d-integration

Hello everyone! Welcome to my blog, d-integration.  As you can see, this is my first post.

I won’t spend too much time on myself. You can see enough of that in my about page.  Instead, I thought that I’d take a little bit of time to outline why I created this blog, and how it fits into my larger creative project.

I should start by saying that I was formerly in academia.  I’m trained as a historian, and I continue to work in a job adjacent to the larger academic world.  But, as anyone in the academy knows, it’s a grueling occupation.  To succeed, you must “publish or perish.”

I loved teaching students and I was particularly fond of seeing the way that they engaged with topics that aren’t covered in K-12 education.  Making sense of the millet system in the Ottoman Empire, for example, opened their eyes to the idea that the nation-state isn’t the only possible polity.  Creating timelines forced students to put events in multiple world regions onto the same temporal space, and changed the way they saw history’s “progress” (or lack thereof).

Another benefit of being in the academy was being closely connected to others who took education very seriously.  The overwhelming majority of my colleagues were kind, insightful people who pushed others to expand their horizons while thinking critically about information.  They do ground-breaking research and I am constantly impressed by the work they put out.

My difficulties with the academy were, instead, systemic.  As every Ph.D. Candidate quickly learns, it’s necessary to carve out a niche exploring some topic that either (1) hasn’t been covered before, or (2) requires reanalysis with new evidence or perspectives.  The challenge, I found, was that I much preferred to be a generalist.  I wanted to learn a little bit of everything.  When I tried to dive too deeply into a single topic, my interests pulled me in new directions, and I couldn’t sit down long enough to write a solid dissertation.  All of this is to say, rather than writing monographs or academic articles on my research topic, I wanted to be an essayist.

After enough grinding for long enough, I realized how miserable it made me.  I decided that I couldn’t do it anymore and left.  

I started and re-started this blog a few times in an attempt to get back into writing about the topics I choose.  Unfortunately, each time I saw the visitor count rise on the back-end, I backed out.  I’d then send the blog back into maintenance mode, erasing everything on it.

One reason that I decided to link this blog to the Fediverse was as a way to allow myself to be read by other kind, charitable people.

Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you’ll like what I put out in the future.