Choosing the Tower

It’s 3:30 in the morning and I can’t sleep.

The reason I can’t sleep is that I’m on the academic job market, applying for jobs as a professor to start next academic year. So far, I’ve applied to 22 tenure-track jobs and one postdoctoral fellowship; I have three more postdoc applications to submit in the coming week. These numbers are relatively low, and some people on the market end up applying for 80+ jobs, but I’m a historian of philosophy, and job postings are even more limited for me than they are for philosophers in general. As a rule, postings for “philosophy” that don’t specifically ask for history don’t hire historians, and it’s considered a waste of time to apply. So even though I’ve applied for everything even remotely connected to my area of specialization, I’m still at the relatively low number of 26.

We’re hitting the time of year that first-round decisions are being made about who gets a job interview and who gets cut from the running. Of the 23 positions I’ve applied to, 6 have contacted me to notify me that I’m no longer under consideration. One has offered an interview to one of my colleagues (who is a fabulous scholar and absolutely deserves it), but has not bothered to contact me; this means they’ve rejected me and couldn’t be bothered to notify me. And for an eighth job, there’s a rumor going around not only that they’re really looking to hire senior faculty, but that my adviser of all people is under consideration; he gave an impromptu “guest lecture” to their department that looks suspiciously like a job talk. So we can comfortably say I’m not going to get what’s behind door #8.

That leaves 15 places that I’m still waiting to hear back from, along with the last three applications I still have yet to submit. And I wait. And wait. And wait.

Every time my phone buzzes, I get a spike of adrenaline. Every time I open my inbox, I’m intellectually aware that my “one unread message” is probably a promotional email from some company that isn’t hiring philosophy professors, but I can’t help it. The stress is getting to me.

Each position has received more than 250 applicants. Two hundred and fifty applications for one spot–that’s less than half a percent of a chance of getting any given job. Since there are only 22 tenure-track jobs on offer, only about 8% of applicants will walk away from this cycle with jobs in hand.

Holy hell, I’m stressed.

Look. I don’t have to stay in academia. I’m perfectly happy trying to finish this degree and then walking way with the letters DR in front of my name and doing something else with my life. Nonetheless, I love teaching; wanting to teach is why I went to grad school in the first place.* I don’t need a job as a professor, but I really want one. Moreover, even though I know that there’s more to life than academia and there are plenty of other things I could do, I don’t have that much of a concrete sense of what those other things are. My graduate program is designed entirely with the assumption that all its students will go on to become professors, and I’ve received no professional training in other possible career paths, so I don’t even really know what options are available to me. I can (and likely will) find those out, but I’ll confess, it’s a daunting prospect.

All of this stress is completely foreseeable, foreseen, and expected. Back in September, I got a Tarot reading about my trajectory in grad school and on the job market. I was having incredible difficulties with my adviser (who is, all things told, not a bad man, but whose approach to mentorship consists of exacting expectations that are never communicated in advance, resulting in me often feeling belittled, bullied, and like my time has been wasted working on things he didn’t actually want me to do). I was worried not only about going on the job market, but about trying to finish the degree at all; it felt like my adviser was giving me the runaround, and I worried that I’d be stuck in a pattern of my work never being good enough until I ran out of funding and had to drop from my program. I was seriously considering just walking away from it all. Truth be told, if I’d had a good sense of what non-academic job opportunities were out there, I probably would have; one of the things that kept me from quitting was simple inertia and the fact that I didn’t know where else I would go.

That reading was filled with eights—cards about a pressing need for motion and change. There were cards indicating a conflict of wills, futility, and a general feeling of helplessness. The overall message of the reading was something’s gotta give. My situation at the time was untenable, and I either had to walk away or initiate some serious change.

Two cards—the bottom right of the reading—indicated what would happen if I stayed in grad school and tried to stick it out. Those two cards were the Tower and the Aeon (Judgment in RWS systems). The message: “If you stay, it’s going to be a Tower experience. It’s going to get worse. But you come out all right on the other side.”

This reading presented dropping out as a much easier (and, to be clear, still respectable!) path. Walking away from that reading, I fully intended to quit grad school. But in the short term, I kept doing the work, because I was still pulling a paycheck. And as I did that work, one thing led to another and I ended up scraping together a set of job application materials that I’m actually quite proud of. I kept at the work, and I accidentally ended up making a lot of progress—honestly, more progress than I’d made at all up to that point in my dissertation work. If nothing else, trying to get together materials for the job market helped me clarify the dissertation project, distill my research down, and provide a more coherent shape to the work as a whole.

Even if I don’t land a job as a professor (which is by far the most likely outcome), the work I’ve done toward the job market has been time well spent. I’m so much closer to finishing the dissertation and getting my degree than I would have been without going on the job market, and it actually feels like a possibility now. There’s a ton more work between here and the finish line, but I think I can actually do it. I can actually get this doctorate.

At least, that’s how I feel right now. The feeling varies from day to day.

But getting the doctorate is still months and months away. And in the meantime, I’m sitting awake in my room in the middle of the night (it’s now 4:30), because as much as I know I’ll be fine in the long run, the short run is full of job applications I haven’t heard back from. I am stressed, and I’m depressed. I didn’t leave the house yesterday, except to buy boxed macaroni and cheese and to pick up a cake from a local bakery. (I thought cake sounded good, but then I had a slice and all the sugar in it made me feel sick.) All I want to do is curl up in bed, sleep, watch mindless YouTube videos, and anxiously avoid looking at my phone.

I am, in short, not in a great place right now.

It’ll pass. I know it will. But I keep coming back to that Tarot reading, and the prediction of what would happen if I tried to stick it out in grad school. The eventual outcome is the Aeon, but first comes the Tower. Right now, I’m unable to sleep, I have no appetite, I generally have no interest in anything, I’m unmotivated to exercise (which is always a sign of deteriorating mental health for me), and I’m so, so, so anxious about the future. I know things will be fine eventually, but they’re not fine now.

But hey, that’s the Tower for ya.

It’s a weird feeling, walking into this with my eyes wide open, making the decision to stick with my graduate work even though I knew I’d hit this wall. I don’t know that it was the right decision, or a terribly smart one, but it’s the decision I made. Now, I just have to stick with it and see it through to the end. I’m in the middle of the Tower, and I have to see it through until the Aeon. Wish me luck.

In the meantime, I’ll keep checking my email. 15 more applications to go.

[A final note: Please do not comment on this post with words of advice, or even encouragement. I know it comes from a good place, really I do, but it’s not helpful and it’s not wanted at this time.]

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*To be honest, I’m not all that interested in teaching high school, although it’s certainly a possibility; I like teaching people who have already reached adulthood.