Who am I? The alt-ac/ post-ac reinvention

After one decade teaching at Japanese universities in different roles, I am now trying to gather the courage to go explore what else might be out there. The pandemic years have been hard, mentally as well as emotionally, and I have, like many others, become ever so slightly disenchanted with tertiary education and the academia in general. You’ll have freedom and flexibility, they said. Think about the long holidays, they said. The ugly truth? Week-ends are for workshops and reading groups, summer and winter breaks for writing papers. Admin tasks are communicated in messages that arrive at small hours and will take the better half of the morning or late afternoon to get taken care of. In the end, too much time is spent in meetings or replying to emails, and too little time, joy, and energy remain for reading and writing, not to mention knitting or pottery. While the “publish or perish” culture is alive and well, I kick an squirm trying to invent the 26-hour day; failing that (doh!), hiking and skiing trips get postponed indefinitely, family trips are coupled with conference attendances, and one more literature major stops reading literature for fun.

Perhaps it is not too late to re-invent myself, or at least to rediscover some of the fun in reading (without deadlines and notes). Perhaps I’ll do just that here.

First of all, I know what a gross privilege it is to be sitting in front of a computer, on a comfortable sofa and in a warm room, ranting about happiness and having a mid-life and/ or identity crisis. 60 or so years ago, my grandparents didn’t have this luxury, because they were busy working, raising children in the aftermath of a world war and in the looming shadow of an emergent communist dictatorship; 30 years later, my parents had to do more or less the same while navigating the uncertain waters of the new and “original” democracy sweeping over the small Eastern European country I was born in, so no such dawdling for them either.

I turn 44 in a month or so — and it is often quite easy to forget that only 150 years ago 44 would have been my entire life expectancy! Where my great-great-great-(etc) parents were dying suddenly of the plague or slowly with consumption, I get to agonise over what to do with the next half of my (expected) life. Talk about first-world, twenty-first century problems…

But talk about them I will, because reinvent myself (even if only a little bit) I must — if I am to survive, nay, thrive! for the 30 to 40 years that lay ahead of me. To set off this reinvention process, today I’ll list a few things I like to do that might also be used to make a living (I think):

• reading stuff and talking/ writing about the stuff I’ve read (and beyond)
• translating (especially literature, but not only) from Japanese to English and Romanian
• proofreading and editing English academic and literary pieces
• mentoring others, helping them organise their thoughts in writing or otherwise
• coordinating events, bringing people together, starting conversations

For the most part, I am able to do all this in the academy, too. But what if I were to do it outside of the academy, i.e., without all the admin emails and meetings, without the microaggressions and power struggles? Ah, would that I could! And I could, no?