 40 here. Welcome to 40 University. Got a real-life academic. Someone who got her PhD. Unlike 40, I didn't even graduate with my BA. But I love the world of academia because my father got two PhDs. So I love the life of the mind. And you, Dr. Lisa Monroe, you wrote an essay that affected a lot of people. So I just want to read a few paragraphs from this essay. You wrote it in 2017, I believe. I've been out of academia for two years having finished my PhD in 2015. I think I'm finally on the road to healing. I often joke that leaving academia feels like the worst breakup ever, except that I'm not joking. Giving up on something you thought was your life's calling hurts like hell when you experience rejection from the entire industry of academia after devoting years of your life and thousands of dollars to become an academic, betrayal and rage sometimes become your only emotions for a good long while. So it's now about four years since you published this. What does it feel like to have these these words read back to you? It's a little it's and hello and thank you so much for doing this with me. I'm so excited to do your show. I think I'm a little bit, so there's a lot of, there's a lot of quit lit like a lot of academics when they leave academia, they write these and people have done it sort of better than I ever will. But a lot of people, a lot of people find I think some solace in writing about their experiences because this really does feel traumatic for people. You know, these lives that we expected to have these jobs we expected to have this this culture we expected to have does not exist or we are excluded or we it's not it's untenable or for lots of different reasons it's not working out. And it really does feel awful. I mean I think I spent probably let's see that was 2017 I graduated in 2015 so I was two years out from my PhD and still trying to make sense of what had happened. Who am I now? What does this mean? Am I still a scholar? Should I bother with my scholarship? What will I do with my life now? Everything seemed very up in the air and very uncertain at that time. And so I look back on it and I'm I'm a little bit embarrassed about it now but it really did feel that way. And so now I've just I actually after that in 2018 I actually ended up getting a job with a very tiny college directing a study abroad program. And that was really great until I got laid off in December because of COVID. And so I said to somebody I said you know the first time you break up with academia it feels absolutely awful. And the second time is kind of meh like it's just not that big of a deal anymore. So because I've already been through lots of life transition and it just was sort of one more life transition. So the intensity of the emotions has become both less frequent and less intense? Yeah I think so. It's it's become um it has become part of my story but it's not the story anymore. At the time I wrote my essay it was the story. Those feelings were absolutely the story. And now I look back on that and I'm like yeah that's part of it. But I've got some other stuff going on too and new feelings and new projects and you know life is things turned out okay. And I noticed on your Twitter bio something I don't recall seeing before though I'm sure it's been there for probably hundreds of people but you put adopt D in your Twitter profile. So is that rare because I don't recall seeing that before. I put that there because I wanted I want people who are adopted to be able to find me. That's become um that's become an important an important marker of identity for me in the last I don't know maybe five years maybe 10 years. I've started really connecting with people who have had that same experience and there are a lot of similarities. And I talk about that experience a lot on Twitter because just pop you just I think we all have this idea that that being adopted is is such a great it's so great right. It's a it's a it's a win-win-win for it's an easy solution to social problems. And then if you start thinking about it for a couple minutes it starts getting intimately more complex and more complicated and has some and and these really significant problems start coming to light. So I'm pretty active on Twitter talking about that. At what age did you learn you're an adoptee. Oh always. My parents there are a lot of parents who my parents that you know I could be any adopted kid in the 70s. But my parents adopted me at this point when adopted parents were finally being told to tell as early as possible. And so my parents did that. So it was like we always like read these like kids books. And there was a lot of kind of normalizing that experience in my family. So like there was never like a gotcha or a surprise moment. It was like just something I always knew. But I didn't start thinking about it until until much later in my life when I started searching for family and searching for some medical history and searching for the what I felt like were these missing pieces of my of my life. And how old were you when you were adopted. I was two months old. So that's that's you know it's not uncommon for kids to be adopted at birth. So it took me so I was in foster care. And it's it's weird not knowing where you were for the first couple months of your life. That's sort of strange. And then you know I don't have any I don't have any baby pictures in those months either. Like it's just kind of a I'm missing it's kind of a hole. So it's it's a little yeah it feels a little strange to not have some of those pieces still. And I can't help but asking what kind of relationship have you had with your adopting parents. They're great. My dad died a couple years ago. My mom and I have a great relationship. And I often tell people when I tell people that I've searched and I found birth family and continued a relationship with them. A lot of times people will ask me well like what is your what is your mother think. And I'm like well you know she's fine like I'm struggling she's fine. So it's it's it's interesting how yeah it's finding searching and finding it's often I think we see it as a rejection of parents. But I really think you can have a wonderful relationship with your adopted parents and still want to know these things that they can't tell you. And did you have siblings either biological and or in your adopted adoptive family. Yes I have one adopted brother and two biological half brothers. So I'm wealthy and brothers. And when when did you find out who your biological parents were and what kind of relationship have you had with them. I was 38 years old which was which seems so late. But I think that's not uncommon in the adoptive community. A lot of people some people are still waiting until their adopted parents die before they search because they're so afraid of hurting their feelings. And that was not my case. But I wanted to there were just things I wanted to know. I wanted to know medical history. I wanted to see someone who looked like me and I wanted to know kind of what their story was. So I was 38 years old and I did I searched and I found I gathered up all this. It's a long story but I did a lot of research and through researching and public records I was able to make contact. And what happened. It was yeah it's a it's a big moment when you you make contact because you don't know what the response is going to be is this person going to reject you. I mean a lot of birth mothers from the 60s and 70s they were told to never never never talk about their children ever again. Pretend that they were dead. So you can imagine it's very shocking when someone does make contact. And so I wrote a letter and I said I based on this research I did I think this is who you are in my life and I have you know I we I'm happy to make contact with you in any way that you feel is is appropriate. And I sent the letter and I waited and I waited and I waited and I waited. And finally a letter came back that was affirmative and positive and welcoming. So yeah we have a nice relationship. We talk every every now and then and what about your biological father. I I never met him. I'm in contact with his family but I've never I he was dead by the time I found him and your half brothers. What was it like meeting them and I think that was at 38 years. Yeah they're so what they're so wonderful. We are it's it's challenging. I mean because you have to the ideas that you even though you share biology there's no there's no shared history right like they don't get your jokes maybe and you don't get their jokes and you're like what oh right because we didn't grow up together. We grew up in different places and with different parents and different values and it's it is it is challenging to create those kinds of relationships but they have been so wonderful and so welcoming. And what was the happiest year of your life. Oh the happiest year of my life. God that's a good question. I don't know if I've had like one single happiest year. I don't I don't know. I mean I can think of like events along my along my life like the Ph.D. graduation that was pretty big. I'm a pretty happy college graduation that was pretty big. Yeah getting my first department you know it's like so there are these events that I can really think of but I can't think of a whole year that's been like the happiest childhood fairly unhappy average above average and I think it was I think it was probably I think it was probably above average. I mean it's hard it's hard to say it was it was challenging in certain respects but you know there was there was love and there was joy there too. So I was shocked listening to a previous podcast that you'd done where you talked about you hated high school. Yes oh I thought it was so dumb it just seemed there was nothing about it that interested me absolutely nothing it it seemed kind of dumbed down and it didn't answer any questions. I mean I hated all my history classes I thought they were dumb because it's that it was that kind of like really bad history where you just memorize a bunch of facts and some dates and that was boring and then people kept telling me that I should I should go to high school so I could learn social skills and I was like what I don't yeah I don't I don't think this is a I don't think high school is a microcosm of the world. I just I just think it's bigger than that so I ended I just I ended up dropping out of high school so I finished my let's see I finished my sophomore year tried to go back for my junior year and just didn't like it any better so yeah I'm sort of missing two years of high school. Oh what about middle school did you hate middle school? Yeah I hated middle school as well I think those are hard years for anybody though I think those are those are challenging I think for everybody. Well I mean challenging yeah but most people in my experience like going to school because I get to see their friends so what about your friends did did you have friends? Yeah I had a couple friends I usually I'm the kind of person who has like maybe one or two good friends but not a huge crowd of friends so um yeah high school never felt like where I needed to go to see friends and my friends were also kind of bad kids who didn't go to school so I didn't have to go to school to see them. What do the other kids mean to you? You know I think everybody well I don't know if everybody goes through but yeah they're like they're some bullying involved but um yeah it just it just didn't feel like my I don't know I was curious about about a lot of things in the world I just didn't feel like school was the place to get those answers. And and then interesting because I mean you talk about high school is not the real world but so many of the dynamics that play out in high school do play themselves out as you as you go through life because the people who who enjoy high school are usually you know connected with other people have have some degree of popularity and they and they learn how to work the system all right education educates you and how to work the system is that is that fair? I guess that's fair I think I think I don't have a lot of tolerance for systems that I don't I don't particularly appreciate. What led you to pursue a PhD so I think was it were you 26 when you graduated with your BA? I was 28 I went to I was I was um let's see I had gone as