Member-only story
About Un-Niched
Updated introduction
Iconfess that I never liked, and never warmed up, to the title I had given this publication. For lack of what would, to my mind, be a better term, I stuck with “Un-niched,” which could mean an uprooting, a dislodging, from a place where one was previously stuck.
Come to think of it, “unstuck” is another word I can use. With the irony of letting myself get stuck to the name.
But “getting stuck” is rarely how anyone else would regard the state of having successfully secured for oneself a niche. Locating one’s niche and flourishing within it is considered a sign of maturity, even authority in the field. When I first introduced Un-niched in this prefatory article, I shared my discomfort with the niche-down imperative. Stuck at home with two small dependents as waves of lockdowns swept over the world, I loosened myself from the many self-fictions that had hitherto been my identities (in the plural):
I’m un-niching myself from the teacher I used to be, from the parent, wife, friend, etc., I used to be. What I used to be — or what I thought I was, what others thought I was, the many fictions that added up and rolled into a singular identity that I’m not…
