Warning: I Am Upset

Well, college has done it again. I went in on Wednesday, thinking to have a look at my room and to figure out how best to pack it up, only to be met by one of the heads of Housekeeping, very embarrassed and apologetic on my behalf. They’d been given the order to clear my room, and all my stuff was now boxed up in the storage rooms. If they wanted the room for someone else (as a stiff little note informed me later on that same day) then why on earth didn’t they just ask me? I’d have cleared it out, and been able to send a mountain of documents for shredding and another to be thrown away, all of which would have been easier than having to do it at home (I have twenty boxes arriving in the college van this afternoon!). And it would have been a chance to say goodbye at some level. I feel like there’s a dignified way of doing this, but college is determined to be as clumsily punitive as possible.

I realise that I need to back up a bit here and fill you in on what’s happened so far this year. Early in January, I cracked and wrote to the Master, as I still hadn’t heard a word from college, no letter, no email, I’d even received a pay slip for the princely sum of £7 (what for, I have no idea). Mr Litlove and I had consulted a lawyer, but she wasn’t much help. She was very unwilling to deal with college, as the university is a law unto itself pretty much, and usually gets its way in the end. I would have walked out after two minutes, but Mr Litlove is made of much sterner stuff, and he kept insisting there must be some way we could signal our displeasure and sense of injustice. In the end, she remembered that we could instigate a grievance procedure. So when I wrote to the Master, I said that this was something I could do, although of course I would prefer not to. After about five weeks, he replied with a very conciliatory letter. This was nothing to do with my work, indeed the college would be very happy for me to continue to provide study support – only it had to be at the level of a College Teaching Associate, not as a Fellow. He was trying to big up the CTA position, saying some other Fellow had chosen it as a route. But the point, I guess, is that he chose it. By having the Fellowship taken away I had lost my research grant (£2,000 over two years), my book grant (£400 a year) and my medical insurance. I wouldn’t even have a pigeonhole in college any more. Not to mention the drop in status. The positions are not at all comparable, although the law doesn’t recognise the loss of a Fellowship, alas, so in providing some sort of alternative, no matter how shabby, the college had more or less covered itself.

Well, I admit I sat on this for a bit. Mr Litlove was all for me making a fuss, asking them to put together a proper proposal for a job that would show me how I’d make up the lost money and so on. But I knew I wasn’t going back. And eventually I wrote the Master a brief note, saying that I did not want the CTA role, and explaining why, and then wishing the college the best for the future and generally being my polite-beyond-all-reason self. A few weeks before I wrote this, I actually received a plaintive email from a student I’d seen last year, asking if she could come again. It cost me to turn her down, as I hate knowing that someone is suffering whom I could help. But yet again it proved that no one knows about this; there’s been no announcement, nothing in the council minutes. I suppose they didn’t really tell the students in the first place that I existed, so it’s no surprise if they don’t inform them I’m no longer there. They just want me to disappear, and transparency doesn’t come into it; they couldn’t come out of this looking good, after all. Then this morning, I heard back from the Master (it’s about a fortnight after I wrote), just three lines thanking me for the work I’ve done and wishing me the best for the future. Is it wrong to feel this is too little too late?

I’m considering writing an article about what’s happened for the THES, I suppose – I’ve never written for a newspaper before and don’t know how best to approach the subject. But is this unreasonable of me? I feel I’ve lost my ethical bearings, and I know my general sense when wounded is to feel that I’m probably at fault. Although I’m not. And I don’t want to go back. All I wanted was for there to be some sort of nice, mutually respectful severing of ties, which it seems I am not to get.

Anyway, on a different note entirely, let me draw your attention to the way in which I’m moving forward from all this, with an article of mine that’s just come out in Open Letters Monthly about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a woman who had a great deal more to complain of than I have. In fact I became interested in her after reading her gorgeous book, Gift from the Sea, a gently feminist philosophical exploration of women’s lives and how they might be lived better, which is as relevant today as it was when it was written 60 years ago. Once I’d realised the author of the book was the same Anne Morrow Lindbergh who had had her son kidnapped and murdered, I became very curious to know how she had managed to produce such a beautiful, reparative, reconciliatory work after all she had suffered. And then that took me to the Lindbergh marriage, which proved to be a fascinating piece of biographical history. Well, please do pop over to OLM and read some of the other wonderful articles available there, too.

