Grad School and Emerson

I’ve been meaning to get something off my chest for a while.  In fact, when I started this blog, this was the post that I really started it for.  It’s been the thing haunting me the most recently; the biggest inner battle I’ve had in a long time.  I’ve just been feeling like I have to get it out there, to tell it to someone other than myself.  To make it public, even if only one or two other people read this.  At least it will be out there.  But I haven’t known how to go about it, until I read “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson for the first time in four years.

               

Let’s start at the beginning.  I went through four years of college at Ursinus with the ambition of going straight to graduate school and, in time, getting my doctorate in British literature, specifically early modern English literature.  I was going to be a professor and research and teach about Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, and Donne (some of my very favorites).  Everything was going swimmingly.  My grades were good, my head was high, and I was accepted into two good graduate schools.  After a few weeks of indecision, I made the choice to go to Villanova in the fall, where I had a full scholarship as long as I fulfilled the obligation of being a research assistant.  I was ecstatic.

I graduated from Ursinus, got married, had a hectic summer, and started grad school at the end of August.  And that was when the problems started.  When I had accepted the research assistantship (the only way that I could go to grad school without paying a dime for tuition) I had read a little paragraph in the handbook saying that taking full-time employment was prohibited and taking part-time employment was highly discouraged due to the amount of time that a tuition scholar, as I was called, would have to spend between study and the assistantship.  I was required to keep a certain high GPA or I would lose the scholarship, and I was of course required to complete all of my duties as an assistant.  The problem was that, even though I was going to school for free, I was newly married and didn’t live with my parents anymore.  And, at the time, my husband didn’t have a full-time job.  And we had bills to pay.  So I had absolutely no choice but to work.  I put in a 30-hour week at a preschool, working from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. every day, and then went straight from work to school for class and the assistantship and usually got home around 9:00, since I lived an hour and a half away from Villanova.  This totally sucked, but I was willing to deal with it because I wasn’t the first person to endure hardship to get a good education, I was young and capable, and, as I kept telling myself, I was a responsible person who wasn’t going to wimp out because of a long day.  But as the weeks rolled by, I realized that I had absolutely no time to get my work done.  I desperately tried to get it all finished on the weekends, but I was so burnt out that I would stare at my work, knowing that I had hundreds of pages to read and a few papers to write, and would read about a quarter of my work before falling asleep.  I had absolutely no social life, my husband and I (of only about three months, mind you) had basically stopped talking to each other except for when I wanted to yell at him to take out my stress, and I was hopelessly behind in my work.  This was entirely unlike me, as I had always been the good student in college, always reading ahead and doing the extra work, pitying the slackers who didn’t know what was going on in class.  And now that was me.  I realized I had a choice.  I either had to stop working at the preschool and take out loans to pay my bills, or I had to leave graduate school.  I couldn’t afford to stay and get bad grades.  My GPA would drop and I would lose the scholarship.  It was one or the other.

This was the hardest decision I ever had to make.  Everything I had worked towards for four years was embodied by grad school.  I weighed my pros and cons.  I cried myself to sleep for weeks, thinking that I was a failure.  I sought the advice of every person in my life that I trusted, with the exception of my undergraduate professors, who I was too ashamed to speak to.  I really can’t convey how tortured I was about the decision.  Ultimately, it came down to two things.  The first was that I was unwilling to put myself in more debt that I didn’t know if I could ever pay off.  The second was that, after four rather grueling years of undergrad and a taste of grad school, I was starting to be unsure if I even wanted to be a professor anymore.  That, in the end, made my decision.  Necessity told me I had to work.  My family and friends told me they were proud of me no matter what, and that this was a decision that only I could make.  And my grad school professors, not yet knowing my dilemma, said to everyone in class, “If you’re not absolutely sure that you want to do this, then you shouldn’t be here.”  So, after filling in the proper forms, sending the most pathetic, weepy emails to my advisor and program director that I think have ever been written, and bawling my eyes out to everyone I knew, I left.

