#prof!reader's journal

Real life isn’t as romantic. The social politics of higher education is a tricky place to navigate for anyone, even more so when you’re a young, ambitious woman. You’ve had to work twice as hard to earn the respect more freely given to your colleagues and be taken seriously as an academic.

Even then, it’s done with a caveat, an underlying sense of condescension for your frivolous and outdated area of study. 

So you keep your head down. Wear practical, professional things that project the idea of "successful" like you can manifest it through outfits. Keep working as hard, to the point of neglecting other parts of your life. Romance, vacations abroad, they can all wait while you establish yourself. Lists, schedules, and the occasional flowchart make up your life.

You enjoy the work, you love your students, but time slips like silk between loose fingers and soon, you’re on the threshold of thirty and still nowhere close to your goals.

Enter Spencer Reid. Genius, prolific, highly successful and representing everything you covet. You should despise him—you do despise him, and his ability to unravel your carefully curated facade—until you don’t. Because he’s gentle, and deeply thoughtful, and has the exact same love affair with stories and books as you do.

Whatever is going on between the two of you is a tenuous, fragile thing, more of an alliance than actual friendship. This fake dating arrangement should have blown up in both your faces. A failed experiment, the catastrophic end to a short-lived acquaintance.

But as the days go by, you begin to find that Spencer Reid is startlingly good at playing boyfriend. And that it’s infuriatingly easy to slide from pretense to something more solid. More real. And it gets harder to deny the funny, tender ache in your chest the longer this deal goes on.

🌟 favorite things: a well written essay, medieval women's writings, the smell of old books, secondhand shops, vintage leather, black tea with milk, stalking people's letterboxd and goodreads accounts

✖️ least favorite things: Spencer Reid, students who refuse your authority, the basement classroom where one of your classes are held, daylight savings time, condescending colleagues

👜 what’s in your bag? a book (usually whatever you're teaching for the week), pastel-colored pens and highlighters, a planner + journal, hand sanitizer, eye drops, blotting paper, wallet, breath mints.

🎶who are you listening to: Nina Simone, Hozier, Ella Fitzgerald, Kate Bush, Florence and the Machine, Jeffrey Buckley, Patti Smith