Tall Trees Catch the Breeze

Good Morning, Fellow Tall Trees!

I hope everyone is keeping going, even if that means that you are keeping going on the couch with snacks watching something truly ridiculous. Sometimes, that’s exactly what keeping going looks like. In fact, I think we all should commit to doing more of that style of keeping going.

However, this post is about a different facet of keeping going. This post is about context and background for clarity. My latest and largest breeze-catching period started during the summer of 2023. I left a job I loved because I told my truth, and some people got quite upset about it and indicated that they were going to do something that would not exactly make my life a healthy one.

In May of 2023, I defended my doctoral dissertation, which was an autoethnographic study on my gendered experiences as a school leader. Autoethnography is a form of qualitative research in which the subject is oneself.  Accordingly, I was the only subject in my study, confirmed by the Institutional Review Board and various ethical checks and balances within my university. Any dissertation study must go through such an extensive university approval process (which I did), have a committee of professors in the field or fields of relevant study (which I had), and go through months of submissions, edits, feedback, and careful discussions to ensure that the study meets all of the academic and ethical parameters of the academy and presents a cogent, literature-supported document worthy of a doctoral award.

My committee was a dream team of women academics, all exceedingly respected in their fields – wickedly smart and unafraid to give me feedback that was, at times, OWWWWWCH. I was lucky. My chair is an absolute unmitigated badass with impeccable music tastes (the latter is less relevant to this story, but said music tastes cannot be understated nor overmentioned). My second and third readers are equally academically solid, although I don’t know their musical tastes as well as I do my chair’s. The point here is this: These women were highly respected academics in their fields, and my dissertation was far better than I could ever have imagined it because of them.

Which is why, over a year after my dissertation’s publication, it was rather surprising that other individuals felt so strongly about it that they contacted the university to contest its veracity. It was a study of MYSELF, and yet other individuals contested it, which in retrospect, is really, really fitting.

Emails were exchanged, and I received unwavering support from the university administration – even intimating that perhaps I had a good civil case on my hands, but the damage according to said other individuals was done. Rather than engage in a protracted fight – one that legal counsel characterized as “a sexy case,” I left.

I left a community I loved.

Kids whom I loved.

Educators whom I loved.

Families whom I loved.

Without much explanation to them, as required in my separation.

When it all first happened, I would spend hours doing the math over and over in my head. Not once – then or now – did I ever come up with a different answer. The decision was either sacrifice myself or leave, and I could no longer continue to do the former. For 11 years, I had sacrificed myself in large and small ways to fit what other people wanted me to be – other people who had the power to make me miserable. I poured my heart and soul into that job, but rarely, if ever, did I feel my soul nourished from anyone above me. It is a testament to the love I felt with the students, families, and educators in my care that I lasted as long as I did.  

In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed (2017) noted that authentic self-care “is about finding a way to exist in a world that makes it difficult to exist” (p. 239). She wrote that an essential part of this self-care is  “reassembl[ing] ourselves through the ordinary, everyday, and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other” (p. 240).

Our self-preservation is deeply rooted in caring for one other. This blog is dedicated to all of the women who have twisted and contorted and quieted themselves to fit a place that never, ever had their best interests at heart. Who question things that don’t sound right, who are terrified of doing the brave thing but do it anyway, and who wonder if they will even find a place where they truly fit.

You fit here.

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.

My dissertation (it’s long): https://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/etd/1285/