I spent most of my Christmas thinking about my crooked career, and comparing. I really don't know if I'm still thinking about returning to Poland, about claiming my place at any of its universities. Patiently, year after year, Christmas after Christmas, I still need to convince myself it is not possible.
So I was reading the CVs and the long lists of publications of those who died, and of those who are alive. What did they manage to achieve, when I was flying around among all those different planets of France, Netherlands, etc. In some moments, I just felt my breath cut; I have no name for the emotion, just its physiological translation. My breath cut, like a computer that suddenly froze. It is such an unnamed sensation to see how they reached the peak of their careers: profesor z tytułem honorowym zwyczajnego, that's what I read on the official website of my old institute. This is what I could have been. Profesor z tytułem honorowym zwyczajnego.  
And what about those who had been removed, discyplinarnie, without any honour?
This is why my breath is cut.
This is mostly about those colleagues who are older than me. But there are also those younger. It is sad to see those boys, professors' sons, reputed so talented in their youth. I catch myself still thinking about one of them as "the boy", eternally hemmed in his Gombrowiczean synostwo, for he was not even ashamed to claim that he was there to "replace his father" ("w zastępstwie ojca", he was telling this quite overtly, in full letters - at the time, my breath was cut as well, for this is very far from the rules and usages of modern universities, and sounds much more medieval than an imam from a North-African madrasa coming to Leiden to discuss the styles of Quranic recitation). "The boy", I say, but the years go by, and he must be almost 38 now, and I wonder if he will ever be a professor like his father. Or he will remain stuck.
I see them stuck, at the Jagiellonian University. On different stages of their careers, but it is as if something went wrong with the institution, as if the triage stopped, and a sort of false equality were established. This is why, in my old institute, I can see eight professors.
So where is my place in all that? I don't see myself as the ninth als ob professor, paid less than the minimum wage in western Europe, and eternally condemned to that hostel on the Leidseplein, to those travels on Flixbus. For I will be old one day, and that day is not as far as I would like it to be. 
I gather all the insight I can about the lives of those who are dead. Like Bauman, like Kołakowski. Those people like me, pushed out of the same university, the same country, under circumstances that are only apparently different. I've read Walicki's autobiography already, some time ago. I try to understand their strategy, their secret and their luck. They didn't make such great careers as many people believe. Kołakowski was senior research fellow till the end of his life in Oxford, sort of collateral staff.
But still, among different miseries of the old age, better to be senior research fellow in Oxford than professor z tytułem honorowym zwyczajnego in Kraków.
And I remember that old Polish series, "Alternatywy 4", where there was that funny docent, the hunter, searching for the way of becoming a professor. "No właśnie nadzwyczajnego chciałem przeskoczyć", he was explaining to a lady looking at him in admiration and awe. I was employed as nadzwyczajny for 12 years. What I would like to przeskoczyć is "z tytułem honorowym"; I would prescind the honour, and go direct to the meritum.
Searching so desperately for the way, he became a hunter; in those old times, hunting with the party officials and other important people of the kind might have effectively been The Way. I think auto-ironically about my own falconer episode. But of course... 
Is it all but a circus? An eternal "Alternatywy 4", that in spite of History, and in spite of the European Union, we still inhabit? Also myself, as much as my colleagues?
This is perhaps the first reason why I search for a way out. A way out, first of all, of my own mental maze, out of my own attachment to this structure in which I have no place to claim. 
I desperately search for something real, serious, for hard facts, hard achievements and hard recognition, for anything at all that would be outside this sphere of illusion. I would like to find a way to my hard seriousness. 

Christmas in Poland is no longer what it used to be. The Christmas tree I have this year is good, it is thick, with plenty of tiny branches, and smells nice. But there was practically no fish, just a slice, packed in plastic. Carp, nonetheless, should be eaten fresh, killed ritualistically, with a sharp knife, like on Hieronymus Bosch's painting. 
Overall, the food is bad, and I refuse to buy at those exorbitant prices. I refuse to pay in Biedronka MORE than I used to pay in the Auchan at Cergy Prefecture. Because it is simply not just. 
So my Christmas in Poland lacked many things. I was expecting local delicacies, but of those there was none. I ate a dead forelle; I guess that at some moment, retired from the pools when they are grown, they ARE fresh, even in Poland(?). Perhaps their Catholic beliefs prevent the Poles from eating the fish fresh, I don't know. Apparently, there was a saint who, being given a fresh herring, used to put it aside, and eat only when it became foul-smelling enough to fit his level of ascetic practice...
And I think of my last Christmas, in Paris, with its fallow deer, and crocodile, and wines, and exotic fruits coming from New Caledonia. As if it were on another planet.
Everyone is tired, deadly tired. Tired of scandals, of reading eternally the same kind of news, even tired of power. I am tired of that eternal fight against my own being-here, being-in-this. Tired of fighting against this invisible net that overwhelms me. Tired of lacking a different life.
We had been in Holland, two weeks, my husband and I, right before the beginning of that new lockdown. There, the fish was fresh, and the lemon was sour, just as it used to be on their paintings. The Hague was like on a Christmas movie, only lacking a tiny veil of snow. There is snow here. Rare, interesting. Who knows, it could be one of my last snowy Christmas. My last Christmas in Poland. It's possible. In one year, a lot of things may happen. Next year I could be somewhere. In Queensland, or New Zealand. Till next Christmas so many things may be different. 
I'm tired of falling eternally into the same shitty hole. The hole that becomes shittier and shittier as the years go by. 
I feel like nothing happens in my life, there is no change, the stagnation is overwhelming. In my life! I know, I have no right to complain. Whose life is dynamic, if mine is not? But I need bigger change, a game-changing change, a breakthrough.