January– the start of a new year and a new semester. This semester is a little unusual for me because this will be the first semester since I’ve started graduate school that I have “off.” The deal is that if you are a teaching assistant (TA) or a teaching fellow (TF) one semester during the academic year, then that semester of work for the entire year. This is absolutely an institution-specific thing, a program-specific policy even. I have friends in another department at my school who have some sort of graduate assistant duties each semester, no matter what. However, they’re guaranteed at least one full year of funding where they have no obligations except to write. It all varies.

So much feels like it’s changed since I last wrote. Last semester (Fall 2019) seemed like the end of an era in a lot of ways. It was the first, and likely last, time that I’ll be a teaching assistant; the next time I set foot in a classroom for an extended period of time, I will probably be teaching my own course. It also marked the end of a series of trials and tests; with coursework, comps and prospectus behind me, as well as the experience of getting my feet wet with pedagogy under a tenured professor, I finally feel ABD (all but dissertation). I feel like everything I do from here on out is for me, on my time, on my terms, and I can begin to craft my career the way I want to, as opposed to satisfying the whims of others.

I’m not a student anymore.

And that means I’ve been spending a lot more time than usual thinking about how I want my career to look, studying the careers of others, reaching out, daydreaming, and hustling. A lot of things have been put into motion that I can’t necessarily say much about at the moment, but in the last few months of 2019 and into this first month of the new decade, I feel myself finding my footing as I begin to walk in my purpose.

The one thing that’s abundantly clear is that I want to write. It seems so obvious to say, but nothing feels like writing for me. Nothing feels like the moment when I get the first words down on a new document or in a new journal; nothing like working through rounds of revisions; and nothing like seeing those words find a home and make their way out into the world.

An important note is that I want to be a writer with range; I recently got to see Lamar Giles in conversation with Meg Medina and the discussion about range has stayed with me. My scholarship, my blogging and my essays are starting to find homes and an audience. I want that for my fiction, too– my novels and short stories. And one day I want to write a comic. I would love to write lots of comics, but let’s just start with one. (I won’t say who I’d want to write but let’s just say her initials are LL.)

One day, I’ll write a post about how I balance all the different types of writing that I do/want to do. For now, just assume I spend a lot of time juggling and dropping the various balls.

As I get further down my path and closer to aligning myself with my own goals, I have come to resent grad school less and less. Yes, I could write a book about what’s wrong with higher education as it stands, but the time I got to hone my thinking, develop my writing, read widely, meet people– specifically, authors and writers…those are skills I can take with me, no matter where I end up. I don’t think I ever would have wrote the novel I drafted last summer if I hadn’t been in grad school, day-dreaming about digital Black girlhood, blogging and writing. I maybe wouldn’t have made the time, or perhaps never even had the idea.

Things happen for a reason, and they’ll reveal themselves in time.

At any rate, there’s still the practical business of having a semester off. What will I do? Well, I still have plenty to do. I still have a whole dissertation to write, research to do, stuff to read to get there. I’ll be making some appearances at conferences: Chesapeake DH in February, SXSWEdu in March and the Lemon Project Symposium later that month. I’m still the graduate advisor of the Africana House on campus so I’ll be working a little more closely with the students this semester. Of course, I’m already back to yoga, but I’m adding in a new cardio class for fun. And I’ll probably be writing across the internet (I’ve already had pieces in Black Youth Project, Wear Your Voice, and ZORA) in addition to my dissertation work and noveling.

I have some cool projects and news dropping soon, too, so stay close to the blog (and Twitter) to be the first in the know.

I’m so glad I’m finding my magic in this liminal space between life as a student and a lifetime as a scholar.