nausea [erase/rewind]
2005 was a shattering year.
After a painfully honest internal audit, I decided it was unfair to indiscriminately condemn the entire year as it contained some of my most treasured memories: Sundance. KÁ. Coachella. Reykjavik. Wisconsin. Topolobampo. New Year's Eve.
Even so, September will forever be marked as one of the most damaging months of my short life. Unexpected severance. Humiliatingly attacked. Solitary migration. Disabused fantasies. Events shrouded in emotional obscurity, which, on there own would have been intense sites of anxiety, but compounded together without anytime to heal or regroup had cataclysmic effects on my psyche. Not since I became emotionally unhinged as pneumonia wrecked my body have I felt so stripped of my sense of agency in the world. Something in my liberty.
Most of last term - the University of Chicago's cruel academic interval - I was in a constant state of delirious exhaustion. Every week another essay for the same history seminar. From Friday to Tuesday, I labored. On Wednesday, I played catch-up in my other courses. On Thursday, I collapsed. Yet, not once did I receive a single word of feedback on my work. My professor held office hours so infrequently I was convinced he was some sort of indeterminate apparition that manifested in a physical avatar for a total of three hours a week. It was a savage exercise in academic existentialism - a terrible penance I would have eagerly tolerated if I had felt strongly in my own work, or at least emotionally invested. On the contrary; week in/week out I shat out pages as if in some horrifying sensory/intellectual deprivation chamber. A deranged Purgatory. I imagine one of the primary reasons people engage in the academic lifestyle is to attend to their curiosity, to feel passionately connected to their own words. I felt sharply alienated from my labour.
And it was heartbreaking.
For the second time in my life, I lost the faith. Only, this time in the historical project; in the importance, let alone possibility, of veracious narrative representation.
This is not to say that I will not have moments of relapse, or to deny the possibility that in the future I will be a born-again academic. As it stands, however, I cannot possibly tolerate a profession that demands everything, but offers so little in return.
Taken together, the events of last year can be distilled into one important, if trite, lesson:
Loving something is not nearly a good enough reason to stay with it.
After a painfully honest internal audit, I decided it was unfair to indiscriminately condemn the entire year as it contained some of my most treasured memories: Sundance. KÁ. Coachella. Reykjavik. Wisconsin. Topolobampo. New Year's Eve.
Even so, September will forever be marked as one of the most damaging months of my short life. Unexpected severance. Humiliatingly attacked. Solitary migration. Disabused fantasies. Events shrouded in emotional obscurity, which, on there own would have been intense sites of anxiety, but compounded together without anytime to heal or regroup had cataclysmic effects on my psyche. Not since I became emotionally unhinged as pneumonia wrecked my body have I felt so stripped of my sense of agency in the world. Something in my liberty.
Most of last term - the University of Chicago's cruel academic interval - I was in a constant state of delirious exhaustion. Every week another essay for the same history seminar. From Friday to Tuesday, I labored. On Wednesday, I played catch-up in my other courses. On Thursday, I collapsed. Yet, not once did I receive a single word of feedback on my work. My professor held office hours so infrequently I was convinced he was some sort of indeterminate apparition that manifested in a physical avatar for a total of three hours a week. It was a savage exercise in academic existentialism - a terrible penance I would have eagerly tolerated if I had felt strongly in my own work, or at least emotionally invested. On the contrary; week in/week out I shat out pages as if in some horrifying sensory/intellectual deprivation chamber. A deranged Purgatory. I imagine one of the primary reasons people engage in the academic lifestyle is to attend to their curiosity, to feel passionately connected to their own words. I felt sharply alienated from my labour.
And it was heartbreaking.
For the second time in my life, I lost the faith. Only, this time in the historical project; in the importance, let alone possibility, of veracious narrative representation.
This is not to say that I will not have moments of relapse, or to deny the possibility that in the future I will be a born-again academic. As it stands, however, I cannot possibly tolerate a profession that demands everything, but offers so little in return.
Taken together, the events of last year can be distilled into one important, if trite, lesson:
Loving something is not nearly a good enough reason to stay with it.
posted by d l wright at 1/23/2006 11:26:00 PM
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