For “reasons,” we’ll be holding our graduate program orientation this Friday. This represents a change: for years upon years, we’ve held this day-long session during the week prior to the start of classes. In my various stints as graduate director over the years, I’ve been responsible for organizing it, so I should know. Like I said, though: reasons.
This year’s theme is “The Work of Community,” and until yesterday, I’d planned on having to deliver some opening remarks of the sort that I relayed in my last post. To my relief, that’s no longer the case, as the session will be a little more focused on interaction. But I’ve already got some notes, and an arc, so I thought I’d share them here. I’m not going to put too much effort into polishing away the roughness, but you’ll get the idea.
I hadn’t really quite figured out the internal logic, but I’d planned on starting with a bit of self-deprecation. It’s important to understand that, in our field, there’s a great deal of work that’s oriented towards “community.” And our graduate program in particular has maintained a focus on it - this journal was, for a long time, hosted here, for instance. But if you made a list of every person in our program, past or present, and ranked them according to how community-oriented they were in their research and/or teaching, I’m pretty sure that you’d find me at the very bottom of that list. Not that I don’t understand, appreciate, or support it, but it’s just not a particular priority for my own scholarship. So I would have had to spend a bit of time threading the needle of providing introductory remarks on a theme for which I have next to no credibility. (Round these parts, we recognize that as irony.)
As I was thinking about what I might say, I saw a post from Katie Rose Guest Pryal, talking about how she’s been rereading Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly. Though I’ve never read it myself, one of the lines that Pryal shared caught my eye:
“I see a shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”
I’ll pick this up again later, but there was something about those fears that resonated with me. It was exactly 30 years ago this semester that I started my PhD, and I still remember how intertwined my own ambitions were with that shame-driven fear of ordinariness. When I was in graduate school, I genuinely believed that I was destined for a certain degree of fame (even if it was only to be field-famous). I thought for sure that I would one day chair our national conference/organization—over the years, I thought about conference themes the same way that others imagine what they’d do with their lottery winnings. I figured that at some point I would become the managing editor for a major journal in the field, and I had ideas about how to draw on my expertise with digital media to innovate them. Back when I started blogging, one of my post categories (which was tongue-in-cheek, to be sure) was “when I’m in charge,” both because I believed that I would be but also because there’s a part of me that’s a futurist at heart. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of ambition, but I know that I didn’t realize at the time how much of it was tied up with the sorts of fear that Brown describes.
To my embarrassment, this affected my opinions of the people around me, and if I’m being honest, probably my treatment of them as well. I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but I would look at faculty who didn’t seem as committed to the ambitions that I felt, and I imagined that I’d be fine as long as I didn’t end up like them. I’m embarrassed of my younger self as I write that out loud and think about the shame that I felt on their behalf because they had different priorities than I did. I’m ashamed to admit that, without any real evidence, I considered them ordinary.
Thirty years later, I’m a lot less full of myself, fortunately. But the career I’ve had thus far would almost certainly have disappointed the person I was in graduate school1. I’ve written some things I’m proud of, taught some interesting courses, and floated some ideas out there that I still believe in, even if they didn’t have the impact I’d hoped. But I wouldn’t characterize my time as “extraordinary enough” in the way that Brown details.
I’m in the unusual position of knowing when my ambitions basically hit the wall, because of the heart problems I had in the mid-2010s. In 2015, I keynoted a national conference on digital rhetoric, ran a week-long symposium, and gave talks at several top-rate graduate programs, all in support of a project on rhetoric and networks, which I hoped to turn into a book. One minute I was giving talks, working social media, and thinking of myself as very much “in the game” of academia; the next, I was recovering from heart surgery and the installation of robot parts, and I’d become a ghost. The energy that I’d diverted from self-care into ambition, all of a sudden, didn’t feel as appealing as it did to my younger self.
My recovery took me a lot longer than it probably should have, but I had the added challenge of figuring out what I wanted to do with my life, if I wasn’t going to fear ordinariness. I’ve written about this a bit before, but during the height of the pandemic, a friend of mine put out a call over Twitter to see if anyone was interested in an online writing group. I’d never had any real luck with sustained writing groups before, but I kind of replied on a whim, as did another mutual friend of ours.
But here’s the thing: the group was a consequence of the things I’d done six years and a heart attack earlier. The friend who initiated the group, Caddie, was one of the graduate students who’d ferried me about at that conference I keynoted (I was recovering from back surgery at the time, and had mobility issues). And the other friend, Eric, I’d met on my visit to give a talk at Texas; another graduate student, he’d interviewed me for his podcast at the time. Both of them had graduated and were now working on their books. I tried to provide whatever advice I could, having been through that experience myself, but otherwise, I’d just open up a Word file and type whatever came to mind. Eventually, that freewriting began to morph into the project that I’m currently working on, and I learned that I’d become the kind of person who can write both with others and on a more regimented schedule. I kept the group going, adding a 2nd day of the week, and slowly began inviting other participants: a couple of former students, a few current students (at multiple institutions), and anyone else that wanted a little extra structure for their writing time. It’s not a large group, but it’s consistent, steady, and it’s gotten me into the writing habit that results in my posts here, more often than not.
My small writing group isn’t really the kind of thing that most of my colleagues have in mind when they talk about community, but then, why not? There’s another essay, from last week, that resonated with my thoughts on ordinariness: LM Sacasas’s short piece on disenchantment, where he asks
what if we experience the world as disenchanted because, in part, enchantment is an effect of a certain kind of attention we bring to bear on the world and we are now generally habituated against this requisite quality of attention?
Is there an important distinction to be made between enchantment and the extraordinary that Brown considers? Maybe so, but I feel like they’re close enough for my purposes here. I think there’s a line of thought that ties these two essays together, one that makes the case that, while there’s nothing necessarily wrong with ambition or confidence, it can have the effect of numbing us to the successes that we do achieve, because they don’t accomplish what Pryal calls “a bigger splash,” because as Brown writes, we tend to “use the celebrity culture yardstick to measure the smallness of our lives.” The more we internalize that yardstick, the more we tend “to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate,” as Sacasas puts it. The less capable we become of “extend[ing] ourselves into the world by attending to it.”
I don’t know that I would have said all of this on Friday. Almost certainly not. But I would have closed by pulling that academic trick of refiguring the terms just a bit. I think that most of us in my field would see the phrase “the work of community” and focus almost exclusively on the latter term, whereas I want to think of their relationship a bit differently. It took me a long while to learn this, but when I’m doing my own work properly, community is the outcome, not the backdrop, or the cause, or the target. The graduate student I was in the 90s very possibly would have dismissed the career that I’ve had so far as “ordinary,” but that was a failure of imagination on his part more than anything else. Sacasas closes his essay by suggesting that we “play with the notion that we might cast our attention into the world in the spirit of casting a spell. We may very well conjure up surprising depths of experience, awaken long dormant desires, and rekindle our wonder in the process. What that will avail,” he writes, “only time would tell.”
I think that it would tell us what Pryal closes her essay by saying, which is that “We are all extraordinary.” And that, I might have said to those graduate students on Friday, is the work of community, or at least a good part of it.
Please believe me when I say that my goal here is not to fish for compliments. That should become a little clearer below.
"The graduate student I was in the 90s very possibly would have dismissed the career that I’ve had so far as “ordinary,” but that was a failure of imagination on his part more than anything else."
Yes yes yes, omg, yes.
I too have found myself numb to the success I have achieved. I even focus on the failures more than the successes. When my most recent book came out, I just went about moving on to other projects.
I appreciate you sharing Collin. I look forward to reading what you’re working on and, if you’ll let me, celebrating with you