I expected to feel something after I officially left and had no more ties to the school.  I expected some sort of extreme elation, some mental validation that leaving was of course the right choice.  I expected some sort of scene out of a Disney movie, where all of the animals sang in the forest, congratulating me for following my heart and making the right choice.  What I really felt like was a pile of shit.  I was a failure.  I had given up on everything.  I should have kept going, should have sucked it up, should have tried harder, should have done anything to stay in school.

For the rest of 2011 I went between extremes of in-your-face happiness where I read as much Faulkner as I wanted, thinking, “Fuck you, Shakespeare, I’m going to read American modernist novels now and there’s no one to stop me!” and self-pitying cry-fests where I read my senior thesis and thought the words “wasted potential” more than any other words in the English language.

Finally, sometime around January, I made peace with myself.  Everyone knew that I had left now.  I had nothing to hide anymore.  Those who were disappointed in me were disappointed in me and there was nothing I could do about it.  I was working as a substitute teacher and, wonder of wonders, I was actually enjoying myself.  I made new friends at work and spent more time with old ones.  Sean got a full-time job.  I read anything I wanted, any time I wanted.  When I first quit I didn’t read anything for a month other than a massage manual, and it was amazing.  By February I was finally finished having episodes of self-hatred for quitting.  I had a new goal, to become a high school English teacher, and things were going pretty well.

The icing on the cake was Emerson.  I stumbled upon “Self-Reliance” two weeks ago while studying for a test I have to take in April that will qualify me for the first stages of getting my teaching certificate.  Although I hadn’t even thought about grad school for quite a while, everything I read seemed to be speaking directly to me about my decision.  And it was telling me that I had made the right one.

In the beginning of his essay Emerson writes,

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.

My envy of those who I believed to be smarter and more accomplished than myself, my envy of their lives and work, was ignorance.  I believed my life would be more satisfactory if I could have a Dr. put in front of my name; that my success in academia would make me a happier person.  I had been ignoring for four long years the simple fact that even though I adored literature and was good at writing about it, the rigorous pace of academic life made me miserable.  My envy for my accomplished professors, my false belief that only their life could make me happy, was ignorance.  The imitation of their ways, while educational in undergrad, would be suicide in graduate school.  My entire life could not be imitation.  It would not then be my life.  It would be killing myself slowly through my profession.  The “wide universe,” including the microcosm that is academia, “is full of good.”  I admire it, and, in a way, will still get to be a part of it as a high school teacher.  But at this time in my life I simply cannot give myself entirely to it.  I need to find my own soil to till.

Emerson says that “[n]othing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”  “Absolve you to yourself,” he writes, “and you shall have the suffrage of the world.”  For years I had treated the ideal of graduate school as a sacred institution.  But grad school isn’t sacred.  The integrity of my mind, the ability to think what I want when I want, not to imitate professors, not to stress myself out and lose sleep and pander to the ass-kissing and pointless rituals of grad school – that is self-reliance.  Leaving graduate school was “the harder” decision to make, because, as Emerson says, “you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.”  But grad school was not my duty.  I have the right to do what I want with my life.  If graduate school doesn’t bring me happiness, then I shouldn’t be in graduate school.

I want to stress that I am not against graduate school as an institution.  I still admire my professors more than I can possibly express.  I admire their dedication and commitment to the ideal of learning and higher education.  I think that those who are happiest in graduate school should absolutely be there.  I respect these people to no end, and I respect higher education itself.  The only thing that I know I will always miss about grad school is the high caliber of intellectual thought that is transmitted between students and faculty alike.  I still have the hunger in me to learn everything I can about the things that I love.

