Given my theoretical framework, I should know better than to assume that my experiences, however individual they may feel at the time (and even if, as in this case, we are specifically discussing an experience of radical individualisation), reflect solely an interior, individual perception… I stumbled today onto one of those ranging conversations that now sprawls across several academic blogs, discussing how socially isolating academic life can be.

I’d been intending to allow my current bout of academic melancholia to pass without public remark, but, hey, if other people are going to blog about it, I might as well join in… ;-P

New Kid on the Hallway was the origin point, I think, for this particular discussion. She talks, among other things, about the ironically isolating effect of trying to carve family time out of an academic schedule – meaning that trips to university are often intensely focussed on work, leaving little time for the sorts of casual interactions that gradually develop into meaningful and sustaining friendships. She also talks about the awkwardness of establishing new social connections in a new environment – and, together with KulturFluff – highlights the importance of actively seeking out new connections. My favourite intervention into this discussion, however, comes from Reassigned Time, who speaks about the “structural” elements within academic careers that tend to cause recurrent social isolation. I’ll quote at some length:

See, this is the thing: this profession is pretty universally isolating. In part, we have to isolate ourselves in order to do our jobs. Grading is not social. Research is not social. Service commitments infringe on our weekends and evenings. In choosing this profession, we choose a lifestyle. But whereas making this choice may not seem very dangerous to us in graduate school, when we have a cohort of people to hang out with and who understand our experiences, or when we begin to think about joining this profession, when we probably still live in or near our hometowns, and have strong networks of family and/or friends who are geographically convenient to us, the reality is that most of us don’t get jobs in our hometowns or in our grad school cities. We get jobs in places where we probably won’t know more than one or two people if we’re lucky, and we need to start from scratch. (And even if you did get a job in your grad school city, you’re still weirdly isolated because your friends leave, or those who stay are still in a different life place from the one you’re in, or whatever.)

The problem is, the vast majority of grown-up people don’t start from scratch with making friends. They just don’t. At a certain point, as Oso Raro noted in the comments over at New Kid’s, friendships happen more organically. It’s not like being 14 on the first day of school and having an expectation of making new friends. For grown-ups, the expectation is that you’ve got the friends you’ve got, and while you may meet new people, you most likely will not become “best friends forever” with most of them. But as an academic, uprooted from the social networks one builds over a lifetime when people ARE making their best friends forever – from ages 0-25 or so – what is a person supposed to do? Because when you move to a place, you NEED to make BFFs, whether you’re married or single or somewhere in between. Because people need friends.

And the thing is, it’s embarassing to say that as a 30+ year old person. It is embarassing not to have friends. It is embarassing not to know how to make friends.

What’s funny about this is that I had a conversation with my best friend here about this very thing a while back. And it was like we were revealing a dirty secret to one another just in admitting that it sucks not to have friends here. (This is also ironic, I suppose, because we do have each other, but at the same time, having one friend is almost as pathetic as having none, you know?) At the time, I remember thinking that it was so good that we’d finally admitted this to each other, that we’d finally talked about it and stopped acting like the fact that neither one of us has been able to get it together to make friends is not a huge problem. And I had that same feeling when I read New Kid’s post. It’s important to shine a light on this.

All of these issues – and many others canvassed in the comments from these blogs – resonate with me. My own peculiar twist on this subject derives from the fact that I personally seem to have some kind of highly developed, and highly undesired, knack for positioning myself in these ambiguous neither-fish-nor-fowl roles – where, e.g., I’m a student, but am also teaching courses sufficiently advanced that potential peers are taking them; I am interacting as a peer with faculty members in some contexts, but am being supervised by them in others… Since most of the people I meet, I meet through one of these awkward hybrid roles, I find myself undertaking a sort of academic ethics analysis around potential opportunities to socialise: I feel like I should be handing out (or signing) something like an informed consent form before I ask people to coffee… ;-P

There are some other social awkwardnesses that result from my work – or perhaps from my presentation of what I do in public forums. I combine research interests and methodologies that are somewhat unusual, at least for my university, and this seems to result in a well-intentioned, but truly unnecessary, degree of deference from peers, which can get in the way of establishing comfortable social relationships… And then there are the more “structural” issues of breaking through all of these issues, and forming meaningful and supportive friendships within an academic context – which are then regularly disrupted as the peripatetic academic job market continually reshuffles friends to distant institutions. These distant social connections can still be strong, and important. Still, as Reassigned Time argues:

It’s important to recognize that no matter how many friends a person has all over the country (and even the world) that a person still needs friends who are just down the street.

It’s those local social connections that can be particularly difficult to negotiate and renegotiate, within an academic career.