From prof to professional: the uprooting of an identity

Once before, I have experienced the existential confusion I'm experiencing now.

I was finishing my master's thesis in the last months of 2010. Having studied from 2005 onwards, I had found comfort in the label student. But not a week after defending my thesis on a dreary January

day, I received the key to my office in the building where I had been taught. Now I was to teach. I had to adjust to the quantum leap; I was still in university, but an invisible line had cut me off from one side and positioned me in another. It was an unknown world, full of oddities. It took me a good two years before I wouldn't flinch when someone asked me my for my job title. When I would say "I'm a lecturer", I expected people to smell a rat. Even though my teaching received critical acclaim, the term 'lecturer' took a while to get into.

But when I did adjust to it, I started wearing my job title as a medal of honour. I found that being a university lecturer earned you respect on travels, and was a cue for others to give your opinion on any subject weight. The qualms I had had before vanished quickly, and I think about a year ago, I had built my identity first and foremost around my academic employer. I was a lecturer, all the other things I had aspired to or succeeded in came after that mention.

And just as I was really relishing the identity that the University of Amsterdam had lent me, the certainty of the job title announced its departure. Until the 1st of September I had the paper proving my claim, after that, I was on my own again. It proves to be both exciting as well as challenging.

Without thinking twice, my friend Kuba Szutkowski and I willfully escalated a documentary project, and without too much thought, our non-profit foundation Volunteer Correct saw the light. The change for me was as sudden as it was in the beginning of 2011: I crossed a boundary. I went from those who describe media, to those who make it.

No big institution to back my claims of expertise, no need to weigh words and nuance everything, no semester cycle to drown in, but my own messing about in the margins, dependence on plans I make with

very little prior experience, and nothing but the schedule I have to carve out of a generally uninterested world.

I have tried to introduce myself with 'film maker' and 'non-profit president' a few times now. It feels like I'm pulling someone's leg when I do. But just as when I commenced lecturing, I am telling the truth. Right now, I might be most uncomfortable with the new labels. But come time, I will probably look back at this time of identity confusion the same way as I look back at the time a lecturer was born.

I discussed my feelings of unease with my new titles with a friend, who chuckled and said: "next time when you meet someone, just say: 'I am a president, what is it you do?'" So, with the authority that my office bestows on me, I wish thee a nice day. God bless you, and god bless the malleability of an identity.