Over the course of this past semester, I confessed to several of you that I was actually pretty miserable. About three weeks into the semester, as my son was screaming in my ear about an hour past his bedtime, I told my partner “I quit.” At the same time, I regularly tell people how lucky I am. I love my job. I have colleagues telling me that I’m doing a “good job.” And, presently, I’m still here, here being in this PhD program, and I don’t have any actual intention of leaving, leaving being not completing the degree program requirements. How does that make any sense? It’s not at all a case of indecision – I think instead it’s a symptom of the multiple stresses in my life right now. And I also think it’s a matter of intention and choice in working to manifest the present I want, and not quite yet succeeding.
A healthy dose of doubt is typical of most graduate student experiences. Most of the writing that’s out there about graduate education is, quite frankly, miserable. We can look to the series by William Pannapacker (writing as Thomas H. Benton) on “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go” and “Just Don’t Go, Part 2“. Or we can look at Rebecca Schuman’s lament “Getting a PhD in literature will turn you into an emotional trainwreck, not a professor,”wherein she compares the chances of getting a tenure track job to the survival rate of small-cell lung cancer patients. Or perhaps we might consider Ron Rosenbaum’s “Should you go to grad school? My story.” Or a glimpse at the title of the blog “From Grad School to Happiness” with the URL http://leavingacademia.blogspot.com/. Then of course, there are also assertions that graduate school, and by extension academia, is a cult, although I wonder how many people would actually argue with that one. All of these messages are predicated primarily on the tight academic job market, and also on the emotionally draining and materially difficult experience of graduate training. On top of those messages, the conversation about the University and the humanities also has a modulating tone of panic, anxiety, and misery.
In the face of these messages, one of the primary responses seems to be fear, panic and despair. It’s as if the looming reality of this situation is just too much to face, so we want to flee from it. Or at least talk about fleeing from it.
Eileen Joy’s response to these crises, however, is brilliant and empowering. In actuality, it’s a call for manifestos for an upcoming volume from punctum books. If you haven’t read this post, or her earlier call for manifestos, you really, really should (including Ruth Evans anti-manifesto from Kalamazoo 2012). But it’s also more than that. It’s her retrospective on Kalamazoo 2013, responding to a lot of the conversation going on there by very brilliant people in our discipline about “the current state of the Academy” (the scare quotes are mine, not Eileen’s). It is also a meditation on what she calls the “clockless nowever present.” Eileen launches into the fear by identifying how we can have a fear that is, in actuality, separate from our wants:
“I also found myself feeling melancholy for a future I sometimes fear will never arrive. This is what scares me, you see: that I myself am throwing all of my labors into a no-future, that I’m just going to be swept away in a tide of economic-climactic catastrophe, that nothing I do will matter ‘in the end.’ IN THE END. But then I realize: it isn’t really the future I want to focus on; it’s the present.”
Yes. This. Right here. This is why we should care about what Eileen is saying, and even if we’re not ready to compose manifestos for punctum books’ project, then we should at least be ready to start manifesting presentness in our own lives, in our own careers and institutions.
Eileen makes a passionate plea for us to focus on the present, because, really, there is only the present. That future we’re working toward is actually the present. In book XI of his Confessions, Saint Augustine tries to tease out this paradoxical nature of time, when the present moment continually slides into the past and the future never actually arrives while simultaneously continually manifesting. This concept is not new or radical, and yet we completely fail, in both our language and our ontology, to realize this nature. We have fit an artificial ontology of time onto our day to day lives at the expense of true joy. Occasionally, a writer or philosopher will point out the problematic nature of our relationship with time. Michelle, at Balancing Jane, recently wrote about the problem of waiting for life to start as it relates to graduate education:
“But all of that focus on future goals can be a problem, especially when it comes to our individual lives instead of the advancements of a larger professional community. It’s called impact bias, and Dan Gilbert talks about it quite a bit in his very interesting TED Talk on happiness (if you’ve got some time, it’s really worth the 20 minutes to watch the whole thing).”
Now, Michelle’s post focuses on the problem of sacrificing personal happiness for the benefit of our professional communities. I might add here for the benefit of our individual professional development as well, although that in turn advances our professional communities. Honestly, I don’t really want to completely dismantle the idea of being goal-oriented. Being goal-oriented constructively moved me through some of my most trying life experiences: separation, divorce, unemployment. It also helped me realize my goal of earning a graduate degree and moving from a staff position in higher education, which I loved very much, to my current position of teaching and research. Being goal-oriented helped me manifest my own goals of working more directly and closely with undergraduate students and working more directly and closely with ideas in order to directly shape knowledge (and in turn curriculum). However, we need to be able to translate that into a present experience, because the future is both always already here and always never arriving. Some days, I feel like Tantalus.