after the high school dropout I had worked for a couple years at some bad jobs I went to community college which I'm pretty sure saved my life it just was happening at the right time it it was a good program in a place that wasn't my hometown and it felt like starting over and it just it it worked for me it really worked for me and community college was just it was it felt really safe it felt like a safe place to be who I wanted to be and so it was it was a good experience so I graduated there with an associate's degree in veterinary technology and then I was working I worked for several years as a veterinary technician and then one of the veterinarians that I worked with he said Lisa you can't keep working here I said what what do you mean I can't keep working here of course I can keep working here he said you need to do something with your life you need to go to college I thought what oh my god I said what what would I do he said well you know based on what you like in the world you'd probably be really good at something like English or history and I said well where would I go and he said well you know there's a bunch of small four-year colleges in Colorado which is where I'm from and so I picked one and it turned out um yeah I was I I was 26 years old and I enrolled as a sophomore at Fort Lewis College in Durango Colorado but what led you to go to graduate school and was it at age 28 that you made that decision it was not so I took more time off because this seems to be my story I took more time off I was a Peace Corps volunteer I enrolled I enrolled for two years two and a half years actually as a Peace Corps volunteer and I went to Guatemala it was the first time I was 28 years old it was the first time I had left the country it was terrifying and but here I was in this foreign country trying to work on these small-scale development projects and learn some Spanish in the meantime but what I learned about Guatemala was that it has this very terrible history of civil war and an even longer history of U.S. intervention and it's it's quite a tragic story on a lot of levels and I wanted to understand that better I wanted to understand how that had come to be and why people in the United States didn't seem to know anything about it so I went from my Peace Corps service I enrolled in I applied to graduate school I got into the University of Arizona and I ended up with a PhD in Latin American history so at what age did you begin your graduate studies let's see 32 I think I was like 31 32 somewhere in there yeah and then it it took eight years to complete your PhD is that accurate 2015 yes yeah let's see yep it might it would have taken seven or eight so yes seven or eight because I got a master's in there somewhere and yeah it takes about seven I think I did the PhD in five I think I let's see it's my chronology right let's see I think I finished my master's I think in 2009 and then I signed a piece of paper to go on to the PhD program and then I graduated like at the end of 2014 the beginning of 2015 now education is usually formal education is is usually education to conform is that fair how true is that what's your experience in with regard to education is a factory for producing conformism well I think it's I think it's going that way I mean I think as I think as we continue down certain political and economic paths I think now I think college really exists to train workers it's not so much thinkers and so I think that's part of the reason that and I mean specifically training like people for like low wage jobs I don't think a college education means today what it did maybe 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 40 years ago I think today there's there's a lot of pressure to there's a lot of pressure to get enough education to try and get a good job but I think those jobs are increasingly scarce and I also think there's there's also pressure to take courses that are not humanities based so a lot of students who do that they're kind of missing this whole critical thinking piece that you've got with humanities courses and I don't think that's an accident a lot of students have told me like oh I really wanted to major in history but you know my dad wanted me to major in business so I can get a job like well yeah here we are training workers not thinkers so I think there is pressure to conform I think I think school definitely has that capability so I'm just going to share one anecdote from my life I trained for three years to be a teacher of the Alexander technique and in my final week of training just two days before I was due to graduate I had published a blog post where I criticized a certain approach to the Alexander technique and as a result of that I was denied graduation denied my certificate because I'd broken the the code Alexander teachers are not to criticize other Alexander technique teachers in public and I blew up my relate I had at the time I had good relations with all five of my primary teachers so I forever destroyed those relationships they have not been repaired those those are blown up also pretty much everyone in the school or anyone who heard of me realized that I was someone to Sean right this is this is someone who speaks out of school this is this is not someone who's popular this is the person who shows you what not to do now I did get the certificate three months later and I didn't protest because I realized I had broken the code and and I was fine with that but I think my story kind of exemplifies this point about conformism I I know throughout my life being educated I would often encounter a teacher who would say I never had a student who pushed me as much as you did and that wasn't a good thing they didn't like that my grades often paid paid a price for it what's your experience with educators trying to get you to conform let's see educators trying to get me to conform um well I will say in junior high high and high school my my I would I would often be found listening to Pink Floyd another brick in the wall and we don't need no education yes we don't need no thought control so it's um yes I have a lot I have a I've kind of long history of that um it's I like education when it can be creative when it can encourage people to pursue individual inquiry but I find as it's become I think more corporate more focused on the bottom line focused on student retention as education gets away from the business of actually educating students I think there is greater and greater pressure to conform to pass students who maybe don't really pass your class um yeah to to say that students have higher language levels than they do um you know I find a lot to dislike their informal education settings like that but that's my my life experience does did you have similar or different experiences to that I'm so sorry can you repeat that I cut out for just a minute sure my experience with education is that the way to succeed is to get along with your teachers and to repeat back to them the things that they've taught you so yeah teachers love nothing more than to have you repeat back with you know just enough variation so it makes it sound authentic what's your experience I think that's um I think I think a lot of students have been trained to do that these days um much to my my great dismay I think there is less emphasis on on like you said um independent thought less emphasis on um thinking outside god I hate I hate this corporate business speaking thinking outside of the box saying something that's maybe not what your teacher taught you um having your own analysis about things having your own thoughts about things um I think a lot of that is discouraged and I think the um the predominant I mean the predominant way that we evaluate students is through grades and grades obviously don't reflect whether students are actually learning grades more often than not I think reflect what we want to hear as educators right you're getting indoctrination I mean there may be some genuine intellectual material but it's overall it seems like an indoctrination into uh particularly at a university level into a particular discipline is that fair well I mean I think there's um like I'm thinking as you were talking I was thinking about um sort of this this move away from students as learners in higher education and towards these models of students as consumers and students as customers and I think that that model I think does us no favors at all because that's a model that very much relies on students um having certain relationships with instructors um that are not based around what they learn it's based on what if I lost you there okay are you back are you there I have too many buttons to push okay okay I can hear you now all right okay good um so I lost I lost the last 60 seconds so oh geez okay it's my mother calling me so let's see I was saying about um yes students students now now conforming to these models of um ideas of students as consumers and what that's doing to um independent thought creative thought educational opportunities and I don't think of that move toward you know everything now is supposed to be based around free market principles and I don't think that free market principles are really best applied to education because I think it does create these situations where you are um you are expected to really toe the line so an experience that I had with education I noticed vaguely in elementary school though I could not have articulated it at the time was that every year it seemed like there was some new fad blowing through so did you experience that um I don't know if I experienced fads so much but I'm thinking about um you know now there's a bunch of outrage on the part at least in the U.S. on the conservative right about critical race theory apparently this is the this is the thing um and I think I don't think that's a fad and I don't think that that's um I think that's not um quite what people make it out to be I mean like if you were to take my class we wouldn't necessarily discuss critical race theory but we would discuss different kinds of systems of oppression and how they work um is that critical race theory I don't know is it a fad I don't know I understand when did you develop the idea that you're going to spend your life as a professor you know that I think came with graduate school because I don't think that I had envisioned that prior to going to graduate school but graduate school I mean if you're getting a phd in history it's really it's geared towards that right very few people become very few people go to go into graduate programs in history without the idea that they want to become a professor and you learn how to do that and that and it just seemed like we were all kind of being groomed to do that and I thought oh well you know this is obviously the career path this is this is the the logical end result um and then it turned out that was not the logical end result um but it it seemed to start it seemed to it it became very appealing like oh like really like oh I have an office and I teach these classes and I read these books and I write these articles and and I thought oh I thought that's that's a nice life because I the whole I mean part of the reason I went to graduate school was just to read books um and write about them and then how did you realize that that wasn't going to happen and that you were better off giving up on that dream oh you know it's um it was a long it didn't occur to me all at once it was sort of I was on the academic job market for a couple years um and that went precisely nowhere like I would have these interviews for these colleges that I had never heard of in places that I definitely didn't want to live and then I think I was shortlisted a few times and that went nowhere so it just did not seem to be going anywhere and in the meantime you know it I mean it takes the academic hiring cycle takes a year and in the meantime like what are you supposed to eat how are you supposed to buy groceries like no one tells you these things so yeah it became very obvious early on that I was going to have to do something else in the meantime I mean maybe I would maybe the academic job would finally break or maybe it wouldn't but like regardless of what happened I was going to need to get some kind of a job what was did you figure out why did some people get