“An exodus of bloggers”
Frogs and Ravens: How Many Data Points Make a Trend?
Blogging — I started this blog (though I had ones before) before I was seriously thinking of leaving. Or maybe not: I had decided last year to give it one more year because I wouldn’t feel content with giving it just the firt year, but was thinking “another year like this and I’m gone”. Of course come the year and I fought like hell against leaving.
But blogging certainly made it *easier* to leave. Sure, I know a few people who left my program. Last year, 2 of 10 people left (in their first year) my roommate’s class (math). But I had no sense of their leaving, why, what they thought. (Mostly.)
With blogs — I got to read Dorothea’s story. I read Rana as she was deciding to leave. I read IA and her comments. So I got a sense of people who left, what they did, what they felt — and THAT people left, and that it was okay. After all, my professors are all people who didn’t leave, and no one in my family has gone for a PhD (my father got his MEd just before I was born, and my mother just completed her MLIS, but those are rather different).
Amanda, in her comment, has a point: I have expressed many, many times my dissatisfaction with where I live. I have not expressed as often my dissatisfaction with my roommates; rest assured, it runs as deep.
I don’t know if I’d've left had I not been writing a blog. Possibly. But had I not read them? Probably not. This way I could feel like part of a community instead of the lone, sole loser, the one who couldn’t hack it. (Sort of. I still feel sometimes like a loser, but at least I can separate how I feel from what I think.)
I suspect that had this been pre-internet, I would have stuck it out, painfully, until I got myself seriously ill, and thrown good time after bad, as well as a long recovery period. Worse insanity, worse depression. Worse scars.
And I wish I were willing to stick it out, but, in the end, I’m not willing to give up what I have been giving up for the past two years. Yes, perhaps a Real Academic ™ would be, or would have to be. And it’s not healthy. But I still wish I were that style of crazy. Because, no matter what, I love linguistics. I love doing it. I can do it, and I can do it well. I just can’t make my life about linguistics. There are people in my department who can and do, and I watch them with a sort of awe. They will, if anything is at all fair, be successful. But it’s not fair, and that’s the rub. But they’re willing to adjunct, to move around, to give up anyone and anything. I’m not. I feel it like a loss.
It’s sometimes hard because there is one person in my year who — well — shouldn’t be there. But next year, he will be there, and I won’t, and I have to deal with that. It’s hard not to make this all about me. About my failure. About my just. Not. Being. Good. Enough.
Am I leaving because I blog? Yes, why not. It’s an easy enough answer, and true enough.