Coping 7: Being multiple

For better or for worse, coming of age in a North America of extreme hustle culture, and in an academic job market that was already starting to get very competitive, taught me the importance of being focused and monomaniacal. Before pursuing a doctorate, I'd been active in a lot of art and design activities, and busy with the promotion of Free/Libre and Open Source Software to artists and designers. In short, I had a lot of projects. The extremely intense experience of my doctorate, the competitive nature of the job market, and the rise in the importance of personal branding that were all happening in the 2010s all worked together to teach me that everything I was doing needed to somehow be legible in my professional identity. How does the F/LOSS stuff fit into the academic work, how does the current project fit into the overall research agenda? Throw in working all the hours you can get because you love your job (and it's a vocation), and you get a recipe for a very intense view of the role of work in personal identity.

In the last five or six years, I've been (like many people) unpicking the relationship between my work life and my non-work life. One of the realizations that's become important in that context is that accomplishments outside of work also exist. For me, having a hobby I can excel at (I know, I know) has been one outlet. Baby steps, because it may even be possible to do things one enjoys without having to be great at them, but being able to find external foci has, for me, been a revelation. I can be good at things other than work! I can be an accomplished person, even in the eyes of others, outside the prism of my professional identity. So today's coping method is being multiple. Allowing oneself to be more than one kind of person, someone who does more than one kind of thing, without every activity needing to contribute to "brand you." When totally engrossed in a professional identity, the hobbies, the groups, the commitments and values that don't contribute to professional clout are easy to sacrifice. But, like the eye of the dragonfly, they provide a wider field of view, even if it's a little less focused.