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