The Trials and Travails of Graduate School...

Part of graduate school involves moments where the line between sanity and insanity blurs in fascinating ways. Amidst papers, presentations, and classes (which, oddly, seem to get in the way of all the other things) it is easy to lose perspective. Which is partially why this blog exists at all. I can't talk enough about the stuff that interests me to everyone who is working with me, so I apparently had to have a forum to do it more.

There's a lot of talk about balance in the graduate school experience, about being able to live a life outside of the department (where I am, in fact, typing this right now!). There are even support groups for new scholars in a lot of academic disciplines, each of which has been eager to try to provide that much needed perspective that will help to keep you sane.

This is all for nothing. As far as I can tell, finding a balance between work (or talking about work, or thinking about work, or thinking about talking about work, or...) and everything else is a fiction they tell you when you enter a program because they don't want you to rip off your clothes and run away screaming back to whatever shitty job you left to get here.

No. This is an endurance test, a test of the passion you have for a subject that you have willingly offered your entire life to. This is a test of your desire to immerse yourself in a discipline that may or may not like what you have to offer, with all of the vulnerability and suffering that that entails. In a way (and I'm sure that there are some students out there silently nodding their heads when I say this) our disciplines are like lovers. We often relate to them as such: when we turn in papers and they come back covered in red ink we take it as a rejection of our skills and ourselves, but when we manage to articulate a new and (we hope) brilliant idea we experience it as the most visceral kind of elation and joy. Our relationship to the discipline often can be more immediate than our relation to our 'real' lovers. Surely, it demands almost as much (if not more) attention.

Our desire, in a sense, creates a new being.

Now, I'm not in any way saying that this is healthy. But there is some nobility in it. The highs are very high, and the lows can be very low, and there isn't always an assurance that any of it matters any more than that shitty job you (or I) left to get here. However, the reason we do it is self-evident, so self-evident in fact, that I'm not going to write it down. You can fill in the blank yourself, can't you?

In any case, I find it all thrilling, and I wouldn't give it up for the world. Even if I have to leave in a straight jacket.