hired as history professors and you didn't what what separated you from those who succeeded oh I have I have bad feelings about this um I think I think there are so many good historians that have not gotten jobs um and it's easy when when it's you it's easy to fall into this oh my god it's it's me right I I'm not good enough to do this my scholarship isn't good enough and as it turns out none of that is true people get jobs I've seen some very mediocre people get jobs because they are well connected or they know people who are well connected or they are wealthy enough to continue to go on the academic job market and they can just do that kind of continually until they get a job um or you know maybe they have spouses who are making enough money that they can do that I mean though like there's a bunch of different reasons that people finally succeed but if you read about academics trying to get academic jobs it's like some people are like oh my god like I I'm sending off my hundred and fiftieth job application I'm like oh my god like that's amazing and then hearing about how many applications different academic departments receive for certain jobs I mean people 300 is not an uncommon number so it's um part of it is is a numbers game part of it is who you know part of it is just dumb luck part of it is persistence um I mean there are a lot of different reasons and some people and there are so many things you can't control you can be absolutely the best person for the job and you may not get it anyways it is it is not regrettably it is not a meritocracy we would like to think it is and it's really not it's a combination of a lot of things that you just cannot control so with those PhD students who kept telling their professor in effect how amazing you are I would assume that they would develop some some of them would have developed special relationships with their professor and their their professor would then take it on as a personal mission to get them hired somewhere because then the student was going to replicate or develop upon you know the the professor's own work and so I would assume that's that's a dynamic that is a lot of the dynamic so I I can I can think of several instances that I have seen in which people have gotten jobs maybe jobs they aren't qualified well not that they're not qualified that's the wrong way to say it um maybe but I've I've seen people who are very well connected get jobs that over other people who maybe could have gotten those same jobs I mean that's that's just the way I see the the world work in various things that I've done it's those who develop a great relationship with their teachers don't cause their teachers any trouble give their teachers this impression that you know how thrilled you are by having getting to have you as a teacher and you want to you know carry on all these amazing insights that I've learned from you and I'm so grateful to you and then then the teachers go oh you know I've got a protege I'm going to get this person hired at UCLA I mean that's just what I see that I think is probably the way it often happens yeah now my my mother died when I was three and so my father was so busy that I was essentially farmed out to foster care for about 18 months or so and so I kept going from home to home to home in those early years and then I think that became a pattern throughout my life that I would I was I was always blowing up my my groups that I was belonging to always getting myself kicked out and as I grew older the pain didn't diminish from getting getting ejected from a group it just compounded like all the loss would just compound and as though I was being thrown around in a washing machine or a dryer and and the loss it just kept getting you know more and more intense rather than diminishing I'm wondering if childhood loss uh then then combined with the loss of the dream of the PhD so that you too may have experienced something like what I described yes I think that's I think that's probably a good part of my story as well is just that feeling you know early experiences I think of rejection really set you up for a lot of self-sabotage as you described and then also um the expectation of future loss um so it's it's um yeah you're kind of conditioned to think about your your life through these lenses of of loss um and that can be very hard and sometimes it's loss that people that is externally created and sometimes it can be I think loss that we ourselves create but either way like emotionally I think there's not a whole lot of qualitative difference between those two I mean loss is loss whether you've lost parents or family or the idea of a lifestyle that you thought you were going to have or groups of people in your life that you thought you were going to have or an identity I mean loss is loss is loss and did you start to get an inkling that you were setting yourself up for rejection because I would get an inkling throughout my life but it only became clear say the last 15 years yeah I that's a that's a really good question and I don't know exactly when and that became clear to me um I've done a lot done a lot of therapy done a lot of work on that and it's been um it's now I can kind of feel it I don't know if this happens to you but I can kind of feel it when I'm getting self-sabotage like I think I think I think I think this is going to happen um and I I'm now able to step back and go is this really what's happening are you making this happen do you want this to happen is this all in your head like I can kind of interrogate that feeling a little bit better but I think when I was younger it seemed so automatic that I I wasn't able I wasn't aware enough of how that worked for me that I could really do anything about it so now I know that I can feel all of those feelings and have that um that urge to self-sabotage and create loss in my life but I don't have to do it I remember I moved to America at age 11 uh entered sixth grade and shortly thereafter the most beautiful girl in the class dropped a note on my desk asking me to to be her boyfriend and I didn't know how to handle it and so I blew it up and so throughout throughout my life I've had trouble accepting good things coming easily and naturally to me I've had a great deal of discomfort with prosperity and I've had a lot of opportunities to make a lot of money and I've always found a way to blow them up uh what is your experience with prosperity meaning good things coming easily oh boy yes I've I've had um I've had I've come to the realization in the later years of my last couple years of my life I guess that um I do tend to struggle with things that seem to come easily to me because it seems like if things come easily they're not worth very much and so now I have a I made up a mantra that I say when I feel myself um not wanting to accept something that comes easily um and so I say to myself okay so I receive and accept and value and honor that which comes to me easily and I know it's okay that I have this and it's uh just recognizing how that works has has led to a lot of self-awareness and a lot of ability to tolerate greater amounts of prosperity greater amounts of joy greater amounts of money um better relationships like I can my tolerance for having has gone up uh my life has been marred by a compulsive need to prove I've always carried like a chip up my shorter that I needed to prove something to Gavin Brown and the other boys in second grade who did not want me at Gavin Brown's birthday party and that's like being a chip on my shorter throughout my life how about you has that played any role in your life yes I think that definitely has I mean part of part of I think what being adopted sets you up for is this idea that you have to prove that you have the right to exist and it's such a struggle because of course we have the right to exist just as people as humans like it's an it's an inalienable right I think um but being adopted is oftentimes trying to prove that we were good enough trying to prove that we were good enough to be kept that we were good enough that we didn't have to be relinquished and it really sets up this idea of having I mean I know it's not it's not uncommon for adopted people and I I'm assuming as as well fostered um people who are fostered as children to be massive overachievers because we are just trying to prove that we really are good enough to be on the planet with everybody else and that kind of thinking I think can be very I mean it can take you to great heights and it can help you achieve great things but it doesn't necessarily come from a very healthy place what would you say to your 16 year old self who didn't want to go to high school anymore what would you say now back to that that 16 year old girl that's a good question I think I would tell her you know it's um it's going to be okay like it was it was not clear that things were going to be okay in that moment um I think I would tell her that it's okay not to be like everybody else and it's okay it's okay to be a little bit different than everybody else and to do things in your own way because one of the things one of my personal patterns has been um to do things in my own way I I like to for example um uh let's see what's next yeah oh yeah I one of the thing one of the great pleasures of my adult life is going on road trips by myself I just love jumping in the car and driving somewhere um and a friend of mine said to me god you know that's such a quirky and funny thing you do and I said really like I it never occurred to me that that was weird she said you make your own roads and I think I do I think I'm very much invested in creating paths for myself that feel congruent with who I am like other people's roads don't usually work for me and I think at the time when I was 16 I didn't know that I thought I had to be on everybody else's road but I don't have to be on anybody else's road but mine all right that's a sound problem my mind but got it fixed okay that's okay do you need me to repeat nope um I think I got it so what would you say to your 32 year old self who was considering going to graduate school and then developed a vision of becoming university professor so it's a little more than a decade later now you've got you've got wisdom what would you say to your 32nd your 32 year old self who's thinking about going to graduate school and thinking about devoting and developing a life in academia I think my advice would be so much the same I think I would say I would say to myself that um yeah other people you know that other people's roads don't usually work for you very well so this one seems like you want this road and it seems like this is the right road but consider the possibility that this is not the only road let me read a little bit from this Steven Turner essay beyond the academic ethic and get get your reaction here's just one sentence the basic fact of intellectual life is that it does not pay for itself what do you think oh let's see the basic fact of intellectual life is that it doesn't pay for itself is he talking materially as in like as in having that life of the mind is often an expensive proposition he's talking financially he's saying that you want to be an intellectual your your odds of being after pay for the intellectual life you know getting paid for your thinking is quite slim it's quite slim everybody I know is in terrible student debt and that's awful um but I think that's consistent with our our switch to rethinking the university as the site of free market capitalism um everybody is I mean tuition is going through the roof which we know and that's I don't think that's going to stop and I think eventually I was who was I telling I was telling somebody this the other day my dystopic prediction is that university education is eventually it's going to be exclusively for people who can afford it so it's only going to be available for a very small number of the population and like those people maybe are going to get a decent education everybody else is going to get maybe like remediation or like I don't know some really I don't know just education that's not meaningful and doesn't actually education but they'll pay for it right because we have to um keep those wills turning so I think I think he's right in that um yeah to have the privilege of of being an intellectual of being able to