The Job Situation, Yet Again

Can you bear to hear more about my redundancy from college? One of these days I’ll actually write a book review and surprise us all. But it seems that this situation is still lacking closure, and it’s causing me a lot of anxiety that I don’t quite understand. What I would really like is to walk away from my old job and never look back, never even think about it again if that were possible. But so far, I’ve had nothing in writing from college, and no mention of my job and the discussion it provoked has appeared in the council minutes that get circulated. It’s as if nothing has happened. Then my friend, the one I mentioned before who is pretty angry about the situation, had a chat with the Master, who said it had all been mishandled and I was never meant to leave. This of course doesn’t fit in any way with what the Senior Tutor told me, which was that the council intended to organise study support quite differently in the future. It doesn’t even fit with the first thing that the Master told my friend, which was to confirm that I’d been nobbled by someone on the council who had better remain nameless.

Have I mentioned sufficiently how much I detest politics? And now, worst of all, there’s all this political mess around the axing of my old job. My friend tells me that the Master very much wants to see me and is convinced he would offer me the job back. But you know what? Even if he did, (and bless her, I suspect her conviction is a product of her loyal friendship) I really don’t want it. I am a very peace-keeping, conflict-avoidant sort of person, and someone who always makes an effort to see any situation through the eyes of the others involved. But if you asked me to go back and work with these people again, as if nothing had happened, I couldn’t possibly do it. The mere thought of it is enough to bring me out in hives.

And here’s where we come to the part of the problem that’s really bothering me: I think that I’m okay about this redundancy, and at least in my conscious mind I am all ready to move on, we’re done and dusted here. But every time I am obliged actually to think about it, and about having to deal with all that remains unresolved, I come across immense anxiety. On two occasions, I’ve discussed this matter with my friend, and after each time I’ve spent the following night in dreadful nightmares, really awful ones that have left me shattered the next day. At the bookstore, my manager had the truly brilliant idea of dropping the Master an email asking politely what ‘package’ college was going to offer me for the redundancy, which seemed to me the best solution to the various issues involved I’d yet come across. It sounded like something I could actually do. Today, I’m struggling with dreadful hypochondria because I have to draft the letter (it’s done, by the way). When I start worrying I have some fatal disease, it’s usually a sign that I’m feeling extremely vulnerable and insecure. But I just don’t understand why. I’m not sure what I’m afraid of here, or what I think will happen. And that’s why I felt the need to write this post, because sometimes, answers come to me most readily when writing, and even more often, my blog friends have insight that helps no end.

I really don’t know why it freaks me so to contemplate having to do something about this redundancy, and there will be things I have to do, like it or not (although I am hoping to keep them to a bare minimum). This is the most frustrating kind of anxiety, the type where I don’t know what’s causing it. Any suggestions for how to get around this psychic obstacle will be gratefully received….or failing that, hugs are great.

Thursday Musings

I was going to write this post much earlier in the day, but I sat down after lunch and fell asleep. That’s how it’s been lately; I’m still a little convalescent and as usual, experiencing most things through my body. But my general state of mind is, hmm, hard to find a word for it… is resistant, I suppose. I don’t want to be fussed or stressed or bothered, I don’t want anything around me or inside my head that makes too much noise or poses too many demands. I want things very peaceful and spacious right now and am fairly unrepentant about being slow and lazy. This strikes me as inevitable. What kind of a robot would I be if, leaving behind a 25-year-old chunk of my life, I could simply brush the dust off and skip away in a new direction? Perhaps there are people who are good at that sort of thing; me, I have to do the work.

I feel a great deal better about the job itself, to the point of being almost quite relieved that I don’t have to tend to the walking wounded. I made a promise to myself many years back that I would not spend so much time fixing others, and this job was not exactly in line with it. I’m even feeling better about leaving the university, since it was kind enough to make it easy for me by behaving so badly. I couldn’t help but notice that one of my well-wishers on facebook is an ex-colleague who was convicted of paedophilia, but kept his job. There’s a waitress in my college who had a short spell in prison but her job was held open. I’m really wondering whether the university has its priorities right, you know? Having written that I do feel it’s unfair, as I’m sure those people have suffered enough in other ways. But do I want to work for a place that won’t keep me because I don’t fit a box, but will readily keep others who don’t publish, can’t teach, have criminal records, or are generally unpleasant? I always believed completely that the university was a meritocracy and it’s been quite a revelation to realise that it isn’t. I don’t think I will ever understand exactly what happened, and why. The other study support tutor, a retired gentleman who works with the mathematicians and the scientists is still doing his job. I’m glad about that – he is kind and experienced and the students need him. But I can’t help but feel that my (relative) youth and femininity and my conflict-avoidant nature went against me. I can’t tell you how much it has helped to receive so many messages of support and surprise from former students and colleagues. One of the best responses I’ve had came from the porter on Sunday duty, who stood there in complete shock with his head on one side saying ‘It just don’t seem right.’

