Andrea Kayne's Blog - Posts Tagged "acedemia"
My Midlife Scavenger Hunt: Demons and Muses
Clue: Sometimes demons are muses, and in your mid-forties, like heartburn, they can no longer be ignored.
I met Gloria Zimmerman, the protagonist in my novel Oxford Messed Up, during my year from hell—a year when my family, career, and sanity were severely tested. At DePaul University, where I’m on faculty, it was a prolonged nine months of insecurity and uncertainty as colleagues from my department, college, and university meticulously scrutinized my teaching, scholarship, and service, deciding whether I was worthy of tenure and promotion. While my record was solid, I was worried about the subtext underlying my dossier—the toes I may have stepped on, the asses I refused to kiss, and the students who sometimes found my school-law classes challenging.
As it turned out, fighting for tenure was not nearly as difficult as the fighting I would have to do at home. Almost overnight, we had to deal with severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in our family. The psychologist described the OCD as “conflagration” as we watched the disease consume my loved one, severely undermining the ability to talk, to eat, to move, and to relate to peers in any way.
The psychologist and psychiatrist informed me that if there was a chance of the person in my life recovering from the OCD, it would have to be through the combination of Cognitive Behavior Therapy and medication. Both of these options seemed frightening, but it was more frightening watching the deterioration. Cognitive Behavior Therapy with its rigid “tough love” system of rewards and punishments seemed so archaic, but it was…and still is…the only therapy that has been proven successful in treating OCD.
So there I was in the Fall of 2007, justifying my academic record by day and justifying the painful limitations I had to place on someone I deeply loved by night. The only one who got me through was Gloria. Thank God for Gloria...
Read the rest of this entry here and please feel free to leave a comment or story of your own midlife scavenger hunt adventures: My Midlife Scavenger Hunt: Demons and Muses
I met Gloria Zimmerman, the protagonist in my novel Oxford Messed Up, during my year from hell—a year when my family, career, and sanity were severely tested. At DePaul University, where I’m on faculty, it was a prolonged nine months of insecurity and uncertainty as colleagues from my department, college, and university meticulously scrutinized my teaching, scholarship, and service, deciding whether I was worthy of tenure and promotion. While my record was solid, I was worried about the subtext underlying my dossier—the toes I may have stepped on, the asses I refused to kiss, and the students who sometimes found my school-law classes challenging.
As it turned out, fighting for tenure was not nearly as difficult as the fighting I would have to do at home. Almost overnight, we had to deal with severe Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in our family. The psychologist described the OCD as “conflagration” as we watched the disease consume my loved one, severely undermining the ability to talk, to eat, to move, and to relate to peers in any way.
The psychologist and psychiatrist informed me that if there was a chance of the person in my life recovering from the OCD, it would have to be through the combination of Cognitive Behavior Therapy and medication. Both of these options seemed frightening, but it was more frightening watching the deterioration. Cognitive Behavior Therapy with its rigid “tough love” system of rewards and punishments seemed so archaic, but it was…and still is…the only therapy that has been proven successful in treating OCD.
So there I was in the Fall of 2007, justifying my academic record by day and justifying the painful limitations I had to place on someone I deeply loved by night. The only one who got me through was Gloria. Thank God for Gloria...
Read the rest of this entry here and please feel free to leave a comment or story of your own midlife scavenger hunt adventures: My Midlife Scavenger Hunt: Demons and Muses
