Return

(In)quiry as a cycle of collapse and re-entry

I inexplicably find myself back at the site of repeated memory events. A marching band contest in my previous home state, at my new university. I never intended to return to the plains where I earned my degrees and began my career. This scene echoes earlier activations/fractures/shimmers.

I was driving, again. Rural Kansas, the rolling hills are crispy red with October.

I was thrilled —stoked — to see friends. The Band Family. Anxious to emerge from exile. A pink energy drink in the console, neon cherry-sugar explosion. This was after coffee.

I was on my way to the de facto state marching band competition. On the campus of my new university, where I am a tenure-track professor, a liminal homecoming where past and present selves coexist. My new office is across from the stadium. Sites of fracture mirroring each other.

It is not a typical fall October day: humid and warm, not cool and crisp. Colleagues and friends from my earlier career will be converging on campus with their bands, including my former band and their director, Former Friend. I am afraid to confront the institution(s) that rejected/silenced me. Evicted me.

I remember the taste of bile.

Come down for the day and hang with us

A text from Dear Friend.

I drove to campus early. Excited, thrilled to be returning to campus—and to the event. The activity, the bustling of young musicians, and the serenity of the college campus. My college campus.

Things were familiar but different. I had attended the event as a director with my group, when the group was mine.

I surveyed the ‘lot’. Equipment trailers and pop-up tents. Some uniforms were updated, some programs featured new trailers, and some groups appeared to be larger. Some bands were noticeably improved, at least by the competition’s metrics. Directors, friends, and acquaintances not seen for five years. There was silver in the hair, lines around the eyes, and a few more pounds. I was fully aware of the moment, the day. The day was be(com)ing, each interaction a recursion, identities clashing violently through (in)quiry.

This was the culmination of years of constructed identity knowledge, the meeting of former self as conductor/teacher/leader with the shift/ed self of musician/teacher/scholar. A (re)entry, a (re)engagement with a former self thought (hoped) lost forever. The state-level competitive event co-occurring at the site scholarly emergence is synchronistic. The campus functions as a spectral site where prior professional selves ghost the present tenure-track identity.

The marching-band competition is an accountability ritual echoing high-stakes testing. The contest’s ranking system establishes a performative meritocracy.

This narrative extends discourse on identity rupture and institutional power.

What does it mean to witness one’s pedagogical line in public performance after renouncing that identity? After eviction? What about the emotional labor of return?

This moment was a culmination.

This return is not closure but recursion.

An arc of professional exile.

An arc of self-imposed social exile.

A return to a place of discomfort, a place of judgment I deliberately left behind when I fled to the mountains to heal.

Yet, there I was. (In)voluntarily at a place I never intended to return—an (un)willing recursion. A confrontation with every success but also every failure, echoes of choices made.

The shadow of my alcoholism is always present.

But the day felt good. The comfort of old friends, shared struggles, shared bonds made in/through our own experiences as college musicians. As young teachers. As accomplished performers.

A cherished Shared Mentor recently announced their retirement. This event ripples through our wrinkles.

Dear Friends’ college-age children absorb our banter. I know them as toddler-pictures broadcast on social media by proud parents. Now they own mustaches and facial piercings. One of them is a student of Shared Mentor.

We walk the front sideline, Dear Friends band begins to take the field, preparing for their preliminary performance. Their only performance of the day. Dear Friend inhabits the role I sought/lived/rejected in real time. I feel nostalgia and warmth in a field of teenage performance anxiety.

A hand grasps my shoulder from behind. A large hand, a friendly hand full of (be)longing.

A hug and a smile.

Kind brown eyes.

You disappeared, where did you go?

I was/am overcome, and I cannot speak. It would be a sin to speak; the moment does not deserve words. The intersection of familiar and new, a node of remarkable kindness and welcome connection at the intersection of every identity. My chest is warm, my face is soft. Rarely is a surprise interaction this welcome.

In the distance, preparing for their own show, Former Friend and my former band. This (re)turn performs recursive reflexivity, folding be(com)ing back on itself.

This return is not redemption; it is a methodological act of witnessing. To revisit the site of professional fracture is to (re)engage in recursive verification of be(com)ing. I stood in the shimmer where self/scholar/system converge. Reflexive return transforms memory from evidence of loss into activation, demonstrating that knowledge creation continues beyond institutional boundaries.

The contest field became metaphor for the institution (the school, the university) itself, both are stages of meritocratic performance. Scholars as displaced practitioners carry the spectral residue of systems. Recognizing these hauntings demands ethical attention to how academia reproduces the hierarchies it critiques.

Return requires managing visibility/nostalgia/shame. The capacity to occupy these contradictions without resolution models an ethic of reflexivity for educators navigating post-trauma professional spaces. Emotional awareness becomes a condition of research rigor, affect is a requirement of valid (in)quiry.

Institutions hiring teachers from sites of harm must develop trauma-informed mentorship and evaluation practices. Leadership preparation must include an analysis of meritocracy and its human costs, and a reframing of accountability as a relational responsibility. This recrusive event confirms that be(com)ing operates as a cycle.

This piece comes from the fifth movement of my dissertation Musician/Teacher/Scholar: A Postmodern Autoethnographic Self-Study of the Intersections Between Teacher Identity, Teacher Be(com)ing, and Music Education. I share it here as part of my public scholarship, what it means to (re)turn after collapse. This piece is not graduation, but a celebration—an invitation.