I’ve been searching for a way to properly articulate these thoughts for a while, especially since I’ve been living in a constant state of anxiety as a graduate student/partner/mother. Each of these identities is future focused, to the detriment of my present. What do we lose, as individuals and as a community, if we ignore the present? On a practical level, a focus on the present can feel difficult. After all, many graduate students live in a state of scarcity with high demands on their time. We all like to think that in the future “it will get better.” We’ll get a job with more security, that will gain us more material security, and the demands on our time, even if they will never become less, will be easier to manage because we’ll be more experienced at those tasks.
I’m not for a moment saying that that trajectory won’t lead to more of certain kinds of happiness. But I think that we need to step back for a moment and take a long hard look at our present. How can we manifest a present that is both meaningful to ourselves and manifests a vibrant present for humanist education? I’m sure that we all have a list of items that we think people with power and privilege can do to help us: better training, better funding, different types of support. These ideas are important and should be articulated. After all, we’re the ones who are living this present. Many of those administrators and faculty members were in graduate school a decade or more ago. Higher education has changed (often thanks to or in spite of them); the world has changed (again, thanks to or in spite of them).
But that’s not what I’m asking. What I’m asking is: what can we do, as graduate students with limited time and resources, to manifest the present that we want? For ourselves and our families? For our students? For education as it exists right now? Will we plant our feet and meet the on-rushing present? Who among us will allow themselves to get “drenched in reality”?
Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers today. As I’m sitting in my home right now, wondering how we’re going to pay our bills this summer, worrying so painfully about the immediate future of the next three months, I’m blind to the present. But someone is asking for our visions of the present, and we need to testify our present. We can advocate for ourselves, and even if it won’t change the past that this present moment of testimony will become, it will help us to manifest the present that we envision. And we should care very much about that.
Please forgive me for addressing the general ideas presented here by Amanda. She is a dear friend of mine, and I believe she would understand if I let her story stand on its own without interpretation or glossing. Let me share my own experience on the tension of living in the moment while pursuing a career that seems so uncertain too often. I don’t know if this strategy can be applied by everyone at any time, but I have found the past a useful way of shifting my focus from the future to the present. Much of this rises from a hermeneutical starting-point many will not share with me, but let me explain how I use the past to situate me in the present.
Oops. I seem to have forgotten to explain another term that is extremely significant for me: fear. Many of my well-meaning friends will try to euphemize this to “concern” or, in extreme cases, “anxiety” (the former has a cerebral air to it, the latter clinical). I operated much of my life in order to avoid things I dreaded; I lived in constant fear. Now, I never would have admitted that I was driven by fear, and mostly because I was ignorant of this force (sometimes willfully, sometimes not). But fear had/has a way of coloring the future in a way it could not/cannot the past.
Not only did fear color the future, but it gestured to the past in a sickeningly selective way. Only the worst of the past awaited me in the future, so I found myself steering myself to avoid obstacles imagined and barriers that might or might not come–despite what situation I was actually in. And that is another thing about fear: Its perspective is always away from the proximate, holding one’s gaze far ahead and whispering about the atrocious past. Fear said, “Trust me, but don’t look back. Or if you must look back, only do so to glance at what I’ve told you; don’t linger too long, or you’ll see even more than I’ve told you.”
And fear was right, but what it never said was that the longer one looks at the past, the more one realizes that there is no suffering that isn’t common to all, no difficulty someone else hasn’t faced before. Indeed, a considered survey of the past reveals that even I had gone through (and survived no less) many of the things I feared. So the past taught me that the future held nothing new to fear. I even became quite comfortable with being unable to predict the future, knowing that in the Grand Scheme of Things (capitalized after careful consideration), whether my goals were achieved or not, I would do more than survive; I would thrive.
Such knowledge liberated me to schedule my time. Yes: Freedom allowed me to set up boundaries. I worked on my dissertation during the scheduled time. I was a father and husband when I was around my family–as was fitting. When something thwarted work on my dissertation (and a lot of that came up), I remembered that this was not new to human experience, and that I would address whatever came up, knowing that time for writing would return also. I could go on (I want to go on).