But my personality simply could not thrive in that environment, at least not now.  If I ever go back (which I doubt I ever will, but if I did) it would have to be with the knowledge that I was a person separate from my education and profession.  There is simply more to me than that.  The majority of people involved in graduate-level academia devote their entire lives to the pursuit of knowledge about a subject.  I cannot sacrifice that much.  I do not wish to have that kind of pressure on me all the time.  The high stress of the job is not what I want to spend my life dealing with.  At this point in my life, I’m with Emerson: “Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare.  Do that which is assigned thee, and thou canst not hope too much or dare too much.”  It’s time I made my own assignments.

I have taken “My life is not an apology, but a life” as my new motto.  I’m sure I’m not the only one, since Emerson has inspired people for years.  I’m no longer sorry I left graduate school.  I’m not really sorry for anything.  I won’t spend my life wallowing in regret.  Mine is a life, I can make of it what I want.  I’m not bound by what anyone – be they professors, family members, or even the best of friends – tells me.  I make my own decisions, and I don’t apologize for them.  In the end, “[n]othing can bring you peace but yourself.  Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”  Only what I feel is right can bring me peace.  No amount of regrets or what-ifs will do it for me.  I need to stop apologizing and live my life.

I have used Volume One of the Norton Anthology of American Literature for the text of “Self-Reliance.”  I didn’t put page numbers because I’m not in school anymore and don’t have to cite correctly on my own blog :P

Skiing

I went skiing this past weekend.  Or should I say I repeatedly slid ungracefully down a hill on two long sticks attached to my feet and landed on my butt this past weekend?  Either way, that’s what I did.  My husband Sean is a fantastic skier, and has been skiing pretty much since infancy when his parents put him on a pair of skis and held him between their legs until he got the hang of it himself.  He (literally) skis circles around me.  Sometimes backwards circles.

Here's a picture of baby Sean on a ski trip!  Awww, isn't he adorable?

My family does not ski.  The first time I went skiing was right before my 15^th birthday, with Sean.  I was pretty bad, but I think I did even worse this weekend.

Now don’t get me wrong – I like to ski.  It’s always been one of those activities that scares the living crap out of me, in a good way, so I’m cursing and praying as I ski down the hill and then laughing as I fall and do it all over again.  Things like that really are fun to me.  For example, I enjoy water tubing in the summer.  Not the leisurely relaxing-on-a-tube-in-the-water kind of tubing, but the being-pulled-by-a-boat-at-unsafe-speeds-until-you-are-thrown-off-the-tube kind of tubing that I’ve done with Sean and my friends since we were teenagers.  Also, my favorite ride at carnivals is the Zipper, which is basically an overpriced near-death experience with flashing lights.

No matter how hard you try not to, you WILL prepare for death while riding the Zipper.

But I just didn’t seem to be feeling the whole near-death thing this past weekend.  It just wasn’t what I was into.  It was a lot colder than I had expected it to be, and it also became apparent that I’m just not as fit as I once was.  So I had driven two-and-a-half hours and paid almost $100 between the lift ticket and ski rentals and was exhausted, cold, frightened, and miserable by my second trail.  For a (very) short amount of time I was determined to keep going.  Skiing is one of my husband’s very favorite things in the whole wide world, so I knew that my wimping out two trails in was not going to make him the happiest of campers.  Even if I told him to go off and ski his heart out without me, I knew he wouldn’t be out for too long knowing that I was just sitting at the lodge.  My other motivation to keep going was the money we’d spent just to get up to the mountain.  Being not particularly affluent folk at this point in our lives, the money we’d spent on the lift tickets was not small change.  This ski trip was a real treat, and I was determined to make the most of it.

But as I rode on the four-person ski lift with Sean and some lady and her tiny little child, the wind and snow on my face and the annoyingly comforting words of the mom on the other end of the chair digging into me with equal force, I knew I’d had enough.  Sean was talking to the woman about her kid, cooing over how cute he was and how it was great that he was skiing so young, and all I could think about was how horrible of a skier I was, how that little four-year-old boy could probably ski better than I could, and how Sean would probably prefer to ski with that little twerp anyway given that I was practically in tears as I wobbled spread-eagled down the mountain.

