a job talk after an interview at the lsa in DC. 

academic onsite interviews are pretty hellish, two days of nonstop talks, teaching, interviews, socializing. This was made extra hard cuz I had never done this before and I was new to presenting as a woman. I remember still feeling awkward and scared in the womens bathroom, a place that could have been a place of respite/sanctuary/refuge during something like this. The put me up in this dream hotel on the coast and I listened to the decemberists Oceanside on repeat, but was otherwise super stressed. I'd wake up at 2am due to jetlag and nerves.

I tried my best, but didn't get the job. who knows exactly why. But upon hearing the news back in iowa when sandy chung called me, I failed at concealing the fact that I was crying by the time we ended the call. My undreamt of dream life wasn't going to be. And soon enough my dream of even staying in linguistics was dead and I was back in my childhood home, unemployed and pretty much adrift.

***

I think this was a beautiful thing to have happen to me and I feel really lucky now that I didn't get that job.

I often think about what makes something brittle. sometimes it's a linguistic theory that is very brittle:  would be really easy to show that it doesn't work, and this is normally taken to be a good thing because at the end of the day we don't care if a theory works, theories are just disposable tools to aid in understanding. In organizing, we don't want things to be brittle, because organizations are hard to build and, for example, if your organization is totally dependent on one or a few people, it is really easy destroyed if those people move on for whatever reason.

Having your hopes and dreams crushed, at least in my experience with this case, makes the 'you' that persists through it very much not brittle. I know that I can survive and be happy even when my most cherished desires are made impossible. I think this is a really powerful and good thing. It frees me from the fear that I might be ruined, at least in terms of what I'm doing with my time all day, my life (this is capitalism, so it's work). It doesn't matter if I'm a linguist, or a barista, or unemployed. That's not where 'I' resides.

It makes me also think about people who have not gone through this sort of experience. Living in fear that one false step might destroy their conception of themselves or the perception of them in the eyes of others. Who knows, maybe that explains why careerists are so fucking dull and highstrung