Abandon All Hope

School starts soon, and I've entered panic mode.

Panic mode is just slightly more literal for me than most instances of use. I am subject to severe anxiety attacks after most social encounters, but in a state of heightened stress, they get worse. After three months without any income, a diet of canned food storage, and a fairly rocky social situation, I face not only the beginning of another semester of teaching (for which I have little natural affinity), but the progress of my graduate degree (for which I have less talent, but more interest).

Teaching carries a kind of ill-balanced judgment from students whose opinion is only partially valid, but whose responses can destroy all future opportunities in academia. Students don't understand teaching, and yet their casual and emotional response means nearly everything in a market in which they, under great economic and social duress, provide nearly all the capital. They don't know what we're doing, and yet their evaluations mean everything. It's like asking a blind patron to critique a ballet, and then using their responses to make hiring decisions. They can give you an honest response that is valuable in certain perspectives, but not comprehensive.

So I'm scared of students, although their damage is already done.

My own professors (supervisory committee) are much more frightening. I suffer from severe impostor syndrome, as many non-sociopathic graduate students do. It's impossible to know from inside my head whether I really am as stupid as I think I am, or whether I'm just at the painful end of an impossible learning curve. I am aware that it's very important to keep my committee on my side, though, and to act professional, and to show talent or promise.

Bonus: I have not yet cried in a professor's office. Am not looking forward to it.

The pressure to maintain a professional image crashes headlong into the undeniable fact that I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M DOING. Nobody gave me any instructions on how to choose classes, how often to meet with instructors, when to use their titles, how soon to form a committee, how to form a thesis, how to speak and write academese, what a good research question looks like, what "reading lists" are, who writes them and when, how to get five people with totally disparate lives to meet for ten minutes in one room, and these are all ignorances I've already betrayed to the people in whose flurried and forgetful hands my future cowers like a mouse at a monster truck rally. It's going to get worse. I often don't even know what questions to ask, and haven't, as far as I know, ever written a successful paper.

When I was studying for my M.A., I went to talk to a professor about one of my papers. She point-blank refused to talk to me because (she said) "it wouldn't do any good. The errors were too fundamental." What?

I mean, what? Apparently, that's what "tenure" means - the right to refuse to teach. I'm fortunate. Nobody ever questioned my right to have entered the program. To my face. They only questioned my right to take up their time once I was there.

So I look like an idiot. "So I'm a fool, there's no doubt."
Add to that self-image impostor syndrome, anxiety, despair, exhaustion, and poverty. This is my life. I live in constant fear.

 

 And yet, if I step back for a moment and compartmentalize my graduate studies, my whole earth-experience transforms completely. The opportunity of graduate school, whether I earned it by worthiness, or was granted it by my faculty-fairies (Anne and Melanie), or was fated by divine providence to face this trial, is a giant gift. It's an opportunity to delve into research that only a privileged few will ever see, however long it lasts.

It won't last long, all things considered. It will probably leave me in crippling debt, but that debt will end in death. I have no co-signers.

My life is a fairy-tale. It's a long series of what look like coincidences, but which are actually just plot. I have agency in this text, but instead of it disrupting a peaceful, animated journey from family to prince to happily ever after, my agency and decisions move the world around me until it forms a folk-tale of great pathos and beauty. Things happen to me, and I happen to them. My decisions are color-changes in a pattern that I chose before I was even born, and then lost. And yet every turn, every dropped or doubled stitch makes this thing. I'll find out what it is when it's done.

So maybe the colors have gone a little dark. Plot needs dark.