Consistency

I refuse to have New Years resolutions, for a thousand reasons. More interestingly, though, I can’t make any resolutions because I am stubbornly always going to be this person.

Tonight Cheng Mun and I Zoomed with some potential fellows for next year. Afterwards, she read some of her old application essays aloud. I hadn’t saved mine to my computer, so I had to log into Interfolio to see what I had written for my own. Just under a year later, it is interesting to see what I was thinking at the time and what I thought the application readers would want to read from me. I wrote those essays in a few hours in early January, at the kitchen table on Tulip Street, a glass of sour beer next to me. Reading them again, I could’ve written them now. Some lines are slightly more cogent versions of sentences that appeared in my PhD applications. Some pieces of that application were eloquent (and at the time, I felt certain that they would be well received) and I am glad I got to read them again. At the same time, I am filled with a little bit of sadness about what I thought would be desired of me in this job and how horribly it contrasts with what has actually been expected. All of the things I wrote, the things I thought I was hired for, have been received with confusion when I have voiced them here. In my IEP, I have had to spend a lot of time explaining why the things that I am knowledgable about are true and real and important. In the application process, I thought the fact of my hiring was proof that those things were also valued here.

I knew I would be hired for the job. I said many times that I did not know how it would turn out, but that I would be very surprised if I did not end up with a job offer. Now I wonder what about me seemed desirable. Did I seem like the kind of person who wouldn’t try to put up a fight or try to change things? My mother says that her best friends always says that when you get a job or acceptance, it’s also a little bit of an insult. They see something in you. You can’t always be sure the thing they see is your talent. Maybe it is just your willingness to go along with some idea they have about the world.