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  Moments of Clarity: Reflections on Burnout and Resilience IN HIGHER ED   How WRITING saved My Life C. Jenise Williamson The many moments that made up a string of years of burnout were hard to ignore, and I felt incapacitated to do anything about them. While my friends and acquaintances were publishing their stories and novels, attending conferences, and giving and taking summer workshops, my life simmered in a stew of mourning, episodic expressions of neurodiversity, and teaching. I did go to conferences and workshops, and I did give presentations, but doing that wasn’t enough to remedy my burnout. Fortunately, at that time, I was teaching at a small college whose expectations of accountability were weak. Like teachers with their students, administrators get from their instructors the level they inspire. And I identified all too readily with an institution that was itself suffering from burnout and didn’t expect much in terms of publishing. At the beginning of m...
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  MOMENTS OF CLARITY: REFLECTIONS ON BURNOUT and RESILIENCE IN HIGHER ED     My First Lesson in Resilience C. Jenise Williamson Once a student let me know that I had made a mistake in publishing his poems in the campus literary magazine. He said he had retracted the submissions and submitted something else to take their place. I couldn’t recall having had that conversation. The presumption of the student that his work should be immediately accepted was something I didn’t want to get into, so I did as he asked. I pondered the convenience of electronic documents making it an easy fix and thanked a generous colleague who made the edits for me. But afterward, when thinking of it all and the flurry of emails that transpired around it, I told myself over and over that I was unprofessional. But was I really? We all make mistakes on the job. For some reason, though, making mistakes in academia seems worse than making them anywhere else. Here’s why. As academics, w...
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  MOMENTS OF CLARITY: REFLECTIONS ON BURNOUT and RESILIENCE IN HIGHER ED   DO I STAY, OR DO I GO? C. Jenise Williamson As academics, we work hard to encourage “Aha!” moments in our students. When that “light bulb” goes on, our students’ eyes glisten, sometimes even to tears when the realize they can do more than they ever thought possible. They take the newly acquired information into themselves as an embodiment of a truth they hadn’t known they needed. That is the miracle we hope to see in all our students. But when that doesn’t happen, we extend ourselves further, and often even further than that in the hope that every student will shine.   Then there is a reality we hadn’t known we would experience. Under-prepared students, lack of administrative support, and subversive politics can cause us to go to boundless measures. No wonder burnout in academia is commonplace. A Harvard University article by Eric P. Bettinger and Bridget Terry Long states that “high sc...
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