PROFESSOR VICTORIA
ALM No.95, November 2026
ESSAYS
There are many ways to imagine a woman: her name, her age, her profession, the people she loves, everything she has achieved. For many years, my own definition was simple: Professor Victoria.
I am a professor of English literature. I teach, conduct research, write academic articles and books. I have spent years reading about the lives of fictional people and thinking about what their stories might tell us about ourselves.
Perhaps that is why I have always been fascinated by beginnings. That moment when a character leaves one version of their life and enters another. The moment when what has always been familiar is no longer enough. The moment when a person realizes that the story they have been living does not necessarily have to be the story they continue to live.
I know something about stories. I am much less certain about endings. Especially my own.
I am forty. And lately I have been thinking more and more about what it means to reach an age when other people begin to think they already know who you are. Professor. Mother. Woman. Writer. Loved. All of these words are true. But none of them tells the whole story.
I am a professor of English literature. I continue to write academic articles and conduct research. This year, I published two books. I have a twelve-year-old son who is entering adolescence, and a life filled with people, work, love, plans, and responsibilities.
From the outside, perhaps, my life looks quite defined. And yet, inside me, there remains a feeling of incompleteness—not as a deficiency, but as space for the next step.
Perhaps that is what seems most interesting to me about being forty. At twenty, you imagine that one day adulthood will finally give you an answer to the question of who you are. At thirty, you think you are getting close. At forty, you begin to understand that perhaps there is no final answer. There is only the next chapter.
I took this photograph on a bus. Nothing unusual was happening. People were sitting around me. The city was moving outside the window. I was simply going somewhere.
Beside me was my backpack. My jacket was lying on top of it. Inside were a book, a laptop, and all the small things I carry with me without really noticing them.
And suddenly I looked at those things and thought: Perhaps this is what life looks like.
Not a portrait. Not a résumé. Not a list of achievements. Just a woman sitting on a bus, carrying with her what she needs.
I suddenly realized how much time we spend trying to explain ourselves through nouns. Professor. Mother. Writer. Daughter. Loved. We like nouns because they sound finished. They create an illusion of stability.
But perhaps a person is better described by verbs: learning, loving, making mistakes, leaving, returning, beginning again.
I think literature understands this better than we do. A character is never simply who they are called at the beginning of a novel. They reveal themselves through actions, choices, mistakes, encounters with other people. Sometimes through loss. Sometimes through love. And sometimes through the sudden realization that the life they have been living no longer fits.
For years, I have taught my students to notice these moments in literature. I have asked them why a character changes. What caused it? What did they understand? What did they lose? What did they gain? Where exactly did their former self end and a new one begin?
And now I find myself asking the same questions of my own life.
Perhaps this is one of the strange privileges of being a professor of literature. At some point, books begin to read you in return. You spend years teaching a novel, and one day you realize that you are standing inside its question.
For a long time, I believed that education was supposed to make a person certain. The more you read, the more you know. The more you know, the more confidently you can move through the world.
But I no longer think that way. The more I read, the less interested I become in certainty about final answers. A good book rarely gives me an answer. It gives me a more precise question. Sometimes, a question I did not even know I was carrying.
Perhaps that is why I continue to learn after all these years. Not because I expect knowledge to make me complete. But because it keeps me open.
And lately I have been thinking about another kind of learning.
A few months ago, I decided to prepare for an examination that would allow me to become a school teacher. When I say this aloud, people sometimes look surprised.
I am already a professor. I have worked in higher education for many years. I teach literature. I conduct research. I write.
Why would I voluntarily put myself in the position of someone who has to study and take an examination all over again?
I have asked myself the same question.
The practical answers are easy enough. I am interested in education. I want to understand another level of teaching. I want to see a different educational environment from the inside. All of that is true.
But there is another answer, one that is much harder to explain.
I wanted to find out whether I could.
Could I become a beginner again? Could I sit in front of material I did not yet understand? Could I be the person asking the questions rather than answering them? Could I allow myself, at least for a while, not to be an expert?
When you are young, being a beginner is natural. No one expects you to know everything. But adulthood gradually builds a reputation around you. People begin to know what you are good at. They begin to expect consistency from you. And at some point, you may discover that you are protecting the version of yourself everyone already knows.
I know that version of myself. She is Professor Victoria. She has books. She has research. She has students. She knows how to stand in front of a classroom and speak with confidence. She knows how to analyze a text, how to construct an argument, how to meet deadlines, how to be responsible.
But sometimes I wonder what happens when the person we have become so successfully begins to feel like a cage. Not because that identity is false, but because it is incomplete.
