I've been feeling increasingly alienated from academia, or at least my corner of it, and in convo with a fellow disenchanted MA sufferer, articulated this -

You're contextualizing texts in classrooms while decontextualizing yourself from the world.

This is really what bothers me most about being an academic of the kind my school is training me to be - there's a sort of willfull blindness that infuriates me and makes me feel disconnected from the communities I claim as sites of occupation and study. I feel useless, and I hate the sensation of it. 

It's called the ivory tower, immaculate and apart, the seat of higher (literally, elevated, 'tower') learning - but I want the mud, I want the dirt and blood, I want to be small in the face of suffering rather than removed from the presence of it, commenting on it with the calm distance affords.

I'm tired of being a pretentious academic. I don't want this as my identity. I need to change.