The Year Would Not Stay in One Column

In 2023, one line in my professional life changed: I became an Assistant Professor.

The title looked clean on paper. It carried years of work behind it, but the result itself could be written in a few words. It was exactly the kind of achievement that fits comfortably into a CV and makes a year look as if it moved in one clear direction.

The rest of the year refused to cooperate with that version.

There were periods when ordinary routines broke apart and plans had to become smaller. Family concerns entered days that had been organized around work. Some things that had seemed urgent in the morning stopped mattering by the afternoon.

I kept making small things anyway. I worked on my website, followed new interests, and returned to modest projects that could be improved one page or one technical change at a time. They were not solutions to larger problems. They simply gave certain evenings a shape.

I liked that scale. A large professional title had changed, but much of the year was lived through smaller acts: fixing a page, finishing a note, solving one technical problem, then closing the computer.

A year-end summary could have placed the promotion in a column marked good and the difficult periods in another marked bad. The small projects would not have known where to go.

That is why I remember the year less as a list than as a desk with several things on it at once.

One line on the CV had moved forward.

Life around it remained untidy.

The page still got built.