Today I feel like a “you.” You feel like a “you.” So, second person in this post.

These past months you’ve joked that you’re not just burned out at work, you’re checked out. The problem is worse than that, you fear. You have become alienated from your craft, from history itself. You have no “project” to work on and, while you have ideas, no inspiration or drive or desire to do anything about those ideas lies behind them. You think of the whole academic endeavor, the whole process of doing this thing of history, and you feel pointless.

That’s not to say that doing history is pointless. You look at some of the people you know who have a passion for their work and envy them. They have burning questions about the past that they want to find out. Those questions go deeper than the particular story they tell in a book or article. For them, history is the means to another end. They have a mission, and history helps them tell the reason for the mission. Many of these people are from marginalized groups in the study of the past — people of color, LGBTQ+, women — people who have experience intersectional oppressions in their lives and want to know the source of that oppression, the reasons and ways that their persons, and people like them, were deemed “wrong” or “deviant” or silenced. Or, they are working class, wanting to know the reasons for the endurance of poverty and oligarchy. That’s all so fascinating. You wish you had that — whatever it is that pulls them forward.

You try to think what pulled you forward in the past. Two factors come to mind: survival and wanting to read a book that did not exist. Survival is a topic for another time — maybe several other times. It has been the driving principle for most of you adult life. Wanting to read a book that did not exist may be a cliche’, but it’s a good cliche’. You need neither to survive at the moment (at least you tell myself that so you can survive), nor do you know of any books that you have a burning desire to read that don’t yet exist. You don’t even want to read the ones that you’re supposed to read to review, in spite of them being good books.

What drove you to become a historian? You ask yourself, in the hopes that you will find that drive again. As the education sorts say, “remember your ‘why'” At — what was it? Twenty-something years old, still living with you parents, terrified of debt, terrified of making a wrong move, terrified of not being able to support yourself, terrified of being a woman (not in a trans way, but in a not-a-little-girl way, which is also another story), raised to be terrified of falling off of the narrow tightrope of a future that you were supposed to walk to some cubicle in some highrise in flourescent lights where your brain would rot into mush in between hour-long commutes in stop-and-go traffic — at that age, what was your why?

You’re getting shivers in your gut just remembering.

Escaping that terror was really your reason. Books had been your escape. Stories your escape. Majoring in English as an undergraduate was escape. You had no real career goal, just vague ideas that you gave to shut people up when they asked or to feel like you had a purpose while reading. (People should ask college students what they are learning, what they like about their education, not “what do you plan to do with that?”) You considered going to grad school for English in order to keep reading, but you already had some trepidation about the academic world, although you’re not sure from where except maybe stereotypes. You had wanted to write novels, really, but two creative writing classes and attempts on your own convinced me that you had no stories in you and hadn’t since you stopped filling notebooks with them in your early teens. History seemed to split the difference. History had the stories right there, you just had to tell them. You imagined a future in which you found yourself in some stupid academic argument over some trivial detail. At least the things had actually happened in history.

Oh, how naive I was!

Graduate school and the subsequent jobs became a series of episodes requiring survival and escape. Looking back now, survival and escape were two things so deeply entwined as to become inseparable. History, the craft and skills from it, and the lack of any other crafts or skills, became the vehicle for survival and escape. All other stories for other times. Now, no longer escaping, no longer surviving, what’s left? The vehicle. What purpose does the vehicle serve?

The purpose is the inspiration, the “why,” the mission driving it. You don’t have it right now. You feel alienated.

Maybe that’s not so bad. Maybe, like like molting, shedding an old, too tight skin, to become something else; or maybe it’s like losing your parents, both grief and liberation.