New Jobs
I've announced a few places (though apparently not here) that I started a new job a little while back.
It's been an intense experience over this last month-plus, not least because of the weird timing of starting this new role. During my first week on the job, I was in Austria serving on a grant panel Monday and Tuesday, traveled home on Wednesday, and then was in the office Thursday and Friday. This was, in fact, the third job in a row that I've started elsewhere: my first days at the MLA were spent at a Scholarly Communication Institute gathering at the University of Virginia, and my first day as Director of Digital Humanities at MSU was spent driving from Brooklyn to Michigan. Some day I will actually start a new job in the intended fashion.
Not this time, however. During my second week in the role, I was in Montreal at the annual INKE gathering Monday and Tuesday, traveled home on Wednesday, and then was in the office Thursday and Friday.
During my third week, I was actually in the office Monday through Thursday! And then went on a pre-planned vacation on Friday, which stretched through the following Thursday, which was July 4. Which means that during my first four weeks, I spent nine days on site.
Other than that vacation, though, I was working, even though I felt a bit at a loss as to what it was I was actually supposed to be doing, much less how to do it. I've learned a lot in the meantime -- not least how much I have yet to learn.
I've been having these flashbacks to getting started at the MLA, however, and how exhausted and overwhelmed I felt for months on end. As our executive director, Rosemary Feal, told me back then, the exhaustion is real: learning that much every moment of the day will wear you right out. The challenges inherent in any profession built around ideas of knowledge, mastery, expertise, and so on, coupled with the million daily moments of not-knowing, both large and small, that come with any kind of new job (how do we handle this kind of request? who worked on this process last year? do I have the authority to sign this document? where do we keep the sticky notes?) add up to spending a good bit of time getting really intimate with one's own sense of feeling stupid.
I just keep reminding myself that it's the nature of new jobs: you haven't done these things before, so of course you don't know how to do them. I'm learning more every day. And it's an enormous privilege to get to spend this time learning, and to have the chance to work with amazing people in support of a college whose purpose and vision I really believe in.
That doesn't fully mitigate the feeling-stupid parts, or the general exhaustion and overwhelm, but it does help me remember that I have been in a position like this before, and that I can learn what I need to know to succeed.
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