Failure and the Dignity of Work

The first week of June holds several important anniversaries for me, and I hope you don’t mind if I allow myself to indulge in a little personal self-reflection. This month marks my ten-year anniversary of working in the advancement industry and the thirteen-year anniversary of one of the most difficult periods of my professional life.

As some of you know, I started my educational journey wanting to be a professor of foreign languages and literature, with a specialization in French literature. This came from a period of years spent living in Europe and the love affair I developed with the cultures and voices of the francophone world. After working hard in an undergraduate degree program, I was admitted to my dream graduate program at NYU – which meant I’d get to rub shoulders with Assia Djebar, Denis Hollier, Jean Michael Dash, and Bruno Latour (among others) all giants in their fields and accomplished philosophers and writers.

However, after joining the program, it became clear that I was not keeping pace with my peers. After struggling for two years with completing my master’s degree and having undergone intensely difficult preparation for my exams, the stress of the program became too great, and I had to withdraw due to a mental breakdown in June at the start of my third year.

This last year, and after the diagnosis of one of my children, I learned that I had undiagnosed dyslexia. All this time later I’m able to look back on that period at NYU with a new perspective. Little wonder I had difficulty keeping up with my peers and their ability to read and write graduate-level scholarship in a foreign language!

What followed was an intense period of trying to make sense of my educational and professional life and find a new direction. I was honestly deflated, and the job market was grim, the country was rebounding from the recession, and I had a very difficult time landing interviews for any sort of work, much less something that could support my young family. I don’t know how many jobs I applied for, but I recall several interviews for entry-level positions in everything from clerical roles at hedge funds to sales jobs in the retail sector – none of which panned out. I ended up taking odd jobs with a small cleaning crew that specialized in the final post-construction cleanup of retail spaces. I still have a memory of being on all fours late one night cleaning splatters of drywall mud from off the glittery tiles of a newly constructed Forever21 at the Staten Island Mall. I felt like an absolute failure.

A month or two later Hurricane Sandy hit New York and I threw myself into volunteer work organizing cleanup efforts through a local church. I was assigned to be a lead administrator for the cleanup initiative on Staten Island and ended up coordinating the efforts of 3,000+ volunteers in gutting and clearing over 1,000 homes along the south shore. As I mucked out houses, tore down molding drywall and insulation, and helped people sort through flooded personal belongings, I began to understand a quote I had once heard attributed to MLK, “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance.” ?On that cold shoreline, helping people from all walks of life recover what was left of their lives, I learned the dignity of work.

Shortly afterwards I was accepted into a new graduate program at UIUC which completely changed my career trajectory and put me on the path towards advancement and the work I am privileged to do today. I now take this week every year as an opportunity to reflect on the lessons learned from that period of my life and when things get hard, I remind myself of how lucky I am for the opportunity to work. I am grateful every day for the chance to contribute to an institution like UT Austin that has for a mission the changing of the world.

*Images generated using ChatGPT.