“I’m done,” I told Sean as we got off the ski lift.  He was upset for a minute, but then told me to relax for a bit at the lodge while he took on a few diamonds in this sweet, comforting way he has when I’m upset.  “We'll leave after that,” he told me.  But apparently that wasn’t enough for me.  The combination of the cold, my aching body, and my own knowledge that I was acting like a total baby just made me resent his kindness.  Suddenly I was all like, “No!  I can do this!  I’m going to ski!  I’m going to ski all day!  I’m not a baby!”  Which of course only made me more of a baby.

Needless to say, I only made it through one more trail.  I was still protesting at the bottom, but when I saw the line for the ski lift and thought about having to go down one more endless track of snow I caved in.  I went to the lodge and ate Craisins and Fritos while Sean did his diamonds, slowly regaining feeling in my extremities, and as soon as he came back we left.

I still feel kind of guilty for wimping out and not skiing for very long.  I wish I could have just found some inner strength and kept skiing at least a little bit more.  But I guess at the end of the day you can’t push yourself too hard, right?  So I want to know what you guys think.  At what point do you draw the line when you really don’t want to do something, but know that it would be really lame to quit?  This is something I struggle with in general, being rather stubborn when it comes to giving things up, a topic which I’m sure we’ll return to.  So let me know - have you ever had an experience like this?  If you did, perhaps you were able to deal with it more gracefully than I was.

Home Décor Obsession!

I have a confession to make.  It is the first of many to come, I believe.  So, here it goes: since my marriage this past June, I have been totally obsessed with home décor.  I think I have some sort of illness, which I’ll call HDO, or Home Décor Obsession.  Every spare second I get I’m standing around in my apartment envisioning all of the many things I would do with it if I had the money, along with the many things I’m going to do with the gorgeous mansion I’ll have once I’m rich (because that’s totally going to happen on the salary of a substitute teacher and a Red Cross employee).  You probably don’t think this is a big deal.  In fact, you might think it’s normal.  What you don’t understand is that caring about how my living space looks is something entirely foreign to me.  Let me explain why.

                For some reason that is still inexplicable to me, I was an extreme feminist during my earliest childhood.  This might not be strange for a child whose parents are feminists, but I had absolutely no one in my life pushing me towards this.  My family was very conservative.  My mom did all the cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, and my dad went to work.  Not only this, but I was taught that this was the only correct way to run a household.  My pastor-father still preaches from the pulpit, to this day, that the man is the head of the house.  No matter how many times he makes the joke that the woman is “the neck that turns the head,” he truly believes this to be the case.  In my later childhood and adolescence, my desire to obliterate gender roles came from actually thinking about these claims coupled with a healthy dose of flat-out rebellion, but I don’t really understand how or why I was so adamant about changing them up at such an early age.  At any rate, I was, and despite my good intentions I couldn’t help but succumb to the irrationality and over-enthusiasm of childhood.  Even in kindergarten I was arguing with boys (and some girls) about the fact that girls could do anything (and more!) that boys could do, and proudly stated that I hated cooking, cleaning, and anything even remotely related to being “housewifey.”  I vowed never to become one, or to be interested in the things that such a woman would care about.  This continued all the way through my late teenage years and early adulthood.  I swore off cooking, kept my room in a state of perpetual chaos, and laughed at the girls with their perfect pastel-colored rooms, home-made dishes, and ambitions to be stay-at-home moms.

