Thesis Statement
Midlife crises seem a lot more fun in nineties sitcoms: dude loses his hair, freaks out, buys a car, and by the next week he is back to normal! I am months deep in what is certainly a midlife crisis—probably more than months, probably more like a couple of years—and it becomes ever harder to look away from it because I have no work to distract myself.
This deep dive into “What was Fun?” over at Vox does a lot to summarize how I’ve been feeling since this school year began but I did not. Even things I once enjoyed seem to bring little pleasure:
[Travis Tae] Oh’s theory rests on a simple-sounding premise: “When people actually experience fun, it’s coming from some sort of hedonically engaging experience that is also, in some sense, liberating.” Fun, he points out, is a spectrum. For the maximum 10/10 experience, though, you need to be both totally absorbed in the pleasure of the thing you’re doing, and “released from some sort of prior psychological restriction” — usually social obligation or your own self-discipline. (This is the reason a forced office karaoke, while potentially amusing, will never truly qualify as fun.)
Now that my time is structured largely on my own whims—and also around the demands of remote learning—I rarely drop entirely into an activity. I’m certain it’s my own self-discipline, in Oh’s conception, that is stopping me from having fun. I no do things because they are “fun” so much as I do them to make sure I am doing something.
On the shortlist of things I am really, truly enjoying these days with full abandon and pleasure is Star Trek: The Next Generation. Like any child of the ‘90s, I watched a LOT of TNG with my dad when I was growing up. Then I watched a lot of it with my college roommate a decade later. One of my most prized possessions is a Counselor Troi bookmark, no doubt purchased at Walden Books in the Ross Park Mall sometime in the early 90s. In watching the show as an adult, religiously every night after the kids go to bed, I see things I missed when I was a kid. Most obviously, how fucking horny Riker is. But also how Troi steadfastly refuses to EVER take care of herself. How Worf’s default state is eye-rolling annoyance. How Geordi is the WORST with the ladies, despite his dorky charm and dashing smile. And how Captain Picard himself suffers his own midlife crisis after being kidnapped by and assimilated into the Borg.
This, then, is the thesis statement of the blog—this is the thesis statement of my pandemic year—how I am basically Jean-Luc Picard, trying to recover my identity after having my job literally consume me, mind and body, while unable to use my number one tool for self-identification, namely that same job.
The story begins with the first image of Picard in my photo collage. He looks great: calm and competent! He is one of the most respected captains in the Federation of Planets, he commands its flagship vessel, his crew loves him, and he loves his job because he IS his job and he is good at it. This is me sometime about three years ago. I had been at my current teaching job for a couple of years and had mostly gotten a handle on what I was teaching. I had an excellent work team, and we loved and supported one another. We knew how to work together well, and everyone played to their strengths. We tried to let each other help out when we got stuck in our own weaknesses—not so hot at this, admittedly, as we are all a bit type-A and proud—but generally we had one another’s backs and threw ourselves birthday parties and showers during team meetings to cement our bond. I felt simultaneously like I was at the height of my powers and constantly challenging myself, growing, gaining more knowledge and skill.
But this was a mirage. I knew then—we all knew, always—that the jobs we had were killing us. The Enterprise feels like a good place to work, with a healthy balance of demanding work and scads of leisure time. (So much time on the holodeck! Shore leaves! Chummy dinners in quarters and hanging out in Ten Forward! ) The same can absolutely not be said of my school. I cried all the time. The workload was crushing. No matter how many times I told how many bosses (lol, so many bosses) that my workload was crushing, nothing was ever done about it. Structurally, there was nothing anyone could do about it—the job was simply more work than one human was really capable of doing, and only one human was budgeted for the job. Also, I am (see above) very good at my job, so I’m not sure anyone beyond my close work-friends really understood the extent to which my job was crushing me. Externally, I looked like I was in control. And maybe I was in control, but that control came at a very high cost.
I have increasingly felt trapped in a box by my job. I love teaching, and I have no desire to step into any kind of administrative role ever and certainly not soon. Teaching gives me so much joy, and it makes me feel like a productive member of society. It feeds me, creatively and intellectually. But I am also capable of doing much more than teaching—of taking what it gives me and doing something beyond the classroom with it. I want a richer career, but developing that richness was impossible with the amount of work I had to do daily just to meet the core requirements of my job. I took on extra tasks, most notably work with the curriculum team and the standards-based grading pilot, but I wasn’t ever able to follow my own path to who I wanted to be. I could see the hazy outlines of that person—a version of my favorite teacher blogger Dave Stuart, Jr, with a slightly less than full-time teaching job and a flourishing writing career or professional development career filling in that last little chunk of time—but the energy to get there was nonexistent.
