On being a generalist

 Everyone I meet seems to be an expert in a body of knowledge or a master of very specific skills. Russian literature, photography, welding, building canoes, fixing bikes, cartooning, Harry Potter, addiction medicine, videography, cartooning, politics, gardening/farming, forestry, Chinese history, little house construction…

Photo by Russ Ward on Unsplash    (This is not me welding) 

There’s this acronym my friend Julia taught me the other day. SHAME. It stands for “Should Have Already Mastered Everything.” In my case, I can swap the E with another S for “Something.” As I talk to another herbalist/drummer/body worker/activist/medic/climber, shame opens up like a book inside of me. What have I done? What do I know? What can I do? You know those staff bios you come across on certain grassroots nonprofits or movement org websites? “Amy is a black belt, is a master Reiki practitioner, has written 7 full-length novels about mushrooms, doulas births, and raises chickens while managing a voluntary mutual-aid project run out of her garage. She also does carpentry.” 

I’ve pushed, in the past, for some semblance of being specialized in something. Maybe being an ESL/TESOL teacher would count? I knew a few things about language and teaching, but still constantly felt like a beginner. I’d forget what an adverb was every time I had to teach about them and perpetually felt like I was a student as well. Teaching in the English Language Fellow program in China delivered some empty sense of knowing stuff. I was haphazardly shoved to stand in front of dozens and sometimes hundreds of teachers and talk about stuff I (sort of) knew. Sometimes I wore awful, stiff, itchy blazers and resented it the entire time. Mostly, it was uncomfortable. I felt the most impostury of imposters training other teachers. I barely knew what I was doing in classrooms, yet the empty and toxic veneer of White American legitimacy snowballed into me hopping around in front of older and more experienced Chinese teachers and talking about jigsaw activities. Was this to be my future? If so, I kinda hated it, but not in a coherent way, since I was really confused about how I should feel. Why did I keep finding myself performing in front of large groups of people? This was almost certainly the opposite of what I usually want to do, which is read alone on a grassy knoll and touch trees. 

(Me, hating my blazer and having an existential crisis. )

So, over the past years, I’ve found myself wanting to know more things and stuff! Accumulate, accumulate, accumulate. What can I talk about? How can I be impressive? Despite having a neurodivergent brain that actively resists focusing and remembering details, I pushed myself up this slippery slope of accumulation. I couldn’t have said it at the time, but it seemed to me that an identity was a composite of skills, abilities, and specialties. Not, like something completely independent of these things, and entirely sacred and worthy. 

I wrote about letting go of busyness/urgency/perfectionism recently, and part of this, for me, is also letting go of the pursuit of professionalism/specialization. When I’ve given myself the time and space to reflect more on this during this odd season of unemployment, I can clearly hear that I actually have no interest in being professional. Partially, this stems from hating blazers and conferences and sitting a lot and complicated things and stupid rules and pretending to be serious all the time. On a more serious level, it seems like the more professional one gets, the more removed they can become from their life, at least in my experience. There’s the ladder of power in a career, but this ladder can also lead you, step by step, away from being in touch with your body and emotions. I don’t want to be led into increasingly elite chambers of existence; I don't want to become good at compartmentalizing; I want to break out of the entire thing and rejoin the whole, preferably in a meadow. 

I started an additional graduate program this fall in English literature for unclear reasons (another Master’s degree? Why not?), and I think I was starting to climb this specialization ladder in academia, sort of, and while I do love reading and writing about feminist/queer theory and dreaming through others’ words and ideas, I started to feel increasingly weird about it. What did this additional degree mean, if anything? Unconsciously, I was following the prescribed pathway for people raised with my owning class experience….onwards, towards more specialization! Moving away from being a regular, scrappy ABE teacher and towards being able to teach more at the college level. Writing papers for publication, turning phrases, using the word “heuristic” and “ontology”, etc. Sometime in February, while I was up north on the frontlines of the Line 3 struggle, tired, freezing, and scared while we watched beautiful marshlands get torn up by machines that were being protected by police (the machines, not the marshlands. Yeah, I don't get it either), I said to myself, “What the fuck am I doing taking classes in Literary Theory?” 

