ABSTRACT
This semester I taught an adult development course after a career of working with, studying, and teaching about traditional-aged college students. I feel the challenge as I stretch my theoretical knowledge, yet I am energized in the classroom and I feel like the course has been destined to promote my self-discovery. I see myself in the literature as if it were the mirror in my bathroom. I have “arrived,” but I have never been more unsure of what lies ahead. In higher education, and in faculty life in particular, arrival is defined by the achievement of tenure. I earned tenure this semester. It is a carefully planned accomplishment that reflects one career path in student affairs, which includes working as a practitioner, returning for doctoral education, and assuming a faculty role in a graduation preparation program. Achieving tenure while making other significant life changes has heightened the impact of reflecting on my career to this point and has amplified gravity in making personally congruent choices in the future. Developmentally, I stand on the verge of all those milestones and endpoints: self-authorship, integration of aspects of the self, committing to the dream, generativity. After a lifetime of following formulas that have allowed me to “arrive,” arriving has given me the freedom to re-create my life based on professional, personal, and leisure pursuits and goals. Because I have been in the process of arriving since the assignment of this narrative, I have found it quite difficult to write. I write without the benefit of hindsight and reflection. This narrative very much represents “raw,” unprocessed data. There is achievement, freedom, and disappointment in arriving. All these are live feelings occurring in real-time for me.