devote yourself to your writing and your thinking and your scholarship it does it costs money I mean there is absolute cost to that and most people cannot afford to do it for free um people ask me sometimes to do certain to write certain things for free or to do certain types of labor for free and I really have to think about whether I want to accept those those proposals because I have to work to make money um and I have to think about whether or not like what kinds of free labor I really want to do and what kinds of of labor I don't want to give away for free now smart people often get told when they're growing up at least I often was told do what you love and the money will follow on the other hand there's the opposite advice that real artists have day jobs which which perspective do you think is is more wise I am let's see I think I came down on a day job for a long time I mean I've worked some really weird jobs one of my weird jobs after um graduate school well one I worked temp jobs so um I've been meaning to write an essay about the day I walked into a temp agency and I was like hello I have a phd and I need a job um and they were just absolutely dumbfounded like they just didn't even know what to do because they just thought well you have a phd aren't you aren't you employ aren't you gainfully employed somewhere I thought nope that's that's the problem um is that I have a phd and I am not gainfully employed somewhere so I did temp jobs um you know and mostly it's mine mindless data entry um I did that and then the other the other job that I knew was not my heart job it was not what I loved but it was okay for the moment was that I worked in crime victim advocacy so I was um and and they hired me for this job even though I had a phd because I had been a piece for volunteer so I had some service experience and then also I spoke Spanish fluently and they needed that so I was going out on crime scenes with law enforcement to inform victims of their rights um and answered questions and talked to them about their next steps usually on what was the worst day of their lives and so I did those things and I did those and those things allowed me to um buy groceries which was important and pay rent and then also um do some of my own writing in the meantime now what about uh other people you went to graduate school with who perhaps became professors did that place any strain on friendships it you I think choosing my own path has put me in a place like a different emotional place than than oftentimes my friends were like I don't have to I don't have a job where I have to put out a certain amount of scholarship to get tenure like that's just not a part of my world um so sometimes it puts you on these in these um these strange places emotionally you're just in different places and it's okay there's nothing bad about it but I've been amazed at the number of people in my life who are academics and every time I do some weird non-academic thing like they're cheering me on I'm like oh my gosh I'm gonna start my own business and people were like that's great fantastic let us know how it goes how can we help hmm let me read a little bit more here from Stephen Turner he says academic life is selective and the grounds for advancement at each stage are not clear except for degree requirements and depending on the system and the point in history many are called who are not chosen so the question of what sort of calling academic life has become is also a question about the calling of those who fall by the wayside this has recently become a hot topic as a result of an op-ed by a historian who was giving up on academia having after having failed despite some short-term contracts to gain a tenure-track job she writes that giving up on something that you thought was your life's calling hurts like hell when you experience rejection from the entire institution of academia after devoting years of your life and thousands of dollars to becoming an academic betrayal and rage sometimes it become your only emotions for a good long while this comment has gone viral and there are dozens of sites devoted to leaving academia they tell a bitter story about the myth of academic life and its seductions one website describes its orientation as reflecting a belief that the current system is flawed cruel unsustainable and impossible to directly engage with in this view phd programs with their false promises lure students to serve as cheap labor versus teaching assistants then is poorly paid adjuncts when tenure-track jobs elude them any of the comments and contributions reflect the fact that the education that the injured academics have received is highly specialized to leave academia is to face the impossible task of repackaging their achievements as marketable skills any thoughts on any of that oh yeah that's a that's a lot um i i i do i mean later exploitation in academia is is is an absolute fact and i think um it does have to do with our shift towards these free market models of what education should look like so you know we do need like universities do need graduate students to do unpaid labor um and graduate and i mean about that i mean there's there's adjuncts and then there's early career researchers and there's a lot but i mean so it's this whole hierarchy of of exploit exploitative labor um you know and i i don't know that we can get away necessarily from labor exploitation we try and minimize it where we can um but at a certain point we're all selling our labor but i have to say i'm a little happier selling my labor for money than lines on my cb so there's that and then i also what was the other thing i was thinking of oh i wrote i did write something about whether academia was a calling um you know and and do we think about you know what makes it a calling as opposed to a job um because ultimately is it not just a job i mean i i mean hopefully in life you find employment that you love and and makes you feel fulfilled and happy but you know there are a lot of people working jobs in life who don't love their jobs so you know are the is this not just jobs i mean is is that what is it about academia that makes it seem like a calling um and who and why do we feel called so i think there's i think there's a lot probably to unpack there that i'm still thinking about what was it like to go viral i i assumed that this this began as a post on your website giving up on academia yes it's actually it is a post on my website it was it was weird i mean i i think i tweeted it probably and then it got retweeted a little bit and then overnight 15 000 people read it i went oh my god like this that's really crazy um but clearly it had struck a nerve with people people obviously responded to it and it it expressed something that i think people i think resonated with a lot of people who were feeling the same and they couldn't figure out how to articulate it um academics hate talking about feelings and here i was saying that leaving academia actually created grief for people and and created a certain loss of identity that that people had to grieve what what did you get from the phd like what's what skills what what benefits just inherent in the process of doing a doctorate yes it's so interesting um because uh what's always got me jobs has been my non-academic skills like so my my academic skills clearly are not getting me jobs um but what i did learn um i'm a good researcher i learned how to how to do research i actually really enjoy being a historian i enjoy historical research i enjoy thinking about how things are different in the past and why i like to write um i've learned my writing got much better so that was really that was a real plus um let's see and i think um you know you do get tangible skills out of it i mean trying to manage a project as big as a dissertation is um you have to you have to figure out how to do that um but also things like like softer skills right like networking um how do you make friends with this group of people who you aren't necessarily friends with and hopefully you're going to get in good with them and hopefully they're going to help your career like i mean that's what academics do um so you learn to how to do things like that um yeah how to read strategically um and i think you get to learn a little bit about a lot of different things i remember when i was at ucla there was a fellow student who offered me something like 200 to write a paper for him and i was momentarily tempted and then said no but uh have you written papers for people has it been lucrative if you've done so no i do not write for people because i think that's they need to do that um and i have edited for people um most of my editing is with faculty members with early career researchers and a lot of those people are um they're writing in english as a second language and so they do need help to articulate things in english that only maybe a native speaker could um could help with um i spanish is my second language and every i can write in spanish but i'm very very slow at it and i always need someone to check my work so i know that um faculty members trying to write in english are also struggling if it's not their native language so those people i think really do need um editing services but i don't write for people at all what what's the line between editing and writing and surely you've experienced pushing up against that that liminal space yep it's um i think the difference at least for me the difference is to not do violence to people's ideas um sometimes i read something and i'm like wow that is not the conclusion i would have drawn or um yeah that's not i disagree with this or um it's not something that i would want to put out in the world but uh they're not my ideas either um they belong to the owner of them and it's not my job to make um it's not my job to do violence to their ideas so and also i really think when you are correcting people's writing it is important that they sound like them in writing and not that they sound like whoever is doing the correction like i think you really have to think about what are people's natural writing rhythms how do they what are the words they use how do they construct sentences and i think make corrections that make the sentences easier to read but yet really reflect the writer because it doesn't matter if people sound like me in writing they shouldn't um it matters if they sound like them in writing so you've you've developed a business if you go to your website lisa monroe.net it says i help academic writers build sustainable and joyful writing practices in collaborative spaces uh please tell me more about your business yes so that's my that's been developing over the last couple years and it's that's where i've landed with it i wasn't quite sure how i was going to make a business out of what i knew and what i like to do but it's turned out to be my superpower is really providing academics spaces to help them get writing done so i do writing workshops i do writing retreats i do i teach courses i do um some writing i do writing support for people people call me up and talk to me about their writing so i've become involved in how people get their writing done um not so much in like what they say which would be more editing but how they're getting their writing done because a lot of people um what i discovered when i first started doing this work i thought i would be giving people advice on like don't use passive voice i thought i would be giving that kind of advice and it turned out that was it rapidly became obvious that was not what people needed um what people needed for me was people needed to feel a little bit better about themselves as writers and as people and because the act of writing is not so difficult you set up a keyboard and you type some keys that's not super hard but what is hard is everything that happens in between it's all those feelings of shame it's feelings of fear it's it's wondering if you're good enough to have an idea it's wondering if you if you have the right to actually write this thing you're writing um it's all those kinds of things it's self sabotage like it's all that stuff that we've talked about um and people are struggling with that and academics are terrible but talking about feelings so um i am the person that they talk about their feelings about writing with now you