A few years ago, I witnessed something that unsettled me.
I was at a group dinner on the last night of an academic writing workshop, seated next to a senior scholar whose work I had been reading since I was a law student.
She had spent part of the meal talking about a project that was giving her trouble. It wasn’t an academic article, but a memoir. She wanted to tell the story of how she became the scholar and advocate she is today, and she wanted it to reach people who would never open a law review article or draft a legal brief.
The problem wasn’t that she didn’t know her own story. Rather, she was searching for the right words to convey the meaning of her experience in a way that others could feel, even those who disagreed with her.
The challenge wasn’t the story itself. The challenge was the form.
She kept returning to one scene from her childhood. She had been a girl who did not easily accept the rules, who had comments, questions, and responses that were not always welcome. She wanted readers to understand what that felt like from the inside, rather than simply tell them it happened.
She had spent decades persuading lawyers through her writing, yet much of that training felt inadequate for this particular genre. Legal writing often keeps readers at arm’s length. With this project, she wanted to draw them in. We all happily explored the question, trading ideas back and forth.
But I kept waiting for the other conversation to begin.
The one I had been trained to expect. The talk of placements, rankings, the running tally of who is ahead of whom that sneaks into so many conversations among academics. But it never came.
I sat quietly for much of that dinner, occasionally joining in with a question. Everyone seemed confident, sure of themselves. These were scholars whose work I had admired for years, people I thought of as famous. I almost felt like an imposter among them.
I envied their careers, their résumés, their confidence and swagger. I knew I was good at what I did. Some of these same people had told me so. But I didn’t feel the ease I imagined they had. I wondered whether this was what it felt like to have arrived, to focus on the work itself without constantly wondering whether it would be accepted as legitimate or whether academia would grant you a place at the table.
Maybe they felt some of the same things I did and had simply learned not to show them. I will never know. What I remember is that the work itself seemed to be enough to hold their attention. They were trying to figure out how to help a reader feel the significance of an experience. I wondered whether I would ever reach a point where I could give myself over to the work in the same way.
I left that dinner unsettled, and it took me a long time to understand why.
In Part I of this series, I wrote about how achievement in our academic careers can sometimes become an exercise in emotional survival. In Part II, I discussed how busyness can become a way of keeping our authentic selves from showing up in the workplace.
This is the part where I’m supposed to describe an alternative, offer some advice. And I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. But what I’m about to describe is something I’ve seen far more often than I’ve embodied myself.
I want to point toward a kind of ambition that runs on what you care about rather than what you’re afraid of. This is not about wanting less. Academic culture too often interprets any refusal of its relentless pace as burnout or a sign that you’re not serious.
What I am talking about is grounded ambition.
An ambition rooted in curiosity, purpose, and conviction rather than anxiety about where you rank or whether a prestigious institution will choose you.
Reading the List
There’s an important distinction between comparison and gratitude.
Comparison treats another scholar’s success as a verdict on your own. Someone places an article in a top journal or receives a prestigious grant, and we conclude, often in secret, that we must not be good enough.
In contrast, gratitude doesn’t deny someone else’s success. It simply refuses to turn that success into evidence about your own worth.
I’m not always good at this.
Earlier this year, the Law and Society Association announced its annual awards. I read the list the way I always do—top to bottom, fast and thorough. I recognized several names and smiled.
But sitting right next to my happiness was a desire to see my own name on that list. The awards signify that people value and respect your work. While I don’t think anyone owes me validation, I still read the whole list looking for it anyway.
I guess that’s not uncommon. The deeper question is:
What does that habit cost me?
The cost of comparison isn’t simply the envy it breeds, although envy can corrode into bitterness if left unchecked. The real cost is your attention. Every comparison pulls you away from your own work into an endless accounting of where you stand in the social pecking order.
Academia conditions us to normalize this behavior.
I don’t mean that as a dig at professors. It’s how our institutions are built. There’s always another rung, another list, another award. Academia doesn’t need you to fail to keep you occupied. It only needs you to keep checking where you stand, chasing the next sign that your work matters.
Is there anything we can do about this?
I’ve started paying closer attention to how I behave toward people earlier in their careers. When recognition becomes your measure of worth, someone else’s success can feel like a threat. Junior colleagues can become competitors, even when we would never describe them that way.
When a junior scholar succeeds at something I once wanted for myself, I feel pride, especially when I’ve played some role in helping them get there. I want to offer the advice, make the introduction, or write the letter that helps someone find their way.
But there is something else there, too.
Sometimes I feel a kind of grief. I think about the advice I wish someone had offered me, the people I wish I had known how to approach, the opportunities I might have recognized if someone had helped me see what was possible. So much of an academic career can depend on having the right conversation with the right person at the right time.
The game can feel rigged in that way. Some people find the guidance they need early enough to move forward with confidence. Others spend years trying to figure out whom to ask, what to ask, and whether they belong in the room at all.
There is jealousy in that feeling, and I don’t particularly like admitting it. But there is also genuine joy in knowing I might help someone else avoid some of what I’ve experienced. I can want things to have been different for me and still want something better for them.
