Why I'm Launching The Recovering Academic

And how you can participate

Photo by Alfons Morales on Unsplash

The end of 2021 marked the end of a career that began twenty-seven years earlier, when I discovered Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia and changed my major to English. I’ve been a lot of things other than a professor over the years: firefighter and wilderness ranger with the Forest Service, husband to my wife of nearly eleven years, father to three amazing kiddos, son, grandson, nephew, cousin, friend, neighbor, gardener, writer, runner, hot sauce fanatic, and campfire guitarist. Nearly all of those identities made me a better teacher. But none of them fit very well with how I defined myself as an academic. This series is an attempt to understand why.

Many of you could replace “academic” with your own career title. The Recovering Engineer, The Recovering Lawyer, The Recovering ____. I know I’m not alone in feeling that the demands of my work identity have pushed against the qualities that more fundamentally define who I really am or who I want to be. For me, that realization came after years of believing that I was following my calling, not just chasing a paycheck.

I’ll have more to say about how burnout culture contributes to work/identity confusion (this is a hot topic these days) and why it seems so difficult to give generously to both career and family life. But the real purpose of this series is to speak to broader questions that all of us wrestle with as we try to sort out our goals in a chaotic time. In that sense, even if my experience as an academic does not align perfectly with your own story about career and identity, I hope you’ll find that we are moving toward a common future. I’d like to learn from your journey, too.

If you like what you find here, please share it. I’ll post new content every Tuesday and would love to help support other blogs and newsletters once I get up and running. I look forward to what we will discover together.

Cheers,

Josh