live in mexico what are the joys and oyes for you for living in mexico oh yeah it's been it's so nice here um people are lovely and wonderful i mean i think if you're going to live somewhere that's not your home country you should live somewhere that you really love the people and i really love people here they're so wonderful and lovely um i think it's just been it's a safe city um i live near an ocean which is interesting i've never lived near an ocean so that's um that's a new experience for me um and then it's just been it's just been a really nice place to it's been a nice place to develop my business and to develop further into who i want to be as as now this business person and kind of this academic off off the road um yeah it's been a good place to sit and think about these things how many years of therapy have you had how many years of there oh jeez yeah off and on i couldn't even tell you but it's been some we'll say that yeah i've had 10 years so oh yeah to the extent that you feel comfortable what are some things that you've learned from therapy what are some things that i've learned from therapy let's see i've learned um let's see i think what i think what's been most helpful to realize is that um you can feel all of those feelings all of that self sabotage these stuff and people pleasing and um yeah trying to prove yourself to the world and all of this all of that stuff you can feel all of that not okay um but that you can make decisions that are empowering from different a different place like you don't have to keep picking the same thing over and over again you can you can make a different choice um and realizing that we're always it's always possible for us to make different choices about who we want to be in the world has has felt very powerful to me yeah that one thing that i learned from 10 years of therapy was that there were always a lot more options than what i saw that i i would often go into therapy that i have to do a or b and my therapist would sometimes say well why do you need to do anything or why not cd e yes absolutely i remember reading a book once that said something to the effect of if your decision making comes down to this or that you're probably not considering all your options i thought oh yeah that's helpful so yeah i think we always do have more options than we think uh did you experience reparenting from from therapy oh can you tell me more about that yeah so i my mother died when when i was three she was sick for the two years previous to that and my stepmother had some pretty significant uh health problems meaning that she wasn't mentally stable so i i grew up and developed a range of women uh among simultaneously with putting them on a pedestal so so it was it was good for me to have a stable relationship uh with with a stable yet intense yet open and honest relationship with women who i wasn't having sex with and so i didn't have sex with any of my therapists but uh when i saw my therapists were female so that was helpful to me to have the stable honest sometimes intense relationships with with women that the relationships weren't sexual and i i kind of felt i i got a little bit of reparenting i got that i got a little bit of that female nurturing that i logged for all my life uh without you know buying a hooker yeah um i think reparenting i think i think what i've come to realize about that is that we can parent ourselves um and i think there's there's a lot of work to be done in terms of when you feel those those urges to self sabotage those urges to acting these ways that um ultimately are not good for us um i think you i think i think if you subscribe to the idea of the inner child and i think i do um yeah you can you can reparent that inner child you can and i think you can treat them like you would treat any other child i think you can validate that for them like yeah i i understand why you feel this way and i think you can explain things to them but i think i think those inner children desperately need us to be the adults um in their lives not behave ourselves like children which um i know a lot of adult people who are essentially uh behave who essentially behave like children because they they just haven't received great parenting um we're inadequate parenting or absent parenting or or neglect or any number of reasons so i think i think we can reparent ourselves to some degree so you blogged about reinvention and i pretty much went through my life continually trying to reinvent myself but i would always run into the same sort of problems that have caused me to so desperately want to reinvent myself in the first place so pretty much all my attempts at reinvention were failures what have been your experiences with reinvention and what does it mean to you i yeah i think you can i mean i i see how i've made several reinventions in my life but then i think it's up to us to discover the underlying dynamics like why is this not working why am i am i making these choices that are going to land me back here again um and i think a lot of that takes place at subconscious levels that we're not even aware of but i think becoming aware of those patterns i think that gives us power and awareness to be able to alter those dynamics alter those old patterns when we feel ourselves falling into them because they're so they're comforting in a way i mean sort of i think about my own my own dysfunctions and i'm like yeah i'm kind of attached to them because they've just been with me for a long time so how how to um how to make different choices instead and and really and really engineer genuine reinvention as opposed to i think i'm i'm i find myself in the same dynamic over and over again so you believe in reinvention you believe it's possible and and i do yeah yeah and so i'm gonna i really do wonder i was listening to this series on american identity from the the teaching company and when i heard of the topic i thought that's stupid there's no american identity because there are so many different nations in in america don't tell me that there's american identity but then the the series argued that a lack of fatalism is is part of the american identity and then i thought about it just go yeah compared to every other country of which i'm aware there's a distinctive lack of fatalism in among americans and yes there's also a great belief in in the power of the individual to reinvent or to pragmatically or ingeniously find find a solution to life's problems while pretty much every other country seems far more fatalistic any thoughts yep i think that's probably i think that's probably true we have and we have boundless optimism in the power of change um and i i think but i i do think there is um i want to believe that we can change our patterns as individuals and make different choices um i mean i i said to i said to somebody the other day god i need to go back to therapy because i need to straighten all this out and they said no well maybe not like maybe you can just be aware of how these how these patterns work in your life and maybe you can make some different choices i was like oh is it just that simple it might just be that simple i don't know do you think there is american identity and if so how would you describe it yes i think there's definitely um i mean it's um it's almost a negative yeah the united states is it's hard it's easier to see when you're not in the united states um and i think that was one of the that's one of the things i realized living abroad and kind of looking at the united states is being like wow it's really weird um every time i go back to the states i'm like oh i'm kind of culture shocked like people are um what do i notice oh people are very direct people are people are very um they will tell you exactly how things are and like a lot of cultures that i've experienced it's really um people will kind of talk around things and you kind of really have to listen to what's happening um people are i think i think very i think a lot of people are still invested in in the american dream for for better or for worse the idea that things are going to be better in the future um and for their children um i think there's definitely some sort of i mean things are things have changed a lot in the last couple of years but i mean i i read about the 1920s and the 1930s and and the development of like i'm writing something right now about the development of travel as a consumer product i'm like oh yeah it kind of is you know we cut we we consume other cultures we consume travel we um even if we don't go places like we still buy stuff and have it in our homes that kind of suggests that we're worldly travelers like huh that's really it's interesting that we sort of the big we um it's interesting that we do that what was your phd doctorate in uh latin american latin american history and then i focused on cultural relationships between uh guatemale and the united states in the 1930s and can you tell me more about that um i can so it was really an exit so one of the things we know about central america is we know that there is we know that in the early 20th century there was this this free market cap these private enterprises came to central america came to latin america and they um extracted wealth um from people for their own for their own ends um i'm thinking in particular of the united fruit company in guatemala and costa rica and other places um and so we like we kind of know about that it's kind of this this economic imperialism that is is a well-known it's a it's a fairly well-known story if you know latin america at all um sort of that commodity export capitalism is a is a pretty well-known story um but what seems like a less well-known story to me and what i found in my archival research was that there's this whole a cultural economy and maybe an ethno economy that supports that and so there's a lot of cultural exchanges happening in the 1930s for different reasons but it also helps to soften kind of this this more evident economic imperialism that's happening at the same time so i look at things like um textile expositions i look at film um what else archaea archaeological tourism um world spares museums like those kinds of things are really interesting to me uh graham green are you a fan of graham green his books like the power on the glory i don't know but do i know his books i don't i would have to look i might okay yeah he was a novelist he wrote the power on the glory about uh mexico's socialist revolution the 1930s oh i'll have to look yeah from an american perspective uh most americans would really know the difference between a mexican or and guatemalan culturally what are what are the differences between mexicans and guatemalans well they have i mean this is an obvious answer but they have different histories i mean um mexico had this tremendous tremendous revolution in the early um 20th century and guatemala had a revolution too but they also had um because of these uh sort of this wave of capitalist enterprise they also had um guatemala had the first real um post world war two intervention by the us um so there was a a mill a coup orchestrated by the cia that overthrew the democratically elected governments um of guatemala in 1954 and so and that set into motion a series of events that culminated in what's been considered to be genocide against mayan people and so that's really that is a very different story than mexico so it's been it's a it's a story of violence and it's a story of racial and cultural oppression at the same time but how would that manifest if i let's say i employ a guatemalan and i employ a a mexican i mean what what should i know say as an employer or someone who's interacting with mexicans and guatemalans here here in los angeles what what are some some differences um i think there's a greater sense of national identity in mexico like if you ask mexicans if they're mexican most of the time they'll be like well yes yes absolutely um on the other hand guatemala has a much weaker sense of nation i mean the state forcibly tried to exterminate people um and so people there's not a whole lot of allegiance to a state as a as a political entity um but i mean phenotypically i mean mexico and guatemala both have large indigenous populations people who reach the united states sometimes they are not spanish speakers um off to sometimes their