Bare Your Soul

Hannah Alpert-Abrams bio photo By Hannah Alpert-Abrams halperta@gmail.com @hralperta Comment

I’ve been very honest about how I’m feeling on Twitter lately.

I wrote some playful tweets about itinerant academic contingency and the way it wreaks havoc on relationships and communities:

I wrote some more serious tweets about the feelings I’m having after three years of being not-quite-successful-enough on the academic job market:

“Why do you write about yourself online that way?” a friend asked. “Aren’t you afraid?” It’s a question I’ve been thinking about for a few weeks, and it’s one I want to answer a little more fully here.

Let me start by saying, yes, I am afraid. I am afraid of seeming whiny, self-indulgent, hysterical. I am afraid of seeming like someone who uses emotions exclusively for personal gain.

I am afraid that emotional honesty will have negative consequences for my long-term employment. I’ve been reading Rebecca Traister’s book Good and Mad, which talks about the consequences faced by women who express anger in public spaces.

We can achieve popularity, she says, by saying the things that other people are thinking and feeling. But when we do so, we lose credibility. Women who express anger become unelectable. I am concerned, in a very real way, that I am making myself unhireable.

As someone on a search committee recently put it: “I suspect you were not the top choice for the position because, although you were the most qualified, you have too much personality.”

Pay attention to me

I want to get this out of the way: I love getting reactions and responses from strangers online. I love feeling like I have a platform to express myself.

This has been a hard winter and I feel fortunate that I can ask for and receive care and concern online, from all kinds of people, many of whom I don’t know in person. This is often what I’m doing when I write publicly about my feelings. I am asking for attention. And I’m getting it. And in the short-term, it helps.

To be clear: talking about feelings is something I do, first and foremost, for myself.

I am angry, I am sad

Talking about feelings is something I do for myself, but not only for myself.

I am a student of Ann Cvetkovich. I care about feelings. Ann writes:

For those who are fortunate enough to imagine that their careers and other life projects can be meaningful shaped by their own desires, depression in the form of thwarted ambition can be the frequent fallout of the dreams that are bred by capitalist culture.

I am angry because I feel that I have succeeded at everything capitalism, and academia, has asked of me, and still I am struggling to sustain the career that I decided to pursue.

I am angry because according to every metric I can think of, the meritocracy has failed.

I am angry because the failure of the meritocracy feels a lot like a personal failure.

I am angry because the very particular ways in which this system is unfair and violent are impacting not just me, but so many people I love, and so many more people who I don’t even know.

I am angry because even when people have success, it exists only in the context of this systemic failure. And I am angry because that very way of thinking feels broken, distorted, and shameful.

And I am sad.

I am sad because I can’t stop myself from being angry. I am not clinically depressed, and I feel very fortunate about that. But I am sad every day. It impacts my ability to enjoy things that once brought me pleasure. It impacts my ability to conduct research and to be an effective teacher. It impacts my relationships. The thing about sadness is that it feeds itself.

A possible resource for action

Ann Cvetkovich writes: “The goal is to depathologize negative feelings so that they can be seen as a possible resource for political action rather than its antithesis.”

I write about how I feel as a gesture of solidarity, to create space for those who might also be struggling, and who might be less able to speak. I want to normalize these expressions of feeling because I suspect this is becoming normal. I want to destigmatize them because it does not help us to go through this alone.

I also write about how I feel because I want to document the ways that changes to the academic job market over the past ten years are impacting real people and their real lives. I think the time is coming when people in positions of security in academia will have to take action against precarity, contingency, the overawarding of doctoral degrees, and the exploitation of graduate student labor.

I want to make sure that when this time comes, it is clear that we (or you) are fighting for real people. And I have a little hope that in some small way, talking about my feelings might help to get us there.

Towards better feelings

Sometimes I worry about talking about negative feelings on Twitter because I have found that there are times when this piling on of dissatisfaction can reinforce feelings of paralysis and doubt.

It was important for me to understand that certain elements of my graduate education were exploitative, for example. But the more the word exploitation was thrown around, without any kind of accompanying mobilization or resistance, the harder it became for me to enjoy the elements of my professional life that I had once found rewarding. I was prepared to fight for reduced teaching hours and better pay. But I eventually had to disconnect myself from my peers because the endless talk of exploitation seemed to lead only to unhappiness and despair.

My greatest fear as I talk about feelings online is that it is stoking the fire of mutual misery. I want to end with two questions:

As an individual, how does twitter talk about the job market affect your quality of life?

What would a more productive, supportive, and activist academic twitter look like for you?

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