It’s been a while I since I was last here, which is explained quite easily: three days after my last post, I was readmitted to hospital with a bowel perforation caused by my previous acute diverticulitis and sepsis. I very fortunately avoided surgery, but I was very unwell. I’ve had sick leave, worked on reduced hours, and am only now shortly due to return to my “normal” workload.
I thought quite carefully about whether I wanted to share the photos I’ve included here. People often praise me for my honesty in this space, but it is of course a curated honesty, designed to protect myself and my family. How much of my own vulnerability do I want people to see?
I’ve thought about this a lot over the past couple of years, both professionally and personally. After my latest hospital admission I told my therapist that in hospital I’d thought “I have got to stop having new issues to talk to you about,” and he laughed and looked sort of pained at the same time. Trauma veterans, you know where we’re at.
The context for that thought – at 2am in A&E – was a brief moment of internal levity after what was, quite frankly, one of the most physically traumatic experiences of my life. Long time readers of this blog know that’s a pretty high stakes game, given my medical history. I am pretty good at digging into horror and finding something to smile about – not because I am some kind of naive Pollyanna, or because I feel obliged to look on the bright side, but because there is something innate within me that refuses to be entirely quashed.
One of the downsides of this, though, is that people don’t always quite grasp how ill I have been, or how long my road to full recovery is likely to be. After the immediate crisis has passed – bereavement, a health emergency – it’s very easy for people to assume that the still surface of the water is all there is. They see the swan gliding, not the hard paddling going on just out of sight.
I recently attended a conference in honour of my former PhD supervisor, Jeremy Goldberg, on the occasion of his retirement. I gave a paper, and in it I reflected on some of the lessons I learned from Jeremy, and the work I have been doing in my own career to become – inch by inch – the kind of feminist historian I want to be, rather than necessarily the kind the academy rewards. Here is an extract from that paper.
It’s unsurprising that there are gaps in my publications list, and I know when I am applying for grants and other things that require the inclusion of a CV, there is usually a place on the form to explain those gaps, to excuse lacunae and holes.
Except: my life hasn’t been empty, has it? The hollow places where academic publications or journal editorial positions or major grants are supposed to be have been full of life – sometimes too full, in ways that it frankly seems insulting to reduce to a bald paragraph on a form. Of late I have thought how fundamentally unfeminist it seems to squeeze the stuff of life into the margins of our job applications and indeed, into our jobs.
Jeremy, of course, has been a prolific and brilliant academic as well as a tirelessly engaged teacher. But one of the best things about him, in the two decades I’ve known him, is that he always made me feel as if I as a person came first, and while he was eager for me to succeed academically – what supervisor isn’t? – he understood and validated my desire to put myself and my family first. That’s certainly not a given amongst academics. I had quite a few trials and tribulations during my PhD, from the usual chaotic dramas you might associate with people in their mid-20s, to other more complex kinds of pain. Jeremy and Nicola both supported me through those, giving me space to breathe but keeping me accountable – and I honestly sometimes still miss that. Who doesn’t occasionally wish they had a supervisor to lovingly kick them up the backside? I’m sure I exasperated them both with my delinquent approach to deadlines and haphazard notetaking, but they never tried to turn me into versions of themselves. They always asked me questions that made my academic voice clearer, my arguments stronger. They kept me honest (apart from in my promises about how quickly I would deliver chapters – sorry about that), and it is something that has inspired me in my own supervisory work today, and in my academic work more widely.
…
Once I was interested in asking questions that transformed medieval studies; these days I’m mostly interested in the spaces between questions, cracks through which our colleagues slip out of the field or lose pace with their peers. I am interested in the radical potential of kindness and of doing just enough rather than too much. Perhaps for me being a feminist historian means remembering I am a person first and a historian – not even second, but somewhere further down the line among other things I find important. Perhaps being a feminist historian means remembering that about all of you, too.
Here’s to recovery; here’s to radical kindness, to ourselves and others; here’s to just enough, to make space for everything else that matters.
If you’re so minded, you can tip me for my work on ko-fi. Thanks, always, for your support!
Rachel E. Moss 