Changing perceptions

It's amazing what a total of six days in a car and five with the in-laws can do to a person's brain. The Dear Husband (DH) and I just returned from seeing his family. We went for his sister's wedding. It was beautiful and more fun than any wedding has a right to be. The best part was that since everyone was focused on the wedding I didn't get the usual interrogation. "When will you be done?" "When are you moving back here?" or the more subtle version "Do you think you'll stay in Middletown when you are done?" The questions were asked here and there, but no one was really paying attention, so it was okay.

Actually, this time I got more questions about what I do and what I plan to write about. Trying to put my work into everyday terms was a good exercise. It seemed to be going pretty well, except the DH kept swooping in to "rescue" people from my boring conversation. (Yes, that was as irritating as you can imagine.) As my brother-in-law Bull (pseudonymed because he looks just like Micheal Cudlitz in Band of Brothers) and I talked about the project, I realized he wasn't quite getting it. Something about the way I explained things didn't really make sense to him. My frame of reference contained an assumption he didn't share. About that time the DH stepped in and I lost my train of thought about it for a few days.

It wasn't until a couple of days later as I drove through the third state of the day that I realized what hadn't worked in our conversation. At the very core of my project and how I think about the world around me is the assumption that language is powerful. Language not only shapes the world around us, it acts upon us. The missing step in my discussion with Bull was the very first one. I needed to say, "I start with the idea that language is powerful." It is because language has this power that the way we use it requires constant critique. Bull, and almost everyone else who is not in this profession, doesn't necessarily start from that assumption. He doesn't think about language in the same way.

Great. So, now I have a place to start when talking about my work. But, that was not the revelation for me. The revelation was about how naturalized my academic life has become. It is often something I think of as separate from myself. At the very least I think of it as a separate aspect of myself, not really a part of the core of who I am. But how I see the world, how I engage with the world, is absolutely influenced by my academic life. "Duh!" is an appropriate response to this revelation. It is a revelation I needed to have because much of my grad school experience has been spent trying to maintain a distance between my "real" life and my academic life. The fear that my life would begin to revolve solely around work and the academy, which would alienate me from my friends and family, was so great I tried to completely compartmentalize these two aspects of myself. Realizing how naturally my academic life fits in with the rest of my life helps me to see that it can compliment the rest of my life without taking it over.