I got an email last night about a meeting of a group that I am associated with. The group is made up mostly of academic types. I found myself feeling angry and critical of the group and its members. Again, I was feeling alienated and disconnected. It made me realize that I haven't yet fully let go of my dream of an academic life.
I am like a jilted lover, trying to let go of a bad relationship. Occasionally I feel called back, knowing that ultimately I will be rejected and hurt. I first fell in love and started dreaming about the academic life in my first sociology class as a freshman in college. It was the ideas that attracted me: the heady discussion, the clever dialogue. I was hooked. Later I would go to work for the community college where I attended that class, trying to recapture the love I felt years earlier. When I was in graduate school for the first time, I remember sitting in the courtyard, intoxicated by the air of scholarship, crying tears of gratitude for my good fortune in just being there. Going back to school five years ago was yet another attempt to rekindle that passion.
I am not a "scholar." I'm not even sure I know what that word means. I am a teacher and a writer and, at times, a catalyst for change, but I am not a scholar. It is hard to accept that and move on. I recognize that what I am letting go of is not something tangible, concrete or "real." I have found that at the end of any relationship it is the dream that dies most hard.
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