                And then something strange happened.  My boyfriend and I started to think seriously about getting married.  We had been planning to get married since we were 16, but it wasn’t until about five years later when we began to understand the gravity of such plans and actually started thinking about the practicalities.  Suddenly I was thinking about places to live.  And kids.  And awful things like, gasp, chores.  I realized that I didn’t have the slightest clue about how to cook a meal or keep a room clean.  Luckily my boyfriend-turned-husband has always been an amazing cook and knows how to clean, but I knew that I was going to have to do my share.  It was only fair.  The crazy childhood feminist inside me screamed at the thought of ever having to cook a meal ever, but the rational and fair feminist inside me knew that splitting the work as close to 50/50 as possible was the way to go.  So I started learning how to cook.  And I cleaned my room.  And then I started thinking about ways to make a room not just clean, but also nice-looking.  Despite my dad’s comments that I was becoming “domesticated” (he deliberately used that word to annoy me, which is actually kind of funny now), I had to admit to myself that I kind of liked having a room where I could see the floor, and I actually really liked the thought of making a room beautiful.  I didn’t (and still don’t) really like cooking, but you take the good with the bad.

                So now I spend my days Googling decorating ideas and following home décor blogs and thinking about how a space can be utilized.  I think this newfound love for decorating, or at least thinking about decorating, has taught me a valuable lesson (not to get all moralizing on you).  I’ve learned that loving areas of marriage traditionally dominated by women doesn’t have to mean that I’m somehow giving in to the patriarchy, just like it doesn’t mean that I’m a stereotypical woman if I walk outside wearing pink.  My husband and I split the cooking (and I’ve actually discovered that I’m a pretty decent baker), I do most of the cleaning because he works more hours (he did all of the cleaning during my brief stint in grad school before he got his new job), and I’m the one who cares about the décor (and have subsequently contracted HDO).  Do people come over and automatically assume I do the decorating?  Yup.  Do I validate them when I confirm that I do?  Maybe.  But as long as I’m doing things I like because I like them, and not because it is expected of me by society as a woman, then that’s fine with me.

                

I leave you with awesome pictures of awesomeness and home décor inspiration.

Valentine's Day

With Valentine's Day only two days away, I figured I'd discuss the two (admittedly generalized) types of people you will encounter on this holiday: those who hate it and those who love it.  Let's start with the haters.  On Valentine's Day you are sure to see at least ten Facebook posts such as, "valentines day sucks so bad,"  "who the eff cares about ur stupid relatoinship," or "f*ck valentines day."  These generally come from angry, bitter people who don't like the public expression of any feeling other than anger or bitterness.  Ignore them.  They are trolls.  They may think they have good reasons for hating Valentine's Day as vehemently as they do, such as going against the system and denying commercialism, but you'll notice that nine out of ten of these people will say nothing at all about such issues but will instead continue to rage about how they're going to punch out the next person they see wearing pink.

Occasionally you'll come across someone who hates Valentine's Day but isn't one of these angry, unhappily single ranters with bad spelling and grammar.  That person will explain on her Facebook that Valentine's Day is a pointless holiday that she chooses not to celebrate because every day is like Valentine's Day to her.  "Why should we pick out one day to show our partners we love them when we could be doing it every day of the year?" she'll say.  Now, while that may seem admirable, I would like to know what couple really puts that much effort into the romantic side of their relationship every single day that hasn't been together for less than a year, or even six months. It's one thing to work constantly on your relationship in order to keep it going (every relationship needs that); it's quite another to go out to dinner, give your partner a dozen roses, give him all of your attention, light candles, give massages, wear sexy lingerie, whatever it is that you do every single day.  I mean, really?  You treat your partner like a king/queen every day?  I would personally like to know how these people afford such a lifestyle, let alone get any work done.  Letting your partner know that he is number one in your life on a daily basis is essential, but Valentine's Day is special because it requires partners to go above and beyond their normal daily routine and remind their loved one that even though they are together all the time and life sometimes gets in the way, there is still a time when everything else can be forgotten and romance can reign supreme.

