This past fall, I started my first real job. So far I like it just as much as I thought I would. I enjoy the responsibility of teaching undergraduates. I enjoy having my own office. I even get a kick out of being called "Doctor."
I have also enjoyed moving back to the United States, after spending five years in Europe as a performing musician. I now live in a charming college town in the Midwest, loaded with parks and big drafty houses.
I live within walking distance of the campus. Every morning I make myself a sandwich, pack it tidily away into my briefcase, and walk five minutes, rain or shine, to my office. I am settling into the faculty lifestyle and can imagine spending many years here.
The single flaw in my happy scenario? I am only here on a one-year renewable contract.
To complicate matters, a recent change in the college's administration throws the future of my position into question: Every week I hear a different story about the likelihood that my contract will be renewed. So I have no choice: I have to go on the job market this year.
When I accepted the position, I clearly understood the temporary nature of the contract. It wasn't my ideal job, but I hoped it would be a steppingstone -- a safe place for me to land stateside from which I could do another search. I hoped to pay my dues and move on as soon as I landed a tenure-track job.
I never expected to like it here.
After earning a Ph.D. in the States, I had deliberately rejected an academic life and headed overseas. Five years later, I was tired of the financial stresses of life as a freelance musician. When I began doing research on job openings in academe, a professorship seemed purely theoretical.
At the time, I had to try to remember what academe was like, to reconstruct the memories for myself in order to anticipate what might be of interest to a search committee. Initially, I found it very difficult to get excited about any particular place, and even meeting the application deadlines was hard because my life wasn't on a semester schedule and the dates seemed arbitrary.
Each application I sent off was the result of sheer force of will combined with hours of research about the college. I felt neither elation nor relief as I sent off each packet -- just tension.
This year's job search has been different. I am doing a job that is very similar to the kind I'm looking for. I am not driven by discontent or fantasy, and am now at least a provisional member of academe. And I already have the clothes, so if I get an interview I won't be having a suit crisis.
But perhaps most important, I am no longer driven by intense longing. In this first semester at my new job, I have noticed myself starting to relax. That ugly anxiety that had been flavoring everything I did during my job search has started to release its grip on my senses.
I have started to see colors vividly again, to walk more slowly, to take a moment to inhale the wintry air and enjoy the smell of burning leaves. Food tastes better to me now. I pay more attention when people talk to me. I can enjoy other people's successes more. I get more pleasure out of life, without the gray cloud of self-doubt and fear clinging to me wherever I go.
Having now mailed out a new batch of applications, however, I am bracing myself for another round of rejection and possible displacement. The fall semester is over and it will be May before I know it. I look around my office at my half-emptied boxes and can't face the thought of packing everything up again in just a few months' time.
There is the assumption in our field that it is easy to keep moving around until the right job comes along. Unfortunately, my inner "nester" is starting to grumble. To the shock of my inner "nomad," who was pretty much calling the shots up to now, I am growing less interested in mobility, longing instead for a place to focus on my teaching, performing, and research.
I would like a release from the uncertainty of job hunting. I am not a person who is constantly looking for something better, like that dance partner you had in 10th grade who was always peering over your shoulder, scanning the room for someone more popular. I am willing to commit to a department that is willing to commit to me.
That is why it saddens me to find a job at a place that I like so much, but that does not offer the potential for commitment. Who knows? Maybe it will take a while to find a tenure-track job in my field and I will be able to stay here for a few years. That wouldn't be the worst thing.
I feel fortunate to have the luxury of searching for a job from a job, however unstable, rather than entering the field as an outsider, as I did last year. The desperation that infiltrated every thought related to my career has been alleviated by this success, however temporary.
Perhaps after a few more months in this department, I'll start chafing at its limitations, and maybe I'll get tired of living here. Maybe I'll begin grousing about my colleagues and how underappreciated I feel. Perhaps in the end I'll be relieved to move on.
The truth is, there are so many variables at work here that I have no idea how they will all play out. And so, as I revise my cover letter, contact my references, and update my résumé, mere weeks after getting a new driver's license, signing on with the local phone company, and figuring out the best place to get fresh bread, my contentment is only shaken when I allow myself to contemplate the complete lack of stability in my professional life.
I realize that the only solution is to dust off that time-worn admonition to seize the day, and experience each as if it were my last. Or, in the words of the late singer/songwriter Warren Zevon, which ring in my head every morning as I pack my lunch: "Enjoy every sandwich."