I don’t always know what to do with those feelings. Perhaps part of the work is learning to acknowledge them without allowing them to determine how generous I am willing to be.
The kind of mentor I want to become is someone who can offer advice without needing to control the outcome or measure another person’s success against my own. I want to help someone find their way without needing their success to mean anything about mine.
How you handle these feelings privately has public consequences.
The junior scholar sitting in your office doesn’t know what you held back. They only know that the advice felt rehearsed and inauthentic. They leave wondering whether they asked the wrong question, or whether they simply don’t have what it takes.
The truth is, everyone hits a wall eventually.
Exhaustion, burnout, whatever we’re calling it that year. I wonder how much harder it becomes to help others when we spend years guarding ourselves against the very people who need us to be generous.
A Word on a Page
Beneath the career questions—did it get cited, did it get noticed, did it earn the recognition I think I want—is an older question that brought me to this work.
Am I using my imagination?
I believe law, along with the political and economic institutions built around it, is shaped by how we imagine the world to be. If we can imagine a world organized around hierarchy and individual success, we can also imagine one organized around dignity and justice.
I first read Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower around 2012, when I was a struggling law firm associate. I returned to it during the pandemic, when the book had stopped feeling speculative.
I have argued that Octavia Butler was doing legitimate legal work in that novel, despite never litigating a case or proposing a statute. She shows us a society where a person’s success depends on how much money they have. Through beautiful, vivid language, she makes an argument about human dignity that conventional legal analysis often misses.
Legal meaning isn’t discovered.
It is made, slowly, out of what a society is willing to imagine and how that imagination shapes culture. And if law’s meaning is made rather than found, then the question becomes: whose visions of the future matters? Who gets taken seriously when they imagine a different world?
That is ultimately a question about power.
Butler doesn’t hand us a program to fix poverty or a policy proposal for legal reform. She gives us Earthseed, an imaginary religion built inside a novel. I’ve watched people downplay the importance of literature to law, especially when a literary vision doesn’t engage an actual statute or propose a concrete plan for reform.
But what Butler offers, in my view, is the possibility of seeing that our present arrangements aren’t permanent.
And that idea matters for our careers too.
It means we can decide what not to write. We can turn down a great invitation to present at a conference or speak at a faculty workshop, even when we’d like to be seen. We can recognize that an opportunity is distracting us from the deeper questions we came here to ask—questions about identity, values, legacy, family, faith, and meaning.
I have done this a few times.
I certainly need to do it more.
The Same Man
But personal choices only take us so far.
The need for a living wage isn’t a mindset problem that can be solved by manifestation or meditation. Neither is the way service falls on those least protected from it, or the way tenure review can harm scholars whose work is seen as too political, or whose teaching evaluations reflect unconscious biases.
Structural problems need structural remedies. And nothing I’ve said should be read as a substitute for fighting for better, more equitable institutions.
The inner work everyone keeps talking about serves a narrower purpose. It shapes whether we do that fighting as people who don’t need to win to feel loved, or as hostages to a system we will never control and might spend our very lives trying to satisfy.
For a long time, I assumed that the freedom I was working toward was the freedom that arrives with tenure.
So I postponed. I waited. I hid my art in office drawers, telling myself that creativity was a luxury I couldn’t afford, something that would have to wait until I had taken care of the more serious business of building an academic career.
I had poems I wanted to write, ideas for novels, stories I wanted to tell. I called these things hobbies, as if giving them that name would make it easier to explain why they kept finding their way back to me. They mattered to me, though I wasn’t sure what to do with that fact. They weren’t the work I was being evaluated on or the work that would help me establish my standing in the profession.
I told myself tenure would give me more time. Once I crossed that threshold, I imagined, I could finally return to what I had set aside.
Then the door opened.
And the man on the other side of tenure was the same man as before.
Same habits.
Same anxieties.
Same fears.
Perhaps a slightly better title.
Tenure brought new opportunities, and I am grateful for many of them. There were invitations to conferences, requests to give speeches, opportunities to contribute book chapters and participate in conversations that matter to me. I enjoy much of that work. I don’t want to pretend otherwise.
But those opportunities have also filled the space I thought I would finally have for myself. There is always another invitation, another project, another worthwhile commitment. Yet the poems and stories remain in the drawers. And I don’t want them to become so distant that I can no longer find my way back to them.
The freedom I’ve come to want now is smaller and available much sooner.
The freedom to read a rejection without spiraling. To read a colleague’s announcement and feel joy without the cloud of envy and doubt.
The freedom to sit at my desk on an ordinary Tuesday—October’s light falling across my windowsill—and write something that matters to me without checking first whether it will matter to anyone else.
The freedom to sit on my couch and watch a movie with my sons.
No deadline.
No one waiting to give me permission.
I’m not fully there yet.
I got maybe two hours of it last week, maybe three.
But I noticed, which is also a bit new, and I like that for me.
Becoming Full,
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