For much of my graduate student career I suffered bouts of depression, cynicism, and existential despair. It seemed either that I was failing academia or that academia was failing me. I oscillated between raging against the machine—how is it possible to read five hundred pages in a week?—and turning that rage inward—why can’t you read five hundred pages in a week? For some time after defending, I couldn’t speak of graduate school without bitterness. I took comfort in articulating academia’s sins (and continued to despair my own).

Now, three and some years later, I’m no longer inclined to cast my struggles in graduate school as a morality play. I can see my failure to flourish as something much more mundane: a misalignment. The tempo of teaching and research, the incentive system of academia, and the relatively lonely work of traditional humanistic scholarship didn’t align well with my own needs—for balance, for social impact, and for meeting shared goals through cocreative work.

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