their indigenous language speakers or mayan language speakers um you know and they they are geographically very close um so you might i mean at first glance you might not you might not make that distinction they if you listen very carefully um they will speak differently there are there are definite speech patterns in guatemala that are different than mexican spanish now guatemala is one of the highest violent crime rates in the world how how did you operate when you were in guatemala um so i lived let's see i've lived in guatemala twice i lived the first time was my peace corps service and i lived in a an indigenous community that was 90 percent ethnically mayan and so that was quite the experience but i always felt i felt safe there um that was uh that was a good experience so there was that and that was two and a half years i went back to guatemala to do my doctoral research and i lived in guatemala city and guatemala city was kind of terrifying um it is a violent city and you do have to be very very careful there so it was i had to i walked to the archive 20 minutes a day um one way and i was always very careful i was always very aware and alert um when i was doing that but nothing nothing ever happened to me in guatemala city and then i lived in antigua as well um and that's the only place i've ever been robbed was in antigua and antigua is is far more touristy than guatemala city what about male female relations particularly with an emphasis on how they might be different from from america say you've lived in mexico and you've lived in guatemala and you've of course lived in america what are some differences in the way the sexes relate um i think there's just differences in terms of i think well there's definitely differences in terms of gender roles like there's there's definitely i think much clearer kind of male female gender roles although i mean there are um like latin america has pride latin america has trans people um you know those people exist here too um one thing that is particularly notable about latin america in general and i think mexico and guatemala in particular are very high rates of femmicide there's been there's just astronomical rates of um women being murdered every single day and it's um i think they're often seen as as disposable how would you describe macho culture because mexico strikes me as having a fairly macho culture um i think it does it's definitely um let's see do i have any really good examples of this um yeah i think i think sometimes it's um yeah i think sometimes men are men and women are women like men do manly things women do like there's just certain um i think that like for example when i was in guatemala um women rare and i think it's probably different now the um the last time i was there was 2013 like but women rarely drove like like rarely um they did but not in great numbers and that might be changing now but um you know there's there's i feel like there's clear and i think this is probably true in most of the world that there's clear things that men do and clear things that women do and things that men do and men don't do and women don't do it like there's it's different i don't know my my understanding of mexico is that it has about a 10 percent european population that pretty much dominates runs the country and occupies almost all the elite roles is that accurate i think that's probably accurate i think that's accurate for guatemala as well i don't know if i'd say it's 10 percent it might be smaller than that um but there's definitely a very small um a very small minority that is in control of much of the wealth in i think both mexico and guatemala uh would you describe yourself as a feminist and if so how do you then relate to this very sexually racially stratified countries that you love so much um that's a good question i i'm not sure i know um i think i generally i feel like i approach things as an anthropologist like i think i i think i watch things a lot i think i i think my goal is to really understand how things work rather than trying to change things myself because it's it's you know can you change culture um yeah i don't know can i personally change this entire culture absolutely not um it's it's it is a hard question i mean how do you how do you exist as kind of the outsider um in different kinds of places it's a it's a it's a liminal space to be sure like what about at a pub a bar i assume it's mainly men drinking with men and and are there women in in bars or pubs in in mexico yes i have been to you can kind there are certain certain pubs that are okay and then certain ones you absolutely just would not go in some are there some of the i guess some of them are more respectable than others you list on your twitter bio intellectual dilettante uh what do you mean yes i mean that i'm just i'm i'm interested in a lot of different things in life um it's it's hard for me to um have a single interest about something forever i i like to know about a lot of different kinds of things now you talk about overcoming writing resistance is this something that you struggled with yes and i a lot of the people i work with um they're struggling from it as well because i think um writing is it's always a creative process it's always a creative venture and so anytime we're doing work that um is outside of our comfort zones or could um could be judged or that forces us to be in vulnerable spaces um i think it's a i think that is a form of self-sabotage your brain is trying to keep you out of those spaces and keep you away from feeling vulnerable so people get writer's black or people can't think of what to say or people are um resistance shows up for people in so many different ways um but i think once you identify how it shows up for you then you can think about how to get around it and so one of the ways that i tell people to get around it is one keep writing um and two you don't have to give it any more brain space than it already has like maybe just validate it and recognize it and name it like oh yeah i'm in resistance it's okay and then you keep moving on and people um people feel um people like that approach because they get to it allows them to not feel like there's something wrong with them like oh resistance is just normal like it's okay it happens to everybody it's not a big deal um because people get very wrapped up in stories about how they're not good enough or they'll never get anything done or blah blah blah um and none of that is necessarily true had your blog post prior to the one that went viral had they been equally raw or was this um there were a few i think it was the blog was interesting because the more i got vulnerable with feelings on the blog um the more people responded to it and so i had been writing about i've write a lot about issues of shame and writing issues of fear and writing resistance and writing those chronic fears that were not good enough as writers um i write a lot about that kind of stuff but nothing had gotten as much attention as writing about grief well in particular your grief about not having a career in academia i mean you could write 15 posts about grief but you you went viral with this one particular aspect of grief mm-hmm yeah i sure did it was yeah it seemed it seemed to really hit for people because i think um i don't know what i mean i i know what maybe a few people's experiences are like but i think most people i'm not sure i'm not sure that people and there have been posts since mine that um are much better written and are really um much more cogent examinations of of all these issues but um i think it just really uh expressed feelings for people because academics i think have a hard time expressing feelings and to express something yeah like grief from being excluded from this thing that you had trained for for years um that really hit for people i don't think you've written a blog post in about 18 months what's going on yeah so let's see part of it was that i start well i actually i got real employment so i started where i was working as a study abroad director and part of what people liked about blog was kind of reading about like my angsty life um and reading about what i was ruminating about over here and like what my feelings were about this or that and i stopped as as the feelings started feeding um i started feeling like i had less to say i was like oh god is anybody gonna read like my normal life in which i'm like having a nice life is anybody gonna read that i wasn't sure people would read it and so it felt like it kind of didn't have the same purpose that it did and then the other thing that happened was that i started um about a year ago i started a community on mighty networks and so i'm blogging monthly there for um a community of writers that i'm building and so i'm talking i'm going back further to um i'm going back around to practical tips for writers um but there's still some good stuff on the blog like i write about i have a memoir on there about my p-square experience and a lot of people have read that a lot of people write to me about that like oh are you saying i shouldn't be a p-square volunteer and i'm like no no i'm just saying it's complicated that's all have you tried ayahuasca or indigenous medicine i have not i have not and do you have any thoughts on that that fad i don't know enough about it i think i i should not probably comment on it if i don't know about it wow you you imbibe the the best of academia there i know i know i know i can't tell is it is it better or worse to not comment on something you don't know about or should you just make some stuff up and call it good so you haven't you haven't had a desire to try mushrooms ayahuasca you know indigenous medicine people you know i i think i've been invited to do those things and i have not taken advantage of them yet so i can't i i don't know they i'm not sure that i'm not sure they would work for me i'm not sure that's going to be my i'm not sure that's going to be my healing method because you you hate drugs because you're very rational because you're afraid of the dangers um probably probably a little bit of all of those things i also think um i mean healing works for people in different ways um i think you can um yeah i think i think some people do heal that way i think some people um are able to find um maybe not answers but at least um some way to understand their experience through substances through drugs through different kinds of hallucinogenic experiences i don't think i'm one of those people you mentioned that there were people who'd written even more cogent critiques of leaving academia than yourself any names come to mind you know i think if you if you um if you were to google like grief academia something like that like i think i think probably a lot of people have written about that okay did you reach out to some of these people did you do that or did you not not really people reached out to me um which was very surprising um people in the in the time that that post went viral for probably a week or two afterwards people were writing to me a lot people were sending me a lot of email like wow like this really said something that i i couldn't say um this means you know a lot of people i think had not um a lot of people had not um felt like it was okay to say that that they were in grief a lot of people um i i think people felt like yeah it was shameful to feel grief around um shameful to feel grief around something like that like it wasn't serious enough to marry grief and i i i think my post says that it pretty much says that it is and so i think that that helps validate that for a lot for people so you mentioned a lot of people reached out to you but you don't recall reaching out to anyone with regard to their stories about grief and uh leaving academia are you the type of person who perhaps does not reach out very much i just felt like it was very personal like i didn't want to burden other people with that story if people wanted to find that story and read it like that was fine but i didn't i i didn't feel like i was ready to talk about it with other people outside of my blog post i thought that was i had said what i wanted to say but are you the type of person who does not reach out very much do you when you read a great book or a great essay do you send an email do do you reach out to people if