Academia doesn't give a shit about you (or me)

Yesterday I got (yet another) message of thanks from a viewer of my YouTube videos. This person talked about how my videos have helped them see a life in academia even with their severe anxiety problem. I get messages like this all the time. I get emails, and DMs, and cards in the post. I love these things. But today I feel like a fraud.

Two days ago I went to see my community psych. I'd rung for an appointment with my regular doctor about a month ago and got a locum. She didn't make me a same-day appointment, but rang me back late in the afternoon to say that maybe I could just increase one of my medications. Even though my brain was a storm, I tried to be calm as I explained that I didn't want to do that. I wanted to talk to someone about the way I was feeling. The new symptoms. I began pleading with her to let me see my doctor. She put me on hold and eventually gave me an appointment with my doctor the next morning.

This set off a chain that resulted in my appointment with the community psych and a new quasi-diagnosis. A new thing to add to my plethora of issues. I have BPD, but not really. Rather I "would be diagnosed with BPD if you couldn't hold your life together". What I took away from the extensive conversation I had with the psych was that, because I am high functioning in both my bipolar and my (now) BPD then she doesn't want to diagnose me with BPD formally. The medical intervention is similar to bipolar - one of my meds will be switched for a new med from a parallel group - and I can start the 'right kind of talking therapy' for BPD without needing a formal diagnosis. To be honest, I don't mind about the formal diagnosis thing or not, because I am in the very fortunate position of having a mother who is both invested enough and wealthy enough to pay for private therapy. On the NHS I might be waiting up to 2 years for the 'correct' kind of therapist to come up.

So, that was the third thing that happened.

The first was the industrial action over pensions. Taking out the picket-line-awakening of the plight of early career academics and how genuinely insulting that was (you mean you didn't think about it beforehand?!?), what I have learned from the USS strike is that the people who have the money and the power don't actually give a shit about me. Or academics in general. We are cogs in a machine of some kind of Degree Granting Business.

The second thing was writing my paper for the Classical Association conference. It's made me realise that I used to have a lot of creativity in my approach to my research. I used to want to do weird and amazing things. I still do, of course. But I'm also hyper-aware of trying to produce 3* or 4* research. But no one else gives a fuck about REF ratings. The REF has killed my creativity and I'm not even returnable.

Finally - this morning I got a job rejection. It was a job I applied for mainly because I spent a lot of time at the end of my PhD and the start of my career wanting to go this particular department. I've applied for every possible job that's come up there. I nearly got a Leverhulme ECF there. But I've never been successful. For this reason I'd broken my recently self-imposed commuting-time-from-London limit to apply there. So, I almost don't care about not getting shortlisted there. But I do care about not getting shortlisted at all.

So, I think I'm going to put #projectpermanentjob on hold. At least until my book is published (in the last 5 years in my field the only people I can think of that got permanent jobs without a book-in-hand were internal candidates...). And to think about whether actually my strong desire to be an ancient historian, to do my research, to teach, and to learn is actually worth the price that academia wants of me.

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So, here are some ways you can cheer me up:
1) Make a donation to Arts Emergency. And follow them on Twitter.
2) I would quite like this t-shirt... (in a women's large, thanks!) 😉
3) Head over to my YouTube channel, and watch some of my videos about mental health, research planning, or early career academic life. Oh, and please subscribe!
4) Come and say hello on Twitter!
5) Support me over on Patreon!