Review: Coming to My Senses

Alyssa Harad got her PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin, but it didn’t work out exactly as planned. As she writes in Coming to My Senses (affiliate link):

[T]here wasn’t much demand for English PhDs when I began my studies, and there was even less eight years later, when I emerged, degree in hand. The most sensible of my fellow students dropped out after a few years. Those of us more adept at denial or faith kept going, hoping we’d be the exception.

I told myself I was keeping my options open, and I always had a side project or two going. But I stayed too long. I grew deeply attached to my work and to teaching, and poured my heart into both. This turned out to be a mistake — a serious, passionate, complicated mistake, like marrying the wrong person or moving to the wrong country. It took me several years to fully extricate myself. And during that time I wandered around like an exiled divorcee — stunned, brokenhearted, a stranger to the world and to myself.

As it turns out, she wasn’t the exception. She eventually took a full-time non-profit job, which she eventually quit to try her hand at freelance writing. She wrote test questions, book reviews, website copy, and whatever else she could find.

It was then, during her period of exile, that she stumbled across a blog talking about perfume, and she was soon hooked — reading perfume blogs, ordering samples, learning to smell what the reviewers described, learning to tell the difference between top, middle, and bottom notes, learning the history of perfume. It changed everything, and by the end of the book she’s guest-posting for popular perfume blogs, flying to New York for an annual perfume tour, and, well, writing this book.

In other words, perfume brought her out of exile.

I recommend reading this if you’ve left or are thinking about leaving

Harad’s book is a thoughtful, well-written, and lush description of the pain of leaving one world and the strangeness of entering another, and it was even more powerful for me because she was leaving academia and entering a world academia generally disdains.

I remember a lecture in which the speaker was talking about bodies, and paused to pinch her forearm and say, “I don’t mean these bodies.” Perfume is the antithesis of academia in many ways — frivolous, feminine, decidedly embodied. This contrast between academia and Harad’s new world makes visible the specific challenges of leaving academia, challenges it’s all too easy to think are ours alone, our own shameful failures we need to hide or forget as soon as possible. But our journeys, while always unique, have more in common than we often acknowledge.

This is why I read memoirs about leaving academia, it’s why I read blogs, and it’s why I write here. We aren’t failures. Leaving is hard. Changing worlds changes us, and that’s the hardest thing of all.

Three key takeaways

While I doubt most of you are likely to become obsessed with perfume, there are three main things I want to highlight from Harad’s journey.

First, until she stumbled upon perfume blogs, Harad had no idea that was going to be something she loved enough to end up writing about it. She had no idea perfume would become a focus of her time and a way into a new life. You can’t necessarily tell from where you are right now what twists and turns your life will take. That doesn’t mean there isn’t something out there for you.

Second, you’ve got to follow the spark, whatever it is. For her it was perfume. For me, right now, it’s sailing the Pacific. For you it could be flamenco dancing, or child development, or the cuisine of Brazil, or the proofs for the infinity of prime numbers. Whether or not it becomes a Thing you can Make a Living At (and I highly doubt I will ever sail across the Pacific, much less make a living doing it), it will enrich your life and point you in new directions. That’s both helpful and fun, and it’s a hell of a lot more effective than trying to consciously and linearly figure out What You Are Supposed To Be Doing.

Finally, whatever it is, and wherever you go, you’re likely to get bombarded with internal fears, anxieties, and rules that come directly out of your academic experience. Whatever it is isn’t intellectual enough, it’s girly, it’s weird, it’s useless, it’s fluffy. All those fears / anxieties / rules mean is that you’re doing something different, and your old patterns aren’t sure what to make of it. They don’t mean this new thing actually is wrong or anti-intellectual or useless or whatever. So long as it’s meaningful and enjoyable for you, that’s good enough.

Want to read Coming to My Senses? Click here to buy the book from Amazon. Do you have other favorite leaving-academia memoirs? I’d love to know what they are!