Now, I am not “cured.” I still fight against my propensity to fear (perhaps, I willingly concede, others are more fortified). I still fail to keep the Now in perspective. I fret. I wonder what the future holds. But this is significantly less now. This is the exception rather than my norm. I am free. Those who know me personally will know the deep places from where this rises, the assumptions I hold and don’t try to prove. Not everyone will appreciate such faith. I understand. Nevertheless, I am satisfied in plenty and want. The past reveals a cycle that includes both.
I’m rereading these now as I enter into the final stages of dissertation revision, and I cannot express how helpful and wise I find Amanda’s initial post and Michael’s contribution.
I think that in tandem with Michael’s discussion of fear, we also need to highlight something Amanda’s post gestured at eloquently: disappointment. Disappointment of course creates fear, because once experienced we might expect it again. It is fear of disappointment in particular that ironically often leads to disappointment. As I have labored to make my dissertation chapters at least make some sort of coherent point, I have regularly found that disappointment in my writing makes my writing worse. Disappointment is a self-centered monster – it is a type of narcissism, for me at least, that (as the proverbial irony goes) causes a loss of my voice. “This chapter is terrible,” I say to myself, to my advisor, and to people asking about it, and I set out to fix the disappointment to make it at least satisfactory. And the goal to make it not disappointing is a miserable goal indeed.
It has become a running joke, one in some sense that I have encouraged and cultivated, that I am overly eager about Boethius. In some ways it is true – Boethius represents a lot of things that truly matter to me, and he becomes sometimes a shorthand for issues I am concerned about. But the fact is, there is a direct correlation between how focused I am on a chapter’s writing being disappointing and how much I have let my enthusiasm for Boethius slip beneath the security blanket of irony. Irony is a safehaven from disappointment – if I am ironic about what I like, then I am safe.
For some I suppose that irony is a powerful tool that allows them to tap into the intellectual and creative resources that allow them to succeed. And as an allegorist who recognizes irony as a subset of allegoria, I am willing to concede this point. So I don’t want to recommend anti-irony (we all need a little iron in our diet, har har). But the unironic appreciation for what I am writing about always, inevitably, makes my writing better. When I stop thinking about how I am acting in a social interaction and focus on actually enjoying the other person, my awkwardness eases, and in the same way, when I stop thinking about how the process of expressing the thoughts about the thing I enjoy is disappointing, then I remember that good writing isn’t my goal. Good writing is a means to an act of celebration. Of course, you might celebrate irony, but when you celebrate it well, you probably celebrate it earnestly.
This all is a tangential way of responding to Amanda’s and Michael’s posts by saying that disappointment is, for me, often the product of an ill-placed irony that stops me from seeing what I really think success is. I’m not trying to say it’s all in our heads, and that graduate school is difficult only because of errors in judgment – I’m not Stoic enough for that, in worldview or in constitution. But what I am saying is that the process of achieving success, which may fail because of things outside of our control, can only collapse in our personal experience if we do not face the fears hidden by the sometimes hasty protective mechanisms of irony. In the event of actually not getting what we want, irony might just be a distraction from a legitimate grieving process – and yes, failure in a career is a legitimate reason to grieve. And in the event of getting what we want, the success will be bitter anyway, because the fears of success are in some ways scarier than those of failure.
So the question really is: What is success in the humanities? The answer is of course in the word “humanities.” Success is measured by goals achieved or not achieved by people who want them, an obvious point but one that brings home this point: We must establish our goals with wisdom about our own human experience. This is something admittedly that I have failed to do, and I think academia has failed to establish the methods by which person-centered goals are established. We should start with tiers – goals which are improbable but for which we will try, goals which are difficult but in which we have some hope of success, and goals in which we are more or less guaranteed to have success. This last will seem difficult for some – isn’t establishing goals in which we are guaranteed to get what we want a bit cheap? But this is where the irony is. If your goal is to earnestly enjoy a piece of literature, and you do, then you have achieved it. Recalling the basic need of yourself as a human being to have fulfillment and taking the steps for that, in lieu of the bigger dreams, is not weakness, and it isn’t fear. It’s a reminder that we don’t need everything we want, and that most disappointments, most failures, are not the measure of our lives.
So in fact, by abandoning default, fear-based irony for love-based self-care, disappointment might be something that we can ironize with more agency, something over which we can grieve and then, later, maybe laugh too.