One podcast I used to listen to religiously, when I listened to podcasts regularly, is Waking from the American Dream. It is Kelly Carlin’s podcast. She has amazing guests on that end up having these amazingly deep conversations. My favorite episodes are the “Octagon Table”s, where she has a bunch of friends (many of whom are comedians) and they sit around a poker table and talk about a topic.
Anyway, there’s one episode where she reads a piece she wrote called “Finding Voice.” I wish I could remember which episode. But it’s about the number of things you can do to find your voice. In the end, she repeats the phrase “To find your voice, you have to use your voice.”
Being in graduate school you learn a level of flexibility. You need to be able to write the paper required for that class. I took classes that had nothing to do with my own research, but I had no other choice for a variety of reasons. I’m not mad about it. It’s given me an idea of what different disciplines and research areas do. But in all of that, I was trying to figure out what my voice is. Then, as I started to figure out what it is I want to write about, what I want to highlight the importance of–texts and people that deviate from the norm and challenge the norm–I was told that doesn’t “fit” or “make sense.”
This past year, as I’ve written about before, has given me time away from all of those voices and time to try to find my voice again. But, then I had to go on the job market, and there’s not a lot of jobs out there currently for an interdisciplinary scholar like me. So I got in my head again about trying to be this or that. Trying to put myself in a box. (I’m really trying not to quote Adam Lambert here, but it’s so appropriate!) A box that I was never going to completely fit into.
Recently I had a couple of interviews for jobs that would get me into a college, but not in a department. The idea of having a job at a university and having the freedom to keep doing my thing without worrying about how it fit into the department or school or college was freeing. One of the interviews hasn’t led to the job and I haven’t heard back about the other yet.
But it made me realize something, I need to stop worrying about how I will fit into some specific box. Yes, I need a job, but that doesn’t mean I can’t keep doing my own thing. Even as I write this, I realize that I enjoy being the scholar who themselves deviates from the norms of academia by being interdisciplinary. In being interdisciplinary, I can draw on more than if I were to try to confine myself to one discipline or another.
Also, I know that there are plenty of jobs out there and careers out there that want my interdisciplinary approach to studying those deviant texts and their challenges to the norm. They just need to be looking for me. I’m going to stop worrying and embrace my “superpower” and keep trying to find that place where it’s needed. Isn’t that what superpowers are for?
Deviate from the Norm 