The beginning of an e-mail exchange with a graduate student in linguistics, call him GS, who wrote to tell me that he’d found my blog a few years before he went to grad school in linguistics:
and I thought it was excellent and exactly the thing I needed at the time
I replied with delighted thanks, and asked if he would be willing to say, more specifically what is was that I provided for him.
GS then elaborated on his thoughts at the time in a particularly thoughtful flight of introspection (and, yes, said more nice things about me).
Now: details.
AZ1. My reply to GS’s first e-mail:
This is touching — words to delight a writer, a scholar, a teacher. Thank you. They have inspired some good thoughts, ideas I’m trying to fashon into an actual essay, but that might take a while.
I get a fair amount of mail from lgbt-folk, of course, thanking me for being a beacon in a hostile world (a role I took on myself in 1970, with full awareness) — but, very often, mail from random straight people who thank me for my openness, settting an example for them. Then startlingly, from an occasional former student, saying “You changed my life”. A couple of times, “You saved my life”.
This is hugely gratifying, but also way scary: I’m just a guy, a lot of me is a working-class kid from Pennsylvania Dutch country who got very very lucky (and, yes, worked his ass off), how can I be serving as a model and affecting other people’s lives?
Well, it comes with the territory, and I have to accept that.
And then asked him to say more about what in my blog had suited him so well. (I write for my own satisfaction — these essays are a lot of work, but also a great pleasure, occasionally fun — but of course I also write for an audience (well, an assortment of audiences), so I’m naturally interested in hearing about what moves them.)
GS2. His thoughtful elaboration (somewhat edited):
I couldn’t really imagine what my life would look like; I don’t think I could really picture what the life of an academic would be without feeling like I would give something up; the prospect of dedicating at least the next 5+ years of my life (and possibly the rest of it) to studying linguistics felt daunting.
I don’t remember specifically how I found your writing. Maybe your name was mentioned in a meeting I had had or it was something I just randomly stumbled upon. What I do remember though was just being really fascinated by the range of things that you talked about. Not only were the posts that focused on linguistics interesting but also your writings about “gay things”, different observations you have had, or just the details about your life really struck me. In combination, it seemed to show this very rich and varied life that wasn’t lacking the things I was initially worried about and that I had been struggling to dream for myself. I think I was just very struck by how honest and open the writing was, and it made this possible future something that was very appealing.
Rich and varied life, in an academic setting — connecting linguistics to all sorts of other interests and activities in my life, and all sorts of other things to linguistics; it doesn’t actually all hang together, since it’s a work of bricolage, a multidimensional lattice of connections (you can compose your own, and it will surely be different from mine — but I’m evidence that you can do it).
Radical openness — treating everything as open to scrutiny in public: “nothing human is alien to me” as a way of life, and made personal (I’ll talk about any damn thing, taking it seriously), a position that was thrust upon me several times in my life, for different reasons, but always leading to excellent outcomes, so that eventually I came to think that it was a good thing as a life stance, and potentially useful to others.
Here I have a great deal more to say, with many stories (some hair-raising) to tell, but let it be clear that I’m not recommending radical openness for anyone else; I happen to be in the fortunate position of being able to take this stance with only moderate blowback, so my moral principles tell me I should. Your mileage might vary.
(By the way, I tell people that I don’t recruit for homosexuality, but I do recruit enthusiastically for linguistics. And Sacred Harp singing.)
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