My Developing Academic Identity as a Singleton

Over the past few years, I've been researching, blogging, and writing about singlehood and the stigma surrounding it.  During my interview process at my new job, I gave a series of elevator pitches around it, which seemed to impress the people interviewing me.  As part of my tenure packet, I'll need to provide a narrative on how that study benefits the institution.  During our New Faculty Orientation yesterday, a faculty member who had been through the process invited us to think about our professional and personal identities and how they can tie into our new jobs.  We could meditate, write, draw, whatever.  As a writer, I find writing is the best way (for me) to process thoughts.  Here's the freewrite I devised in four minutes (no proofreading):

As a happy singleton, I also like to research and write about issues related to singlehood.  As pertains to my professional identity as a rhetorician, I particularly like to examine the rhetoric of marriage and singlehood and how that shapes the hegemony of marriage, because as a singleton, I feel I am a part of a marginalized group.  I bring that into my teaching through my themed composition courses on singlehood, and I invite students to think about those particular students, because some of them MAY NOT MARRY in their personal lives (some of them have already indicated they don’t want to).  As far as UDC is concerned, if we’re trying to build scholars and critical thinkers, I want to help students also understand implicit bias exists in the language we use in a lot of contexts (not just marriage) and I also want them to think critically about why people get married so they can also make the right decisions for themselves as far as whether they choose to marry or not.  I’m not saying don’t do it, but I do feel that if students can learn to be critical about how society promotes marriage, they can be happier if they choose to be single.  They can also be critical of language functions in the workplace and how it can shape policy, and I’d like to get them looking at it on a local level.