I keep procrastinating. In general, but especially on getting down to nitty-gritty work on grad school. (In the past, I’ve procrastinated on figuring out a career in general, and possibly for similar reasons, but let’s talk about the here-and-now.)

Over the past four years or so, I have been learning not just how to be more social, to feel closer to a wider range of people, to feel connected. In a way, it is precisely this human capacity for a variety of forms and intensities of intimacies that I aim to examine as an anthropologist: kinship, sexuality, bonds of alliance and friendship and collaboration. (What is “marriage” in all of this?)

I think what I fear most is becoming disconnected from my social relations, floating free as I focus on the work at hand. It may help to learn to cultivate a good relationship even with just myself, my “primary partner,” but I fear not ever being able to come back down to earth, and I want to someday. I don’t need to “settle down” in the style of a suburban nuclear family, but I would like to land somewhere at some point where I am able to feel that the connections I have with others are somewhat reliable, lasting, intimate. I don’t know how to feel that right now; perhaps I should let go of even that. Perhaps all intimacy is fleeting and one should just learn to be satisfied by the constant present moment, whatever its state may be.

I suppose that, in conventional terms of my culture, one would say I’m afraid of “losing people.” But I know there will always be other good people to meet; I am more concerned that I’ll not have the time for people, and them not the time for me, that engenders the stronger feelings of intimate connection I currently enjoy. (But what does that even mean? (An aside: Michael Warner says publics require strangers; is intimacy only felt in private, and could contemporary liberal society exist if people could learn to feel genuine compassion and kinship with their extended society?))

Perhaps, in a way, I can find a way to let my work be a different way of building and seeking intimacy and connectedness with others. (An aside: hm, perhaps I am running up against the barriers of my own culture’s concept of intimacy, that it can’t be felt deeply, or legitimately, if shared with many people for less time? Do other cultures feel this with their bandmates (or whatever) all the time? Does “romance” only make sense when your culture proscribes human intimacy pretty much altogether, save “one special person?”))

I also fear needing to “be academic” so much that I fail to be useful in the world, in the manner of effecting even some small change in culture, or just in a few people’s lives. I don’t want to do that only by “having an effect on students,” but even then, I want to remember to be—in my language, in my thought, in work—an ally to the marginalized. I don’t want my work to be about me, I want it to be about the change that needs to happen in the world. I am thinking this after reading this excellent line in this article, “Kutcher and Moore aren’t interested in being allies, they’re interested in being heroes, and those two desires are mutually exclusive.”

I don’t want my work to be about me, but about itself. This is the difficulty of dealing with a system in which reputation is important to maintaining your participation in the system. It’s like this: when applying for employment, one “has to sell oneself,” you are marketing yourself as a good choice for the employer to make. It’s an alienating power relationship. In the academy, one also has to craft a reputation. Hopefully good work will do that for me, but I will have to tailor some of my work towards maintaining my own career, and it will always be difficult to strike a balance.

Maybe the question of balance in all of this is answered in the paragraph at the end of that same article:

Ashton, you have a powerful platform at your disposal. Could you, for once, use it not to amplify your own voice but rather to cede the spotlight to those who have made this their life’s work? Right now, you’re not listening. You’re yelling. But people who care listen. They never stop listening, especially when someone tells them they’re getting it all wrong. For you, this is a vanity project. For many of us, this is our lives.

I still forget, but listening is how you bond with others, comingle with others, transcend otherness. Listening is when we’re most human. Maybe I’ll lose the sort of intimacy that’s about me, but gain a sort of intimacy that’s more valuable. Maybe if I focus more on listening being why I want to do anthropology, and less on the idea of “being an anthropologist and educating others” (i.e., “shouting”), maybe I won’t have to worry about the balance.

One who thinks the world needs change tends to think that “telling” is what the world needs, when really perhaps it’s listening.