12. Daring

 Daring

Is daring a feeling? Can I be daring without being aware of feeling daring? I have done things in the past that, looking back, were daring, but at the time seemed the only thing I could do. Dropping out of Antioch College in a city I’d only been in for a few weeks for my co-op job period, for instance. At the time, I felt unsure of everything in my life, and I knew that when I returned to school, I was expected to make a “five-year plan,” essentially choose my major and make sure all the courses I’d need would be available on the schedule I’d be on campus and not off on my co-op jobs. But I had no idea what that major would be. I’d taken courses in English, history, philosophy, and none of them had awakened any desire to continue those fields. When on my current co-op job I’d met a woman my age who was looking for a roommate after being kicked out of her college, I jumped at the chance to just stay here in Washington, D.C., and try to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I didn’t think I was being daring, and my parents thought I was being foolish.

            Many years later, did I do another daring thing when I asked not to be evaluated for tenure at New York University’s journalism department? It’s true I might well have been rejected—I hadn’t published much. But I had a book proposal that a university press had expressed some interest in. Instead, I was attending meetings in 1990 about organizing a meeting for women activists in the newly non-Communist countries of eastern Europe. The next spring, when I should have been working on “unpacking” the thoughts from my recent master’s thesis for the book I would need for tenure, I was headed for a weeklong gathering in Dubrovnik, just a few weeks before war broke out in Yugoslavia. It seemed to me that 1990 and 1991 were a world-historical moment, and how could I miss being part of that moment? The 75 women in Dubrovnik founded the Network of East-West Women, and I worked for NEWW for some years, helping to get create its online presence in the early days of the internet as a mass medium. But when I left for that meeting in  Yugoslavia, I had no idea what would happen in the future, only that I might continue teaching at NYU as an adjunct. Daring? I guess so.