you get an get an idea or a story that moves you um that's a good question i think occasionally i will tweet people i'll send someone a tweet like hey i read this article you wrote and i thought it was really great um but i don't know i don't yeah i don't know if i would reach out well yeah i don't know i'm not sure uh bashful shy reserve what what's going on i'm just curious um yeah it's a good question i mean i think everybody's process is so individual i don't know that yeah i don't i don't know if i would i i just don't feel like i would reach out to people and be like hey me too because it it is it is an individual process i think to some degree yeah but i'm not just talking about grief and academia i'm talking about anything oh in general yeah in general in general yeah i think people describe i think people probably describe me as i think people probably describe me as reserved definitely introverted reserved sometimes shy is there a true self a true lisa monroe or are you simply different in different circumstances so that the idea of a true self has no truth oh that's a good question um that's a hard one because i think i mean i think we all have different selves that we put on for different people um i think there's probably something real and true in there but again it's um i think it's a hard thing for adopted people to reconcile with because you do have you are in between families you are in between a life that you didn't live and a life that you are living um you are in between people who raised you but you were not born to and people you were born to who didn't raise you so i think there is i think there is sort of a split um a split self in certain certain respects i realized recently that i own two of a lot of things and i was like oh yeah because i have i have two there's definitely like duality is a real theme in my life and i think that's probably why is is life in mexico or in guatemala does it does it come with with a payoff of getting to run away avoid or hide life in america um that's a good question um i felt good being in mexico i've been here let's see when did i get here then here's this february of 2018 so i got to miss a lot of um i got to miss a lot of the trump presidency and i was not sad about that interesting so i i got a lot of help from this 12-step program called under earners anonymous and i think i'm just going to read to you some of the symptoms of under earning according to this one particular program and see if any of it pings your your thinking so one symptom is time and difference we do not use our time to support our own vision idea deflection we compulsively reject ideas that could expand our lives compulsive need to prove linking to useless possessions exhaustion exhaustion we habitually overwork become exhausted then underwork or cease work completely giving away our time we compulsively volunteer uh undervaluing and under pricing we undervalue our abilities and services isolation we choose to work alone when it might serve us much better to have coworkers associates or employees physical ailments sometimes out of fear of being large or exposed we experience physical ailments symptom 10 misplaced guilt or shame we feel uneasy when asking for being given what we need or what we are owed symptom 11 not following up we do not follow up on opportunities leads or jobs and 12 stability boredom we create a necessary conflict with other people generating problems that may result in financial distress anything there paying your thinking um i think probably a lot of those describe me in the past but i feel like now i am i think i'm very invested in overcoming a lot of that thinking i mean i run my own business and i'm doing i'm i feel like i'm doing okay i'm doing okay financially i'm doing okay mentally um yeah so i think a lot of that stuff i mean i think part of it because those patterns are so deep will probably always be there but then i think the point is to use for example like the 12 step model to make new pathways for ourselves and you know maybe the old ones will always be visible but to start using those new pathways and using new habits and using new kinds of knowledge and learning to ultimately empower ourselves so i think i think i feel like i'm on my way i'm well on my way and were there any turning points as you start getting on your way that stand out to you um let's see turning points i don't know if there's been any kind of like watershed moments where i was like wow there's you know now i see everything clearly i think it's been a very long process of realizing that a lot of a lot of the messaging i think um i i had just internalized a lot of stuff um adoptee stuff and cultural beliefs about money and you know your parents always affect how you think about money and blah blah blah and so i think i had just absorbed a lot of that and internalized a lot of about that and so it's been interesting to examine those beliefs and be like oh you know this one is actually not right this one is wrong and it's not serving me so i can do something different have you read any books or essays in the last few months that have really rocked your world um what i've loved recently i have become addicted to the series the expanse which is not something i would normally i'm not a science fiction person so it was surprising to me so i watched the whole series and it i was thrilled with it and so now i'm reading the books and they're great okay awesome what should i ask you which i've forgotten to ask you or is it what should i ask you that i've forgotten to ask you um gosh that's a good question is there anything that is there anything that you would like to know that i can answer yeah hang on let me oh how how many friends well i i get a thrill being on a university campus i mean i i get it's thrilling for me but uh at the same time i'm thinking about a girlfriend i had who for many years was with a leading hollywood director and so she cannot go to anything that reminds her of hollywood because she gets a panic attack so it's stepping on to a university campus a thrill for you is it a panic attack is it what is it um usually it feels familiar and then sometimes it makes me a little sad but it's um it's it's a manageable sad like it's not like um it's not like i feel like i'm being stabbed in the heart it's just like well you know maybe that could have been but it's not so on we go i like university libraries i like being in libraries i feel good there so sometimes i'm using the the library of different universities um an idea i do enjoy being in them um but there's always a little a little feeling of sadness about what what will never be i occasionally have nightmares about there's a test and and i've forgotten or i'm i'm late do you do you have those nightmares i have a recurring dream and my recurring dream is that i've forgotten something and i have to go back and get it i can't and it doesn't i haven't had in a while but there was a time it and it happens in different ways it's like maybe i've left a backpack on a perk bench and i have to get back on the bus and go find it and i can't find the bus so maybe it's like that or like maybe i left something in an airport and i have to go back through security and or i have to like leave the airport and try and find the thing again i can't figure out how to do it so it's always the same dream but it it comes to me in different ways what would it feel like for you to step back on your high school campus oh i you know it looked like a prison to me and the rumor was a prison uh does architect had designed it and i just have no desire to do that how do you navigate your relationships and friendships with people who are more and less successful than you oh that's a good question um i really think that uh comparison really is the thief of joy so i there was a time when i would read about people getting research fellowships or some kind of funding or applying for jobs that i could have applied to or things that i could have done and didn't and it was like being stabbed in the heart like it really felt that way for a while but as i continue down my own road i realize that like there's enough for everybody like i don't i don't need to be in competition with these people for these scarce resources because i i'm not doing that anymore and it's okay and that there are different kinds of resources in my world and different kinds of things that i can access and do um that don't require me to feel jealous and um yeah feel jealous about other people's success if you put a gun to my head and said uh look what do you do best i would say i do best at interviewing people compared to all my all my skills this is i think this is my best one if uh if someone god forbid put a a gun to your head and said what do you do best out of all your skills what what do you do best what would you say i'm a writer i write i write well that's my best skill and so and not even always academic writing either sometimes it's different kinds of writing so what type of writing do you do best i'm a good academic writer i have a strong voice for doing that and i'm still working on my scholarship i'm still um i have an article that's coming out here soon i just published something um i'm gonna hopefully work on my book manuscript and then i'd like to branch out and do some different kinds of writing like i'd like to do creative nonfiction i'd like to try memoir like there are different different genres that i'd like to try that i think can ultimately have a bigger reach and a bigger impact so the the type of first person writing that that i usually enjoy the easiest is is shame like when people delve into shame that's just immediately compelling on the other hand we all want to construct an image for ourselves and you also have a business so how do you balance uh emotional honesty in your writing uh delving into shame because everybody loves to read about what somebody is ashamed of and on the other hand developing your image your your this professional business woman your your a coach you're you're helping academics you're doing all these things how do you balance those two contradictory impulses yeah i think i mean i think you can be um i think it's okay to talk i i want people to know that it's okay to talk about dark stuff like that's that's okay um and i talk about my dark stuff a little bit with people so that they know it's okay and then they can talk to me a little bit about their dark stuff too like i don't think we necessarily need to you know it's it's rare that i would approach a total stranger and be like hello i need to share my darkest struggle with you um but it's like that's not what i'm gonna do but um i think it's like on the blog like i i feel good about the work i did there because it it does give people kind of this opening to be like oh yeah hey me too like i i've felt that i relate i see um and then people i think can feel free or talking about their own stuff when they see somebody else who's sharing that emotion with them if uh simon and shuster offered you 15 000 to write a memoir on the theme of 27 things that i'm ashamed of would you go for that um i think i could probably do it um i'm 27 is 27 is a lot um could i do 27 maybe um i would try i would sure try because i mean i think i think anytime you shine a light on those dark corners of the soul like it really um oh i think it's um it's enlightening i mean i'm thinking about this exhibition i went to it was at the san diego museum of man and it's called i think it's called post secret and it's people who write their most shameful secrets on a postcard and they leave them and now there's a museum exhibit about it and i think i think it's on instagram like i think you can actually find some of the postcards there um good and people have some really awful shameful things to secrets right like secrets and oftentimes they're things that people are very ashamed to they would be very ashamed to share but they are in this very public way because it's anonymous so but i think work like that is helpful like you read something and you're like wow that's really awful and i kind of relate to that are you a spiritual person and if so what does it mean oh that's a good question um let's see i think i think i believe in powers greater than myself but can't really explain them i think that's i think