I was living in Berlin, had been working steadily towards my dreams of finding my place in academia. I was exhausted between teaching at three different language schools in order to stay afloat, the stresses of applying to and preparing for grad school with no guidance, and the details of the everyday of negotiating life in a foreign city.

Without any guidance to help me find my way, I scoured the internet when I could for information: course syllabi, bibliographies, conferences: what books and topics are people discussing, what are conferences like, what did I need to independently learn in order to make my way, looking for red threads to follow and weave together. Trying to build so many maps in my head at once of both my physical location and literary genres.

During one of these expeditions and with some nostalgia for the classroom with well-lit intellectual paths and Peter Pan adventures I’d left behind, I came across a presentation about book called Lisa’s Liebe, by Marelene Streeruwitz. So I got myself a copy. Not very far into the book, I had the funhouse mirror sensation of realizing that some of the protagonist’s experiences were strikingly similar to extremely personal experiences and communications I’d shared (I thought confidentially) with the presenter, and at times with close friends. It appeared that the presenter, who had responded personally to my news infrequently, was now milking that content publicly for their own personal and professional advancement – and probably also to get some laughs along the way. The implied message, of course, was about my own superficiality and emptiness and banality of my existence, a sort of lame protagonist who just lets things happen to her, which had by some twisted logic become fair game to scrutinize in the effete realms of academic conferences. It felt like some of my own narrative had been stolen from me – without permission, and shared, again without permission, with people who would now never be able to take the character presented seriously as an academic, much less as a person.

At the same time, by objectifying my experiences into some intellectual exercise, the presenter distanced themselves from their own significant effect on and involvement in my life – my current struggle to find my way academically and was very real, and I had no guidance. With nothing solid to rely on, I was forced to return in my mind again and again to the place of assumed safety I’d left behind as a place to venture out from. Also I had so much confusion and so many questions left over from some academic experiences that I was trying in vain to resolve and to understand, to piece together, to come to terms with all the mixed messages. I could not admit my confusion, believing that it would only show my lack of sophistication as I tried to grow quickly into the maturity I felt I lacked. I read other books by Streeruwitz hoping that that would help. It didn’t. My big folly was in believing that entering academia would allow me to finally get the perspective, experience and information I would need to finally be able to understand and get a clear picture, to have more fine-grained control over my own narrative, to keep growing into my own power. In fact, academia only made everything worse. My experience in grad school was a large dark tunnel of unrelenting and inescapable abuse by a senior professor who used information about me that I hadn’t shared with her and words like “inappropriate” like an electric cattle prod anytime she wanted to put me in my place apropos of nothing to let me know she found my whole being inappropriate, or just felt out of control in her own life. It was one violation after the next. It was the worst anyone had ever treated me in my life – surpassing the tortures of the middle school bullies. She felt the need to to control my narrative and leave me out of it, leaving me out of classroom discussions, and obstructing my progress at every turn. I could barely get my papers returned even two years after they’d been submitted. I never knew what my grades were based on because I was not allowed to talk in class, and I didn’t have any feedback on my work. Others did have their work returned.

But what could I actually do about cardboard Lisa, from Berlin. I was not in any professional position to “play the game” and confront or respond with a smart academic rejoinder – to jump out of some sort of cardboard action figure into my three-dimensional self which could also analyze, discuss, opine about things. I just had to watch this puppet show happening on a high shelf I could not reach. I did not realize how unfair it was – and how unfair I was to myself at the time. I could not ignore it either – it felt so dangerously close to exploitation and exposure that the jagged edges of discomfort persisted for months and years afterwards. And yet I tried to push the hurt aside and to extend some sort of benefit of the doubt – maybe it wasn’t what it looked like all the way from Berlin. Maybe the content of the presentation vindicated unlikeable Lisa of her boringness and naivete. Maybe there were professional things I didn’t understand. Maybe it actually was “all in good fun” and even a sort of Easter egg for me to stumble upon later in my career. Or maybe the presenter never intended for me to see it and didn’t even think of the fact that I might, having long ago become too bored of me to even care.