Torturing Myself With Thoughts of What Might Have Been

I really need to get more capes into my closet. Maybe that will be my New Years resolution this year?

I need a fun and easy to attain one because, in all truth, the last couple of days have been rough.

As many readers may know, I have a PhD in British history. While I was earning said PhD and in the few years immediately following my graduation, I very much wanted to enter academia and be a professor (or at least I thought I did - 8 years of grad school has a way of brainwashing you a bit). The problem was and is that there are almost no jobs opening with any regularity in my particular field and there are literally 300-500 other people with PhDs applying for each opportunity that does come up - and every year another 500ish people graduate and add to that number exponentially. I dedicated myself to the process for a couple of years and had some offers for 1-2 year postdoctoral and visiting professorship jobs (and that’s normal and the way it works for most people in my field – you do a few short term contracts, get more teaching and publishing and researching experience under your belt, live an itinerant lifestyle for a few years as you move all across the country for different jobs, etc) but it was frustrating and demoralizing and I was in my mid-30s and married by that time and wanted some career stability and to do things like afford to travel and buy a house and have a kid.

And then an opportunity for a non-academic job that complemented my skill set, had opportunities for advancement, was close to family and in a place where my husband could also work (getting a work visa for your non-academic spouse so they can work abroad is actually really tricky, meaning you’re often on one income if you are married to a non-resident), that had great compensation that would allow me to have a lot of financial security and freedom, and that seemed challenging but also fun came about. And I went for it. And I loved it and love it still and succeeded at it. And I was happy. I even kept up with academic stuff. I taught part time a little and wrote and published a book and published an article and did 2-3 conference talks each year. But, gradually, I got further and further away from academia and focused more on the new career I had and on growing my family.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret those things for a second. But throwing myself wholeheartedly into them was a bit easier when I looked at the job listings for historians of Britain and the jobs just simply didn’t exist. But over the past few weeks, a couple of jobs in that field have opened up (one of them at the University in my city where I did part-time teaching) and it threw me into a pretty huge crisis of confidence as I tortured myself with thoughts of what could have been if I had just stuck with it, been patient for longer, waited a few years to have Eleanor, etc etc. Ugh. I’m slowly digging myself out of it but it’s been a wild ride. I have to say though, I feel a lot better for just putting that out there and exorcising it from myself.

leggings: ASOS / sweater: Simons / cape: BB Dakota