that's where i've landed so far and god um i think exists um there's been too many things i've i've personally experienced um just things things that happen in my life that have seemed pretty seemed pretty miraculous um so i'd like to say i'd like to say that god exists okay as a as an interviewer i can't let that go without following up would you share i also have experienced the the transcendent i i felt like i have i i and the universe i and god had had some kind of uh meeting um but i'd have a heck of a time describing it but i gotta push push you and see if you can describe any experience you might have had with the transcendent yes i think i felt i think i've felt like in the presence of something larger than myself a lot of times in nature a lot of times in caves i have a lot of people really hate caves because they are claustrophobic and kind of scary for people i'm a fan i i really feel like they are magical and they're special and i can see why maybe ancient native people thought they were they were very holy places as well and so i think i i think i often feel like i i'm to the point like when you when i'm in like i've gone to different caves in my life and seen these spectacular formations and i'm like yep i feel like i am in the presence of something much greater than myself here like it just it seems improbable that um i don't know natural processes created these things and i'm like yeah i think you know is it well maybe i choose to believe i choose to believe there's something bigger going on there and who are your anthropologist heroes oh my anthropologist heroes let's see um right now i'm writing an article about um um i'm writing an article about women adventurers to latin america in the 1920s and 30s and and this idea of adventure as consumer products and some other things too but there's um there are a lot of really interesting women showing up in that article and some of them are anthropologists and some of them are just exploring just because they just want to uh very gingerly i'm going to introduce a thought from the from the manosphere okay very gingerly okay there's a cliche in the manosphere that uh when women say that they like to travel single women when they say they like to travel a large component of it is that they're after erotic experiences that they would not feel good about if it became widely known where they live ha that's interesting um let's see so the research i've done so far on this and this is a brand new article for me so i i'm still reading sources and so i i haven't drawn super firm conclusions yet but um one of the things i find is that these women they wanted to have these authentic experiences with some kind of with indigenous cultures really so some kind of um cultural other um and so they travel latin america i mean they what they want to see and and so many of these women are not they're not interested to travel to like go shopping like that's not really what they want to do but they go because they want to have some kind of experience that's so that's that's outside of their everyday life and so native people i think really have this appeal to this these women because they are they saw them as kind of like this idyllic like pre-capitalist communities like we know that's not true right like we know that native people have been just as changed by capitalism as western societies like we know that but um they really thought that they were they were kind of these pre-modern relics trapped in this pre-capitalist past and they wanted to have that experience so they um they go very specifically looking for native people oftentimes uh but they don't talk about seeking erotic adventures no they um what i have i just was reading over some articles recently what they were what several women mentioned that they were interested in they were interested in the head hunting tribes of ecuador and so they um one woman brings these shrunken heads back to the united states and that seems to be like the cultural boundary that sort of defines barbarism for them or it's like these these shrunken heads so but a lot of a lot of the mention going to to ecuador and looking for um i think they're hivero people and finding them to be kind of on that um sort of outside their own cultural boundaries and and and being the first white women or at least they thought they were um to interact with these people so it's sort of about conquest and exploration and um yeah and also that line between what they perceived as as civilization and barbarism and and were they seeing reality or were they seeing through a prism of white savior complex were they just seeing what they wanted to see i think well i think what they thought they were looking at were authentic cultural practices from the pre-columbian period which is not really what was happening because we know that cultures change and we know learn many things and people change things and and cultural is culture is always changing it's always in flux so the idea that these um there's this popular idea that these women are experiencing native cultures like these pre-hispanic native um cultures but they're not really but they thought they were so they they are they are i think seeing what they want to see there why did you notice about academic clicks about academic what clicks cli ues oh as in like oh um yeah i think there are well it's hard to say now that i'm not so much in that but there's definitely um kind of groups of people who um stick together on certain things whether they stick together um on the force of somebody's personality or somebody's ideas or um different schools of thought i mean they're they definitely exist i don't i don't have much to do with them but i think they definitely exist ah so perhaps not having much to do with with collects is not a path for success in academia let's see so put another way that to be a successful academic you need to join a click uh no that it can help that it can help yes i think it can definitely help i mean if you attach yourself to certain um people and ideas um that are popular um or well known or groundbreaking or whatever um yeah i think i think you can um i think you i think you can gain a certain um status maybe that's the right word yeah maybe you can gain a certain a certain status or you can become well known in certain circles did you try attaching yourself to any clicks did you try flattery and then hate yourself for it um that's a good question i don't i'm trying i'm thinking back to like being having professional colleagues in grad school like who was i hanging out with um i i think a lot of i think i was probably more independent than the average yeah i'd say like i would say i really i really yeah i was i was really doing my own thing and and part of doing my own thing was that my dissertation was so much an attempt to just explain my Peace Corps experience to myself and really understand what had happened there and then what my role was in um the story of Guatemala you know what was what was my role in in people's stories of violence um and oppression um and trying to understand that and and it um i don't know if that was very you know it's it's not a super um it's not like a really um it's not trendy you didn't check out it's not trendy no i really didn't because it was just really personal to me and so like you know it's my work super groundbreaking like no but um it means something to me and it helps me think about certain things and i hope it helps other people think about other things are you going to publish it as a popular book i would like to um like i think that the memoir i have on my blog i think is a good start um and that's kind of how i saw it i was like oh well like maybe this develops into a chapter and so maybe it's like kind of memoir me looking back and then maybe it's like some analysis um and then maybe some more memoir like maybe it's like that what was your relationship like with your dissertation advisor um it was good it was professional he is a brilliant person um i have nothing but respect for him and that's um and i'm yeah i think that that should be that should be the norm in academia and yeah i know a lot of people whose advisors were terrible and then what did you have all rules what was that that experience like that was um not a great experience i just wasn't very well i just was not well prepared for that so it didn't it didn't go very well i i didn't pass the first time i did manage to pass the second time there was a lot of crying in between um but you know it feels like i mean your your exams feel like such a big deal as a graduate student and then um much like your dissertation then you're done and like nobody cares i got asked to tell me more like tell me about the first time like we want to know about you know pain what did they ask you that you weren't prepared for i mean oh it's it's i mean mostly you just have to demonstrate that you have a grasp on certain um certain debates in the field that you know certain foundational works it's a lot of reading and i just didn't study very hard well i mean i thought i i thought i was studying the right things but um yeah then then my committee asked me questions and i was like i don't even know i i got nothing so it was it was not a great experience but um i regrouped and then it was fine what were some of the questions that they asked you if i may ask i can't i can't even remember i can't even remember but it was like in your field that might have come up i know like i'm trying to even remember because i was like i think i've blocked it out because it was so awful um yeah but a lot of and and that was not everybody's experience either like a lot of people i know had nice um comprehensive exam experiences a lot of people were like yeah it was kind of hard but it was okay i was like yeah i thought it was i thought it was awful but um yeah everybody's got a different story what what were the major debates in your field at that time um let's see there's debates about um god i can't even remember like what was going on there um but people want to know i mean what's complicated about history is that sometimes the best thing we know about something like the book that changes the way that we think about things is not necessarily the most recent work and so like maybe the the book that kind of shook the foundations about what we thought we knew about something uh maybe it came out in 19 i don't know 47 and that's the book you're supposed to know about right like not everything that came later you need to know about this book because that's the book that changed everybody's thinking on something and i can't even think of any really great examples but sometimes the in history sometimes the most recent work is not the best or it's not the most that's not how i wanted to say that sometimes the most recent work is not the most important and so it makes it a little bit of a complicated field to study yeah i can can imagine okay lisa is being great to talk to you thank you you've given me well thanks luke two hours of your time and allowed me to ask a lot of people questions i don't mind thank you something painful i was like okay we i want to go there yeah i know right because isn't that like the you know that's what everybody wants to hear about yeah it doesn't hurt when i poke you here i exactly here is this the most painful exactly is this the most painful thing you've ever experienced let's talk about that yes yeah but that's what people you know that's what that's what people like to read about people want to read about conflict and pain and you know nobody wants to read about you know my life is great nobody wants to read about that yeah i'm a drag so absolutely yeah so and that yeah people love that so let me ask you this so what happens now you i assume process all this interview yeah yeah we're we're live on youtube right now so okay i'm gonna leave this this stream up on youtube and upload it to different different video sharing sites and also strip it to an mp3 and upload it to soundcloud which goes out to itunes google podcasts etc all right well i hope i hope somebody finds this interview useful and illuminating great do you have any any any additional final words anything you want to find i don't i don't this has been fun okay great thank you so much lisa and i'm going to end the stream and