The Fading Away of a Former Life
My own great resignation from academia
Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/empty-road-between-trees-38537/
The fading away began when the last of my former students — former, because it had been months since I last taught — turned in their belated essays at the beginning of 2022.
Fireworks were setting off for the third pandemic year, hopefully the last. In the Philippines, we were yet to reopen schools to in-person classes, the last in the world to do so. And as though to ceremonially put an end to that inchoate period of “goalposts” instead of deadlines, “movable” due dates and course requirements that were never final till the very end — and then not yet still, because the due date was compassionately moved, again, and students were permitted to negotiate, again, what they could reasonably do to survive this major assault on their mental health, never mind their teachers’ — the university where I taught finally, compassionately, declared an irrevocable deadline for all things overdue and pandemic-related. For all our sakes.
So the new year began with a finality I hadn’t felt since the pandemic messed up our calendars, clocks, and circadian rhythms. Finally, I could close my grade books to students — with or without legitimate need — who kept knocking on virtual doors. Finally, I could terminate tutorials that extended for months, bleeding into my next batch of courses to teach, in a maddening pile-up of pandemic-academic things to do.
I — who’d filed a leave after an impossible year of teaching remotely, teaching a child who’s home from school, and mothering an infant while my work-displaced husband scrambled to regain an income — appreciated the absoluteness of a date that prevented students from emailing me (during my leave) about a forgotten lesson, a clarification, a request for feedback. But some still did. Instead of debating in myself whether it was worth at that point to investigate if the student really needed help or not, I was anyway still in a lingering “compassionate” mode, though at the tail-end of it, and so dug into my files for that lesson that I, too, had forgotten.
I only had enough energy left to be kind. It was more consuming to be cynical.
When I encoded the grades on what were probably the last student forms I’ll ever see, the fading away — which had begun a bit when the department chair approved my leave— sped up, intensified. The campus that had receded a bit in my mind receded even further, faster. And with it came a relief I didn’t know I could ever feel. It felt so deliciously, so inhumanely wrong: my students’ faces blurred on my mental pictures of Zoom, and not just they who I’d actually taught on Zoom. Blurred into them were the collective souls I’d met these many years in brick-and-mortar classrooms, parties and sports events, counselling rooms and disciplinary hearings. With the blurring came the scandalous realization that they were beginning to not matter to me. Not anymore, not like they used to.
Hang on, I told myself. I haven’t resigned yet! I wasn’t ready yet for the long process of resignation.
Clearance paperwork.
Letting go of a stable job.
Letting go of a life I once intimately knew.
I’d just filed a leave! My body and mind, however — and despite internal protestations — dissociated with ease. The pandemic, and the digital wall imposed between the campus and me, its people and me, succeeded to remove me a bit from my would-be former life as an academic. Where previously I felt too deeply entrenched, too emotionally invested, to entertain even a passing thought of a different life, now I couldn’t envision anything else but my absolute removal from it. Like it was the most natural, most logical, most inviolable thing to do.
With the fading away came a lift, a lightness I never knew existed. Never mind that with one less paycheck we might not financially survive, though mentally I know I will. With headspace cleared, I wondered with amusement how come the old excitement for new courses to teach, or new students to meet, didn’t come rushing in to fill it. No mental fireworks to greet the new academic year. I no longer missed my office, the smell of lavender oils and the dampness of books.
It’s been two years since I last set foot in there, when it finally occurred to the university that there would be no coming back till the pandemic was over, and we were all instructed to clear our tables, shelves, mailboxes. I dutifully then returned to take away my lavender oils and books.
The campus was thoroughly disinfected, over and over, until any lingering scent of my presence faded away, too.
This story was also posted to Medium, here. On the same publishing date as this one.