On the Kaweco Student 60s Swing and the Education That Never Stops
There is a particular violence in being made to feel disposable by something you gave yourself to. Not the violence of a single blow but the slow kind; the kind that arrives in the form of a reorganization memo, a changed reporting structure, the studied casualness of people who have decided you are a problem to be managed rather than a person to be valued. This kind of violence does not leave marks anyone else can see. It leaves them entirely on the inside, in the place where you kept your sense of yourself.
Just before Thanksgiving, in the specific quiet that settles over the weeks when the year is clearly ending and everyone is half somewhere else already, I came to a realization that I did not entirely want but could not afford to refuse: my value is not measured by my job. This sounds simple. It is not simple. It took a minor identity crisis, several weeks of genuine interior darkness, and a Kaweco fountain pen in a colorway called 60s Swing to arrive at it properly.
The Department That Wasn’t Mine
I had been moved. That is the neutral way to say it, and I want to be precise about how carefully neutral language gets deployed in these situations; the passive construction that removes agency from the act, that makes a decision made by specific people about a specific person sound like weather, like something that simply happened rather than something that was chosen. I was moved. Reorganized. Transitioned. The vocabulary of institutional tidying, applied to a human being.
What it felt like from the inside was being thrown away.
I want to say that clearly because the feeling deserves accurate language. It was not subtle disappointment or mild professional frustration. It was the feeling of being assessed, found inconvenient, and relocated accordingly, of having people who held power over my daily life communicate, through action if not through words, that I did not fit where I had been and they were not particularly interested in finding me a place that suited me better. They were interested in solving their problem. I was the problem. The move was the solution.
The day I sat in a department that was not mine, reporting to a structure that had not been built with any consideration for what I was actually capable of ; that was the day I knew, with a clarity that surprised me by arriving so cleanly, that I would be somewhere else within a year. Not in defeat. In refusal. There is a difference, and it matters enormously, and I have spent considerable time since then making sure I understand which one I was operating from. I began casually looking for and setting up interviews, ready to separate. It was refusal. I was refusing a version of my life that did not fit.
The Crisis Before the Clarity
What I did not expect was the collapse that came before the clarity. Identity, it turns out, is more entangled with work than most of us admit until the entanglement becomes a problem. We tell ourselves that we are more than our jobs. We believe this, in the abstract, in the way that people believe things that have not yet been tested. And then the job shifts, or diminishes, or signals in some unmistakable way that it does not see us as we see ourselves, and we discover that the abstract belief and the lived reality have very little to do with each other.
I did not know who I was without the professional identity I had built. This is an uncomfortable sentence to write, but I am writing it because it is true and because the discomfort of writing it is considerably smaller than the discomfort of having lived it. I had organized a significant portion of my sense of self around what I did and how well I did it and the recognition that came from doing it well. When the recognition was revoked, not through any failure of mine but through the arbitrary reorganization of people who had their own priorities, the structure I had built on top of it became suddenly, vertiginously unstable.
Who was I if I was not valued here? What did my competence mean if the people positioned to recognize it had decided, for reasons entirely unrelated to my actual capabilities, that I was somewhere to be placed rather than someone to be invested in? What did any of it mean if the measure I had been using: professional standing, institutional regard, the sense of being seen and respected in the place I spent most of my waking hours, turned out to be a borrowed measure, owned by other people, revocable at any time without my consent?
These are not small questions. I sat with them for longer than was comfortable, in the weeks before Thanksgiving, in the specific melancholy of a year going dark.
Making Peace With a Sliver
The realization, when it finally arrived, did not arrive dramatically. It arrived the way most true things arrive — quietly, almost sideways, in a moment when I was not bracing for it. My work is a sliver of what I am.
A sliver. Not nothing, I want to be careful here, because dismissing work as meaningless would be its own kind of dishonesty. The work matters. Craft matters. The application of hard-won skill to real problems in the world matters. I am not interested in the performance of detachment from things I genuinely care about. I care about work. I care about doing it well. I care about the difference between work that is merely adequate and work that is genuinely excellent, and I always will.
But a sliver is not the whole. And I had been living as though it were the whole, or close enough to the whole that the distinction barely mattered, and the department move had exposed this with an efficiency that I could either resent or be grateful for.
I am a writer. I am a philosopher. I am a Buddhist practitioner of twenty-seven years, which means I have been sitting with impermanence and the dissolution of fixed selfhood since before most of my former colleagues were out of college. I am a reader of some obsessive commitment, with over two thousand books arranged in my home according to a logic that makes complete sense to me. I am a collector of fountain pens and inks, a keeper of art journals, a builder of websites, a documenter of processes, a student of aesthetics who has developed over decades a sensibility that is entirely and recognizably my own. I am the person who sat with her grief when her grandmother died and did not look away from it. I am the person who walks into a room of struggling people and understands instinctively what needs steadying and how to steady it.
