I need a space where I can make stuff — academia has burnt me out as a creative.
I have a confession… academia is great but it has burnt me out as a creative. There, I said it. For awhile now, I have felt cooped up inside the formalities and structures of academic scholarship like the tiniest doll in series of Russian nesting dolls. Within my discipline of science and education, this is something I have tried to understand and explain as the dissolving of the individual “I” (i.e. I feel…I see… I know… I think…) into an objective and scientific narrator (i.e. it was observed… it was found…). My own experience with being creative is being able to express something that is uniquely you and human; messy, imperfect but genuine. The way I see it, part of creative expression is being able to say “I feel..”, “I see…”, “I think…”, “I wonder if…”. For awhile now, I have had to manage my creative inner monster to find other ways to express itself while I work as an academic but have not been too successful. I do not have any margin in my life to do anything outside of my job to fulfill that need to be creative so my work needs to have some element of that. That is part of why I am writing here in this space, which is free from the formalities of academia to see if I can scratch whatever itch is there.
While academia has burnt me out, I do want to talk about why academia is great. Because it is. It is a privilege to be at the frontier of discovery, of human experience, of information that can change the world around us or tell us more about how it works. So, first I will talk about some reasons why it is great and then I will rant as a creative.
Why Academia is great
- Collaboration with amazing people. Working with others who have niche areas of expertise and being able to reach out to any of them to collaborate or learn from them, is great. I often feel like a kid in a candy store knowing that I could potentially learn about anything or do anything if I just reached out to one of my colleagues.
- Discovering new knowledge. Sometimes it’s not necessarily new knowledge but a unique take on something that we already know. There is the feeling of being on the edge of something not discovered before; even when you realize it is only a drop in the ocean, of what is possible to uncover; is humbling but rewarding. The way something is written can be just as insightful as what is written. I find this a magical part of academia — finding that quote that feels like you found a jewel.
- Becoming better at applying a powerful medium for change, influence and impact — that is writing. Writing is part of the gig and you try and master because it is how you share your ideas with others who can build on them. As you read tons of writing when you do research to develop that basis for how to join the larger conversation on the area of research you are aiming to contribute, you begin to develop what I call reader compassion. You as the reader can think about how to be a good writer especially when you come across bad writing but important research. You often adopt a style of writing, what I think of as the accepted academic dialect in your discipline. This dialect can sometimes become challenging when trying to have conversations with other academics in other disciplines who have different “accents” and certain terms can mean different things.
So while there are some great things about academia let’s back to the feeling- like-a-burnt out- creative-who-is-also-an- academic, part of this conversation. Mind you this is also my own experience, I cannot talk for all academics.
The confession
I find that the scholarship part of academia — in the way that I have been introduced to it — can sometimes feel like a bottleneck to creativity and idea-birthing. What I mean is that you can have this amazing experience uncovering insight through your research and then you go to share it and there are, for the most part, set pathways for how to share it. I know in other disciplines there are much more creative ways of sharing of and building of knowledge but it has been my experience that, there is a set way to do certain things.
What does academic scholarship look like with all the frills? It is storytelling.
I was inspired by a paper deconstructed scholarship into the essential elements and realized what they are describing is a form of storytelling; the process of it, the sharing of it and the building of a larger narrative. I dream of finding creative ways to tell the stories of the discoveries and experiences the people in my world have while learning. What gets me out of bed? Thinking about putting experiences of people on paper and that it matters to me how this is done, how we preserve language, what language is used, what metaphors we use, who is telling the story, what are they not telling and what does their story mean in today’s context?
Storytelling is the thing I want to do when I have free time (which is never). It it what I want to learn about. I think back to my education and the courses I found challenged me and inspired me at the same time were my english and literature courses that I took along my science courses.
Where does this leave me? It leaves me here to write and even though I feel a sense of relief, I also feel intimidated by a blinking cursor and a wide audience who can read, comment and respond to what I put out there. What I desire is a space where I can “make” and share. I plan on capturing my process as I work out what this means but for now, I am just going to trust the process and show up to see what happens. It doesn’t have to be grandiose, it just has to be me.
