What Matters

I recently passed my dissertation defense. If I read the situation correctly, the defense is a formality that requires a certain level of professionalism and proficiency on the topic, but not a lot else. It is not a substitute for the dissertation. The dissertation has already been written and edited and edited and edited, and there have been numerous checks by supervising professors up to that point to make sure that the PhD candidate is not going too far astray in either argument, style, or approach.

At the defense, the committee may react in several different ways. My sense is that their response depends at least as much on the professional trajectory of the candidate as on the relative genius of the candidate's work (that professional trajectory having previously been determined by the candidate's work and preferences, so it's not a clear-cut binary).

The defense was the period at the end of a very long sentence. I wrote the sentence, and my committee made sure that it was grammatically correct before they let me dot it. That's how it felt, anyway.

Since the defense, I have struggled to interpret the meaning of being a Doctor of Philosophy, and more than that, what the change means, or should mean, to the people around me. Some demand social cachet, while others nurse anti-intellectual resentment. Have I earned respect with my degree? I doubt that even if I have, your average human would give it to me. People are frequently stingy with respect, and my jeans size matters more to most people than they realize. I mean, if a fat person can get a PhD, it can't be that hard, right?

I think that for right now, I will believe that only someone with this level of education can understand what it really is - the kind of intelligence it indicates, and the kinds of intelligence it omits - the range of knowledge, the emotional hardship, the financial stresses, the self-awareness, and that each of these things comes differently in individual experience of the doctoral process.

What stands out to me the strongest on this side of that ordeal is an analogy for everyone's life, and every kind of success. It isn't at all like getting to the Olympics and winning gold (or perhaps it is, but in a different way) in a single meaningful moment. A single, meaningful moment is made of millions of forgotten moments. Whether or not you arrive at some kind of pinnacle, you are allotted your own forgotten moments in which you shape yourself, or reveal yourself and all the wonder that is you. A marathon isn't the number of steps from the starting line to the finish line, but the number of steps from the couch to your car, to the track or the treadmill. And wherever you are now, and however you got there, at some point your decisions were necessary. Your work was necessary. I honor you for it.

But I can say this only because I made decisions too, and I did work, and I overcame obstacles, and I will have a piece of paper that says so.

If you had a piece of paper too, what would it say?