Still here

I was going to post weekly, at least. But then I started teaching again, a bit last minute and entirely unexpectedly, and it was the first week of the new semester and I was behind and, well, I didn't post last week.

I came to all of this, the PhD and writing career, in a tortuously circuitous and improbable way. I nearly flunked out of high school and dropped out of college (which I equally barely got into) nearly immediately upon arriving. By the time I was maybe mature enough to go back, I was diagnosed with severe Crohn's disease. That ate up most of my 20s. By the time that was managed, the Great Recession obliterated most job prospects, I had a new baby, and we decided I would stay home until she was old enough to go to school.

While staying at home with my daughter, I decided to write, stuff got published, and I learned that the game studies program at NC State was teaching one of my articles. I was asked to give a guest lecture, then asked whether I'd consider going back to school (at NCSU, of course), I did, I kept doing para-academic work, and then I went to UNC for my PhD.

All of which is to say that, when things seemed to flame out over the summer, I was faced with entering a non-academic job market at 48, having not worked a "normal" job in 16 years.

My last two backstops failed after I walked with my doctorate. A grantwriting postdoc, which I felt bullish on and had a great interview for, fell through; the feedback was that yes, it was a great interview, but (reading between the lines) I hadn't said I'd given up the academic side of things hard enough. And then the final backstop, a local lecturer position which felt was as close to a sure thing as there is in academia, got caught up in the academic hiring freezes.

I probably would've crumbled anyway but the non-academic job search sealed it. I knew the job market was bad, you knew it. But I didn't know it. I wasn't at all prepared for how demeaning and Kafkaesque applying for jobs is in 2025. You get ghosted constantly. When you don't you get automated emails. Half the jobs are ghost jobs, the other half are scanned by AI. I read a stat that you have to apply to about 500 jobs for 3-4 interviews. I had a couple phone interviews. One ghosted. One job I applied to was kind enough to post their interview process: five rounds, including a synchronous sample project, an asynchronous sample project, and being included on company email lists for a week to see how I'd contribute.

I'm not too proud to say that I did, indeed, crumble this past summer. I am, at the best of times, on the edge of depression (diagnosed!) most days. I push through it by working obsessively on something, whether for pleasure or work. Only there was no pleasure to be found and no work to do. I felt foolish, like a burden, an absolute and total failure. I developed a tremor in my left hand at the height of it and it's still here. It was bad. I was pretty close to non-functional for a solid chunk of July and August.

So when I got an email from my old department at UNC, offering me one, maybe even two, classes I jumped at the chance.

Because I do love this work and I always treated academia as a job training program slash apprenticeship. And listen, I know all of the criticisms, the weary veteran profs, and the analysis that this is a shambling husk waiting for the bloated administration apparatus to burst like corpse gas from its bowels. And yet. And yet.

It's not that I don't share the concerns, it's that the idealistic side of me which often enough shades into the wounded cynicism only idealism can, doesn't seem to want to give up. I love reading and writing. I love the relative autonomy I have, even if it constricts year by year. I love teaching.

I love students. I love hearing what they have to say about their worries and hopes. I love being kept young when they tell me about things I've aged out of. I love helping them be less young by teaching them serious things, but especially serious things about media which might not seem so serious. I love trying to pass on some of my passe humanism and existentialism to them, that there's something special about them which can't be rendered to a marketing category or set of numbers.

And I mostly think I succeed. Imperfectly, sometimes in fits and starts. Sometimes there's a dud class. More often it's good. Rarely but often enough it's a golden moment of connection, discussion, rapport.

It's early but a student walked up to me Thursday, after my intro to media studies course, and told me I was one of the best lecturers she'd had. And look, that feels good, but it's sincerely not about me feeling good but about effectiveness. It's not magic: I sincerely like talking to them and I don't know that you can fake that.

I have my own personal fears. Did news of my (mercifully temporary) nervous breakdown escape containment? If so, is this all just pity? What happens in December? Am I contributing in my own small way to the deprofessionalization of the academy? How do I interact with my friends who are still grad students there? Am I just delaying the inevitable and, if I am, am I employable at all after this? Do I ever work, really work, again?

Like I said, at the best of moments I'm dancing at the thin edge of depression and most of that is irrational. Probably all of it. But you keep going. Stoics, existentialists.

Anyway, that's why I didn't post last week. I was going to post about my dogged, ragged humanism. Instead, I was scrambling to get my classes together, then on campus, then carousing with old friends. I'm starting my seventh year at UNC in some capacity or other, though always teaching and researching. I've never been affiliated with any other job that long.

I do love it.