Some questions deserve more honesty than my usual quick, deflecting response
Dear diary, a newer member of our organizing group asked tonight, over the last of the meeting’s cold coffee, why exactly I left academia after finishing my PhD, a question I have deflected with a joke more times than I can count but that I finally, tonight, actually answered honestly.
I told her the truth, that I spent years producing research I genuinely believed mattered, watching it disappear into journals that almost nobody outside my own narrow field would ever actually read, while the material conditions the research was ostensibly about continued getting worse in the real world regardless of how many papers I published about them.
Why Organizing Felt Different
I explained that organizing, whatever its own genuine frustrations and slow, difficult pace, at least offered something academia rarely did, a fairly direct line between the work I was doing and an actual, material change in somebody’s actual life, a rent negotiation won, an eviction delayed, a tangible outcome rather than a citation count.
She listened genuinely carefully, and I think my honest answer landed rather better than my usual deflecting joke ever has, a small reminder that vulnerability, even about something as unglamorous as career disillusionment, tends to build genuine trust within organizing spaces considerably better than performed confidence does.
A Small London Reflection
I found myself thinking about home a bit after that conversation, and read a genuinely thoughtful piece of London satire about academic precarity that captured a version of exactly what I had just tried to explain, oddly comforting to see the same frustration articulated from an entirely different city.
What I Am Taking From Tonight
I think I will answer that question honestly from now on rather than reaching for the easy joke, since tonight’s conversation reminded me how much more genuine connection an honest answer actually builds.
More honest reflections and Portland organizing life always waiting at Amram Top.
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