I am a professor. But I am not only a professor. I am a mother. But I am not only a mother. I am a writer. But I am not only a writer. I am a woman who loves someone. I am a woman with ambitions. I am a woman who still has questions.
And perhaps most importantly, I am still capable of being surprised.
My son is twelve. He is entering adolescence—that strange borderland between childhood and adulthood. I watch him change, almost from week to week. The boy I have known is still there, but another person is gradually emerging: his own opinions, his own boundaries, his own way of looking at the world.
Sometimes I look at him and think about how difficult it is to become yourself.
We want our children to grow. But when they really begin to separate themselves from the versions of themselves we know, we have to learn to let them become unfamiliar.
Perhaps adulthood is not so different. Perhaps we never stop surprising even ourselves.
At forty, I am still capable of becoming someone my younger self could never have imagined. And that thought does not frighten me. It gives me energy.
Because there is a particular kind of freedom in incompleteness.
I think women are often taught to experience their lives as a sequence of completed roles. By a certain age, you are supposed to know who you are. You are supposed to know what you want. You should have a stable career, stable relationships, a stable identity.
There is comfort in stability. But there is also a danger in mistaking stability for completion.
A life can be steady and still remain open.
I want my life to remain open. I want to be able to change my mind. To study something new. To write something I have never written before. To travel somewhere I have never been. To fall in love with an idea I once rejected. To discover that I was wrong. To become better at something simply because it is difficult.
Perhaps this is what freedom means to me now. Not freedom from responsibility. Not freedom from other people. Not freedom from the past. But the freedom to keep moving forward without turning my life into a final formula.
I look at the photograph again. The bus is moving. My jacket is lying on my backpack. Everything I need today is somewhere inside it. My laptop. A book. Notes. Things that seem insignificant until I remember that these are the things with which I live my life.
And then I think about everything else I carry: my son's voice, the books I have read, the books I have written, the books I have not written yet, the people I have loved, the people I have lost, the places I have left, the questions I never answered, the mistakes I still remember, the dreams I have not yet given up.
We carry so much without even noticing.
And perhaps growing older is partly the process of deciding what truly deserves to remain in our bag.
Not everything.
Some things become too heavy. Some expectations were never ours. Some fears belong to an earlier version of ourselves. Some identities have already served their purpose.
We are allowed to leave them behind.
Perhaps this is one of the hardest things to understand about adulthood: we do not have to carry every version of ourselves forever.
We can leave something behind without betraying the person we once were. We can change without declaring our past a mistake. We can begin again without pretending we have never lived before.
I think about this every time I work with literature. A character does not become someone new by erasing everything that came before. The past remains. It simply acquires a different meaning with time.
Perhaps the same is true of us.
At twenty, I could not have imagined the woman I would become. At thirty, I still believed that some parts of life would eventually take their final shape.
At forty, I am beginning to value something else.
I no longer need permanence as much as I once did. I need possibility. I need curiosity. I need movement. I need the feeling that there is something ahead of me that I cannot see yet.
Perhaps that is why I decided to take another examination. Not because I need another title. Not because being a professor is not enough. Not because I failed to become the person I wanted to be.
Quite the opposite.
I am doing it because I feel secure enough in the life I have built to risk opening a door into a part of it that did not exist before.
And those are not the same thing.
Perhaps this is what the photograph was trying to tell me.
A woman sitting on a bus. A backpack. A jacket. A road.
Nothing dramatic. No great revelation. Only movement.
I used to think that at some point in life, we would finally arrive. Now I think that perhaps the word arrive does not belong here at all.
Perhaps we are not meant to arrive.
Perhaps we are meant to continue.
To carry something. To leave something behind. To open books. To close them. To love people. To allow them to change. To change ourselves. To remain curious about what might still happen.
I am Professor Victoria.
That is true.
But it is not the end of the sentence.
I am also a woman on a bus. A woman with a backpack. A mother of a twelve-year-old boy. A writer with unwritten pages. A researcher with questions that do not yet have answers. A woman who is still learning. Still asking questions. Still carrying something. Still leaving something behind. Still going somewhere.
And perhaps, after all these years spent reading other people's stories, this is the only conclusion I am willing to accept about my own:
It is not finished yet.
Prof. Victoria Akopova is a writer and independent researcher whose work explores the human mind through psychology, language, memory, empathy, and literature. She is the author of Psychological Distance in Direct and Indirect Speech: A Cognitive and Emotional Model of Empathy, Responsibility, and Memory. Her scholarly and creative writing explores human experience, emotional understanding, resilience, and the power of words to connect and transform.
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