Anyway, enough, I can close the door on all that and be thankful. I don’t need to understand. But I do feel overcome by this strange lethargy and I was wondering why. Happily I saw my reiki practitioner today and thank you again to those of you who suggested reiki and brought this wonderful woman into my life. I thought maybe it was the loss of a sense of belonging, as the university is very much like a big family. But when Jodie asked me if I was troubled by the thought of standing alone, I knew that I wasn’t in the least. I’ve always preferred to be on my own, and the group mentality never sits well with me. Did I mind about my career? Well, no, not really. My proper university career ended when I gave up teaching French literature and this has just been a long epilogue. Perhaps, Jodie suggested, it was just the effect of no longer being constrained to keep up a certain role. And that, I knew at once, was exactly it. For me, being in academia came with a lot of standards I had to keep up, a huge philosophy of careful attentiveness, pedantry, precision, loyalty, engagement. I chose to do this because it seemed right. But it turns out to be a burden I can now lay down. It’s much like having had your hands tied behind your back for a long time. Once the ropes are undone you are at first numb. But when feeling returns it’s painful. The very release itself turns out to hurt.

So, as I reassemble myself into my new shape, I have to say the self-medication with books and films has been going well. I can thoroughly recommend Roman Holiday to everyone. Audrey Hepburn won the Oscar for it, and no wonder. She is utterly adorable. And Gregory Peck is completely gorgeous. A few nights later I decided to follow up with a Doris Day film and chose Pillow Talk. When Mister Litlove came in to see what I was watching, I told him that it was an odd thing, but Gregory Peck turned out to be more handsome in black and white than he was in colour. Mister Litlove looked at the screen. ‘That’s Rock Hudson,’ he said. Well, he was right, and that did explain a few things. I’m not sure what to watch next. I have the first season of Downton Abbey that’s a strong contender, or I might work my way through my Hitchcock and Woody Allen collection again. Whatever it is, it won’t be anything too demanding.

Sinking In

I don’t know how to thank you all for the amazing support you’ve given me over the past few days. I’ve been completely overwhelmed and immensely grateful.  Thanks to you, and to my family who’s been fantastic, a horrible experience has been made entirely bearable.

The good news is that I feel a great deal better than I did about leaving my college. The bad news is that I’m instantly down with a throat infection. But that is what I think might be termed a healing crisis. I seem only able to process big emotions viscerally, and my goodness it was SUCH a shock. I think I know what being run down by a truck must feel like. All chronic fatigue phenomena have on one level a protective function, and my body has registered that something large and truck-like or bullet-like has hit me and so its instant response is to lie me low for a bit until the danger passes. But also, and finally, the last part of the old structure of being has been plucked out, and it seems to be a perfectly clean wound that now needs to heal up. And it will.

My relationship to the university was never a wholly healthy one – if indeed it’s possible to have that. I approached it always as a very good girl with something to prove, and I would put myself entirely to one side in order to be pleasing and appeasing in any way the university wanted. I never quite managed to forge a better relationship than that, and if I hung onto my old job, it was partly because I still had a romance with the university and still felt it might love me a bit. But also partly to have this great monument to achievement by my side where it would stand in for anything I might personally lack. So it will be very good for me not to be able to define myself in that way any more. I’ll have to be just me, and accept that it’s enough.

And of course you are all quite right – I’ve got a big open opportunity now to do new things, and that will be exciting. First of all, I’ve got my autumn back. No need to battle the elements, regretting the dying of the light, cursing the ever colder weather. I can stay cosy at home and write when I feel like it (this is not quite how Mister Litlove is envisaging it: he has more of a Colette and Willy scenario going on, whereby he counts the number of pages I’ve produced at the end of the day). But first of all I’m taking a holiday to get over the shock of it all. I’m reading Anthony Horowitz’s surprisingly good pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, The House of Silk, and listening to audio books of Poirot’s early cases and an old favourite novel, The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler. And I have Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck to watch in Roman Holiday. So you can see I am self-medicating in style. I’m not looking forward to packing up my rooms, but I can take a little time over it and, when I’m feeling better, I’ll be able to blog regularly and devote some time to getting The Best of New Writing on the Web up and running. I’ll be just fine. Thank you all so much for helping me to be that.