The parallel to Picard here is a little strained, but bear with me. At the end of season 3, he gets kidnapped by the Borg and they literally turn him into one of them. His consciousness, all that he knows and is, gets downloaded to their collective and weaponized against the Federation. While watching the Borg assimilate Picard, I realized that I had been totally wrong about my role in my school. I thought I was a competent, in-command teacher contributing to the success of the whole. But really, I was assimilated. I was increasingly falling in line behind everything leadership asked me to—and honestly, I don’t regret that. I believe in many of the ideas and initiatives I got behind. But leadership steadfastly refused to hear my feedback, refused to engage my ideas, refused to behave with the respect they insisted they had for me.
So really, I was just a spokesperson, a smokescreen. I was leadership’s patsy: they used me to show there was teacher input and teacher buy-in, they used me to bolster their ideas with my colleagues who trusted me. So when things went wrong—as they always did—I was left standing in front of the mess, feeling like the asshole. About this time last year, I removed myself from the curriculum team. Shortly before lockdown, I had my last standards-based grading meeting and realized that no matter how much I tried to get people with power to listen, they wouldn’t. (A memorable discussion with my principal came down to a conflict between ditching an algorithm that was damaging all of our students’ grades being a less important problem than how someone could lose their job if I kept pressing the problem. Sit with that for a second.) Try as I might to disentangle myself from the school system’s machinery, I was now stuck in it irrevocably, my intellect and work product feeding other people’s ambitions. This doesn’t even get into how my continuing acceptance of a crushing workload gives the school system ongoing permission to keep requiring other teachers to accept similarly crushing loads, either. The complicity, the guilt, the single tear rolling down Picard’s face as the Borg drill into the side of his face with their creepy cybernetics: I understand all of this.
After Picard is rescued by (horny, horny) Riker and the rest of the crew and after he is physically healed, he finally agrees to take a vacation. God bless the manly, open-necked leisurewear of TNG. Picard is unable to recover who he is while still on the Enterprise; he has to go home, to France and to his brother. While at home, he is almost seduced into taking a new job on Earth, a fantastic opportunity called “Atlantis” that will literally create an eighth continent. He has lost so much of himself that he considers leaving his one true love, being a starship captain. Once he finally faces his own weakness by rolling around in the mud with his brother and trading a few punches, he comes to his senses and realizes he can accept his guilt and return to his job.
Just like Picard, I too now wear a lot of open-necked, blousy leisurewear. And I am also on a break from the job that sucked me of my intellect, wrecked any balance in my life, and convinced me that I was nothing more than my productivity and work product. I too am tempted to find another challenging project that is not teaching. Frequently, I wonder how I can go from zero miles an hour back to the breakneck speed required by my current job. I wonder if getting another teaching job will ever be possible for me, or if this is the only teaching job I can have. I worry that I will leave this teaching job and never find colleagues and friends I love as much as these ones.
But I also know that I have to take this year to put my professional identity back into balance with my personal identity. Being a teacher cannot be the preponderance of who I am. I’ve always known that wasn’t enough, and now I face down the balance of the equation every day. I don’t know what peace I can find—I’m pretty sure my brother isn’t going to punch me and then we’ll get drunk and sing a dumb song and I’ll finally feel better. It seems reasonable to assume that I will go back to the classroom, just as Picard went back to the Enterprise. Unfortunately for me, my school is controlled by the Borg—but finding that balance is a problem for the future. The problem of the present is trying to figure out who I am and what I want. That energy I needed to be the person I want to be? I have it now. I just don’t have the constant drum of work to fall back on when I don’t know what to with myself next.
And somewhere else in all this mess is remembering how to have fun, rediscovering what brings me real pleasure and separating that from attempts to satisfy my inner productivity junky. I think the productivity junky has been in charge for far too long. Perhaps the vision of who I wanted to be, a teacher and a writer, was still too driven by career and ambition. And this year, this blog, may hopefully help me figure out what I want to do with my time.