| June 30, 1998 School Days
I always thought that by the time I was thirty, I'd know what
I wanted to do with my life. Thirty just sounded so grown up! Well, so old.
It's been strange to realize in the last few years that the passage of time doesn't
automatically turn you into an adult.
Ten years ago I was an English major at the University of
Georgia. In the summer of 1998 I went to England to study for a month, and that was
when I became sure that I wanted to be a literature professor. I'd always been a
great reader, and working with literature was exciting to me. I liked school, always
had, and could see myself thriving in that setting if I stayed. So I talked to some
professors of my acquaintance, wonderful people, who encouraged me and helped me on my way
to graduate school.
I ended up at Penn State in a two-year master's program.
At first, I didn't much like it there. I was going through a difficult period
of depression (I realize that now) and it was just so dark and cold there. I didn't
like my classes much, and most everyone else around me seemed discontent. But the
one thing I liked was teaching. Teaching writing to college freshmen was a lot more
fun than I'd ever have expected, and I really got into designing my course and making it
work. I think being unhappy with the rest of graduate school made me put a lot more
time into my teaching than I would have otherwise, and the work paid off in personal
rewards.
When I finished my master's degree I was accepted to the PhD
program at Penn State, and for a lot of reasons I decided to stay there. I liked the
PhD program a lot better than the master's program, and things were good in my personal
life. Marty and I got married after years of dating, and the stability of living
with him really helped to even out my mental state. I still wanted to be a
professor, and signing on for the PhD seemed to guarantee that that was the only thing I'd
be fit for when I finished.
This was a good time. I was teaching a lot, I made some
good friends, and I was learning new things all the time. It was exciting to feel my
brain stretching, making connections, opening up and taking things in -- I hadn't felt
this challenged and productive since undergraduate school. I really liked taking
classes. The PhD program at the time was ideally two years of classes followed by
the comprehensive exams, then 2 - 3 years of working on the dissertation. The
classes went great. The exams were good, too. I learned so much when I was
studying for them, I felt so smart! I did well on them, too, which was very
gratifying. You don't get that far into graduate school unless you're addicted to
the approval of academic authority, and I was. So it felt good to be praised for the
hard work I'd done.
Then came the dissertation. I don't even know why
things went wrong, but somehow this became the hardest task I'd ever undertaken, and I
never really figured out how to master it. There was too much open time, too much
working on my own. I felt like I could never get a handle on the whole project,
because it seemed too big to fit inside my mind all at once. It was like nothing I'd
written before. Lots of people tried to help, but somehow the suggestions that
sounded good never seemed to work for me once I got back into trying to write the thing.
I'm wondering, now, if my need for approval was what made it so difficult. In
classes, I felt like someone noticed my work, even if only with a grade at the end of the
semester. Working on my disseratation, I felt like I was the only person who ever
saw it, and my opinion on whether it was good or not didn't count for anything.
The failure I felt over this made life difficult. My
whole self-image, practically, was based on the idea of myself as a good student. I
think I'd always comforted myself with the thought that even though I might not be very
attractive or popular, I was a good student. I thought people appreciated
me for that. Stalling on this project brought all those assumptions about myself
into question. Thank goodness for teaching -- it was the one thing I still felt
successful at (and the possibility that I was teaching to gain the approval of my students
is not lost on me). But even that made things more difficult, since I found it so
much simpler to put my time into teaching than writing. The more immediate sense of
accomplishment that I felt after teaching a good class made it hard to focus on the
long-term goals of the dissertation. This was when I realized that being a professor
might not be the best thing for me, that no matter how much I liked to teach, the kind of
writing and publishing I'd need to do to succeed at that was something that I might never
be good at.
Four years went by. My proposal was approved and my
advisor tried to help me any way that he could. In the meantime, a lot of people
from my year in school finished their PhDs and went on to jobs, or at least to the job
market. Some others dropped out, decided to leave it undone. One of my best
friends left, in fact. I liked it that she could see what was making her unhappy and
stop doing that to herself. Of course leaving was also hard for her, but now she has
a different life, and I think she feels better than she did when she was in school.
I respect her a lot for making that decision.
I stayed on, teaching and trying to write. Really
trying, though I think I must have been going about it all wrong, because I couldn't write
anything at all. I felt worse and worse and worse all the time, and finally last
year it became too much. Marty was in Connecticut for his job, and I was still
living in Pennsylvania. I had a job I liked (I think that was really what kept me
going for most of that year) but I was miserable about school. All I wanted to do
was sleep and write email. Finally, a good friend told me to look at my life and
figure out what would really happen if I left school. Would it kill
me? Actually, when I looked at it like that, I figured that leaving might keep me
from killing myself.
So that was why I decided to leave. Even though I
didn't know what I'd do when I got away, it was better than another day of watching myself
break into a million pieces. I cleared it with my advisor, my committee, my husband,
my mom -- still looking for approval -- and got out of there at the end of last year.
I could still finish, technically, if I wrote the dissertation. But I
promised myself I wouldn't make that decision until the end of this year.
Now I'm thinking about it again. Trying to figure out
what I would have to do to get it done. I've started to wonder, again, whether or
not it's in me. I have a friend, a woman I respect and admire very much, who
finished after years of thinking she might never make it. She's told me that she
wrote most of her dissertation in a matter of months. That encourages me and scares
me all at the same time.
But whether I do it or not, I'm sure I don't want to be a
professor. A teacher, maybe. But not a professor. This might be a good
thing, now that I think about it. Before, my problems with the dissertation were all
tied up with my doubts about my career choice, I think. Perhaps removing that
variable from the equation will help me balance things.
Back to my original point. I'm still not sure what I
want to do with my life. It's scary to be almost thirty and still wondering about
this. Whatever it turns out to be, it probably won't require a PhD in
English. But if I could figure out how to finish it, I might like to have one, just
because. Maybe I will be the most overqualified secretary in town, but there are
worse things I could be. I'm not feeling particularly strong and productive right at
this moment, so it might not be the best time to look at this project again. But
I've started seeing it as something I could do to gain my own approval, rather than anyone
else's. I'm thinking that's a positive change, no matter what I decide in the end. |