I seemed to be, at least in my activism/organizing and relational life, moving further and further away from blazers and adverbial clauses, and so these classes started to ring really hollow. I’m really grateful for this insight, which may not have happened if I had been busily teaching or not as involved in grassroots organizing the past 6 months. I had been teaching at Saint Paul College for the past year before the pandemic, and although I was initially sad when I lost my classes after the fall semester, I am incredibly grateful to have entered a mental clearing. Did I even want to be teaching at a college level, especially considering the really problematic power dynamics at play with my ESL department being comprised solely of cis-white women teaching students of color? Did I want to be serving as a gatekeeper to higher ed and opportunities, as a teacher of required ESL classes that don’t even count as credits and serve as an additional barrier for actually being in college? To add to that, after the two previous semesters of teaching online and spending increasing amounts of time sitting in front of my computer and sighing loudly and cursing all the gods, I was really thankful to be using my body and mind in different and more life-giving ways. What really, to me, is life-giving about becoming an expert in a field? The only kinds of fields that I care about are ones with wildflowers. 

Through the help of community, I moved through the process and made the decision to discontinue this master’s program, knowing that I wanted more spaciousness in my life to be able to do the things that I really did love: nurture relationships, take care of myself and others, organize, create, and play. I wholeheartedly resist the messages that push me to become more professional, more specialized, more of an expert. I want to be connected to myself, to others, to what’s around me, not mired in the details, rules, and disembodiment of a careery-career. 

Even after this insight, making this decision and committing to reflecting more on what work might look like for me in the future, I still felt lingering insecurities about my lack of skills and knowledge in life. I knew that my heart wasn’t in academia or blazers, but I still felt like I should be really good at something (drumming? Bike mechanics?) or that I should at least commit to a deep dive in some body of knowledge. What was I really doing, I asked myself, as friends around me whittled hand-made pottery, harvested mushrooms, and built structures with their bare hands. What can I do? 

Through several conversations with others, because literally all my realizations come through talking with others, I started to understand that, actually, I am a generalist. I am completely curious about so many different things in life, something that often felt to me like an indictment of my inability to commit. In reality, I am completely committed to the world. My friend Julia described it as being a people and world lover. My love and attention is diffuse, not honing in on any one pursuit or thing or even any one person, but spread across many different things and beings. My attention feels best when it is like this, when it is not forced to sink into any one topic, pursuit or person. I feel most at home when I honor this, when I feel myself in love with much of what I see, when my curiosity leads me from question to question, when I notice trees, when I love lots of people. And it’s true: my concerns and preoccupations and passion are all very general. I care about the health and well-being and liberation of the people and communities and beings around me, and I want to talk about and understand a little of everything. 

With that in mind, I’ve started to try to listen to my intuition more and am discovering generalist skills and capabilities that I really enjoy and feel drawn to. I know that I love bringing and weaving people together, synthesizing topics/ideas/dreams, dreaming/musing/creating/writing and paying attention to and providing care for individuals and groups. It always seems to come back to that: paying attention. I think maybe if I were to have a specialty, I would want it to be in paying attention to as much as I can. (This idea is heavily influenced by reading this book by Jenny Odell. Everyone should drop everything, read this book, and then keep everything dropped.)

I don’t need to be good at anything in particular and neither do you. I don’t have to be an expert in anything and neither do you. It’s also super dope if you happen to know a lot of specific things or do specific things. I want to listen to you tell me really excellent and passionately-researched information that you know! I want to watch and learn from you as you identify plant species, create 3D models of dinosaurs, and quote excessively from Star Trek. I want to learn from my specialist friends. 

Above all, I want to pay attention and honor the beauty of the very human way that I am, knowing that the more validation and love I can give myself, the more I’ll be able to do the same for others. You are completely loveable and worthy regardless of how much you know, what you do, or your skills.