None of that lived in the department I had been moved from. None of that was touched by the move. None of that was the institution’s to revoke. This sounds obvious. It was not obvious. It was the hardest thing I learned that year.
On Success and Sold Souls
Once I had disentangled my identity from the institution’s regard for me, I had a second and more interesting problem: figuring out what I actually wanted.
The company had made a choice that told me everything I needed to know about its values. There are organizations that buy themselves back and emerge leaner and more focused and genuinely better for it. And then there are organizations that buy themselves back and what they buy is the freedom to stop pretending; to drop the commitments and the culture and the careful positioning that had been the public face of something that was always, underneath, more interested in the transaction than the people inside it. I watched this happen. I watched the soul leave a place I had given real effort to, and I noted what it felt like, and I decided I was not interested in staying to see what came next.
Reporting to someone I could not respect, for a company that had made its priorities transparent through its actions, in a department I had been placed in as a matter of administrative convenience, this was not success by any definition I could construct for myself. Not the definition that mattered. Not the one that would hold up at the end of a life when I was accounting for what I had done with my time and my capability and my one irreplaceable attention.
Success, I decided; sitting with this question in the weeks before Thanksgiving, in the going-dark of a difficult year — looks like work that uses what I actually am. Work where the distance between my full capability and what is being asked of me is small enough to feel like effort rather than amputation. Work in a place that has not sold its soul, presided over by people I can genuinely respect, where I can look at what I am building and recognize it as something worth building.
That is not a small definition. It is, in fact, a demanding one. But I had just finished learning that settling for the wrong definition is more expensive than holding out for the right one, and I was not interested in paying that price again.
Kaweco and the Lesson That Keeps Going
Kaweco is a German pen brand with roots stretching back to 1883, founded in Heidelberg under a name derived from its founding partners’ initials. Like many pen companies of that era it went through periods of dormancy and revival, and the contemporary Kaweco carries within it the design sensibility of its mid-century peak; compact, rounded, pocket-friendly, unabashedly retro in its aesthetic without being precious about it. The Sport body, which the Student shares its essential DNA with, became iconic for its octagonal cap and small but satisfying proportions. These are pens that look like they belong to another era and somehow feel entirely contemporary in the hand.
The 60s Swing colorway is, in a word, joyful. The warm, retro palette, a combination that reads like optimism recovered from a time capsule, like the particular confidence of a decade that believed in the future without irony, sits on the pen with a lightness that suits its character perfectly. There is nothing grave about the 60s Swing. There is nothing that takes itself too seriously. It is a pen that has decided to be charming about existence, and it commits to this position fully.
I chose it deliberately for what it carries: the ethos of the perpetual student. Not student in the diminutive sense, not the person who has not yet arrived at competence, but student in the philosophical sense. The person who understands that learning is not a phase that ends when formal education ends, not a track you complete and graduate from, but a permanent orientation toward the world. A way of moving through experience that keeps asking: what is this teaching me, and am I paying attention?
The lesson that the department move taught me was not a lesson from a book or a course or a technical manual. It was the kind of lesson that only arrives through living; through the specific and irreplaceable education of having something you depended on taken away and discovering, on the other side of the loss, that you are more than you thought you were. That your value predates the institution. That your identity is not a thing anyone else has ever actually held.
Lifelong learning does not stop at books, or art, or the accumulation of technical skills. It extends into the education of difficulty, the curriculum of crisis, the graduate seminar of making peace with hard things. I am always enrolled. I am always, if I am paying attention, learning something.
The 60s Swing sits in my collection now, warm and retro and quietly pleased with itself, commemorating the semester I did not choose but could not have afforded to skip.
The Pen and the Student
I inked it with something bright. It seemed wrong to ink a pen this cheerful with anything melancholy, even in commemoration of something that had been genuinely hard. The hardness was real, and I am not minimizing it, but it is not what I want to carry forward. What I want to carry forward is the clarity that came out of the hardness — the recalibrated sense of self, the recovered definition of success, the understanding that my value is mine and was never theirs to grant or revoke.
The 60s Swing will write the ongoing record of a person who is always, in some important sense, still a student. Still arriving at things. Still finding out what she is made of when the conditions get difficult. Still discovering, sometimes to her own surprise, that what she is made of is more than she had previously inventoried.
The pen is small and warm and old-fashioned and full of something that functions like hope.
That seems exactly right.
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