Then there are those who only temporarily hate Valentine's Day because they are unhappily single.  Happily single people may enjoy the holiday by treating themselves to something special, listening to their friends' ideas about what they're going to do for their partners, and smiling about how they're going to save money by not giving old What's-His-Face a present this year.  But then there are the whiny single people.  You know, the ones who choose to wallow in self-pity about their singleness instead of enjoying it for what it is and/or making themselves attractive to members of the sex they wish to partner with via confidence and an attitude of personal satisfaction.  Note to single people who don't want to be single: whining about your lack of a Valentine on Valentine's Day is NOT going to make some knight in shining armour ride up to your Facebook status and say, "Here, oh distressed one, your whining has made me realize that I would like to be your Valentine!"  Not gonna happen.  Letting the public know that you are single and interested in dating is fine.  Whining and crying about your singleness by posting statuses like, "It's Valentine's Day and no one loves me :(" or "I hate all you lucky girls with boyfriends" is not making you look like any better of a candidate for a potential mate (because that's really what it's all about, after all).  Be confident in yourself, let the world know that you don't need a man/woman but would like one, and don't hate on everyone else who has one, and then you may not only find a Valentine but may also save yourself from the hatred of all your non-single friends.

This brings me to the lovers.  There are two categories of these people: those like myself who enjoy Valentine's Day as a day to give extra-special attention to their partners, and those who go way, way overboard and really do give legitimate concern to those who hate the commercialism of the holiday.  I celebrate Valentine's Day because I think it's nice to have a day set aside to pretend like you're on your honeymoon again.  Sure, you could do this any time.  And sure, there are anniversaries and other occasions to do this and there's no inherent significance invested in February 14th other than what our culture has created, but I don't see how that is enough of an argument to justify extreme hatred of the holiday.  If you think it's stupid to devote an entire day to the pleasures of romantic love, maybe you need to evaluate your feelings on love in general.  If you think it's stupid to devote an entire day to the pleasures of romantic love via buying things, then I can see your point.  To me, Valentine's Day is about saying "I love you" a few more times than you usually would, about letting yourself give in to the fun of romance and a specifically romantic sexuality, and spending the entire evening doing whatever you love most with your partner instead of squeezing in whatever time you can manage between household duties, TV shows, kids, or whatever else takes up your day-to-day time.  Yes, I usually do pick up a little something for my partner, but it usually costs me ten bucks or less, and it's just a little something to say, "Here, I thought of you and spent a little money on you, now let's spend some time together."  You can celebrate Valentine's Day without spending a dime and still have it be fabulous.  If you're buying out Victoria's Secret, planning a trip to the Bahamas, or stressing out about what cologne to wear on your date to some ridiculously expensive restaurant, then you're doin' it wrong.  A present is nice, but acting like it's Christmas again isn't the point.  The point is to remind your lover that she is the most important thing in your life, and no matter how long you've been together you can still find a way to rekindle the passion that once took up all of your time instead of just some of it.

If this post hasn't convinced you to celebrate Valentine's Day, that's absolutely fine.  Every couple should have their own way of showing love to each other regardless of tradition.  However, I hope that if you're a true Valentine's Day hater, you'll reconsider exactly why you hate the holiday and, at the very least, spare the rest of us your bitter, poorly-edited posts on social media and networking sites.

Welcome One and All

Welcome to my blog!  I'm new to this whole thing, so you'll have to excuse me if I make any new-blogger mistakes.  Just snicker to yourselves and move on.  In this here first post, I'd like to tell you what I plan to do with this blog.  I've recently decided that I need an outlet.  I'm constantly thinking about (judging is such a harsh word nowadays) everything that I see and hear and read about, and since everyone and his or her mother is blogging about something, I figured I'd join in on the fun.  This blog will be part diary, part rant, part social commentary - there'll probably be a little bit of everything on here.  I wouldn't be surprised if you found an essay about Shakespeare, a review of a movie or video game, and some sort of angry rant on grammar or feminism within a few days of each other.  So just hold on tight and prepare to enter the rabbit hole that is Thoughtland.