It’s been a stressful couple of days, for reasons I haven’t been able to articulate. Two things yesterday kind of tipped me over: the Advanced Poetry Writing class I thought I’d be sharing with (at least one?) other graduate students turned out to be full of undergraduates, who were all very cocky but didn’t know what terza rima was, and the Appalachian Lit class I thought I could handle turned out to be full of very brilliant people, all of whom are intimidating, even the two lone MA students with whom I share a ladder rung (below all the dazzling Phd guys). First incredibly underwhelmed, then incredibly overwhelmed. I found out today that all the other poetry MA and Phd students are taking the other poetry workshop, the one I should have signed up for, but now it’s too late. Because—are you ready—it’s scheduled for the same day and time as the Appalachian Lit class. I had gotten excited about having another workshop with a couple of them. I feel very lost in all this.
There are a couple of things I can say I’ve learned from this grad school experience so far. Or, maybe I learned them last semester, and will unlearn them this semester. But I know, now, that teaching is not my calling. I know now that I would rather work on a chain gang than teach English composition. I also know that I’m not an academic. That one was pretty hard to swallow. What’s the point of doing all this, then? I don’t know. I just also (somehow) know that I have to finish what I started, and that something surprising will open before me. At some point, in the next year and a half, a door is going to open.
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January 13, 2012 at 11:35 pm
vocabat
Or it very well might turn out that you will find a door and open it!
Discomfiting truths that are hard to swallow… I’ve been surrounded by them as well these days. Better to find out now what our limitations are– there’s a certain peace that comes when you realize that your options are not, after all, unlimited. Once we’ve marked off our limits, perhaps, we can put down deeper roots. Or something like that.
January 14, 2012 at 7:58 am
jenn
Our paths are variations on a theme, I think, from reading your writing for a while now regarding grad school, that is. . .
When I was licking my wounds over feeling like a failure at the thing I thought for sure I was supposed to be doing with the rest of my life: teaching and being an academic . . . it felt like the breath in my very soul had been knocked out. Hurt for a long while. Especially watching my peers moving up the ranks. That was until I read the MA thesis of the most envied of the group. It wasn’t anything better than I could write, it wasn’t anything more original, it wasn’t better organized.
She was miserable trying to scratch and claw her way to the top only she didn’t really know that about herself. But, we all saw it. She gained over 20lbs in two years, her face was always breaking out, she never slept and became quite the drinker. Eventually, she started bragging about the affair she had with her advisor.
She was supposed to be ‘all that’ and now, she’s off teaching in Chicago’s inner-city as a high school teacher and working part time on a doctoral in education (it doesn’t get easier than a degree of any sort in education, trust me, I’ve looked at what she’s reading and writing, it’s nothing to be bragging about the way she goes on and on). I follow her Facebook and she’s miserable but still desperate to make everyone believe she’s extremely successful. Can’t imagine anyone buying it.
The best thesis I’ve ever read was written by mousey friend of mine who never bragged and who supported everyone else in their ups and downs throughout the program. She was happy about her work and loved the program. She felt overwhelmed and challenged and all the other things we all experienced. At the end of the day, it was always worth it to her to be part of the most amazing experience of soaking up knowledge. She’s a stay at home mother of one delightful little boy.
Me, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with teaching and have learned that really good teachers aren’t born–you’ve got to work on it to get good, just like anything else. However, you’ll never want to work on something that doesn’t satisfy a need inside you. No worries–if you don’t have that need find out which ones you do have and get going on satisfying those.
It wasn’t until I sat down and figured out what need I was trying to satisfy with an MA that I was able to figure out what to really focus on.
Another of the group took off to the mid-west for a long while and none of us could figure out why she’d done it–she never said until she was on her way back but she had gone to [insert state] to become a musician. Now, she already sang and played guitar before she left but when she returned, well, she had nearly mastered what she’d always done. She didn’t go pro and she doesn’t have a record label chasing her down but she does make money by making music. She also makes money working on an organic produce co-op. She’s got an MA in Literature and she found out she’s super happy playing in the dirt.
Me, I’m heading back to California to write poetry, practice meditation, sing in a gospel choir, and, with some luck, open a dance studio. My program was in Cultural Studies and I focused on 19th century Art and Literature. Thought I’d teach Art History, then I thought I’d work in a museum, but those didn’t really fit well. After super soul searching, I realized that life’s too short not to just go for something crazy and unique and totally what you want.
My father always warned me that being an artist was going to keep me in the poor-house but what he didn’t tell me was that going the other route did the same thing only the poverty was on the side of happiness.
January 14, 2012 at 10:29 am
kindbehindtheeyes
Many things come to mind after readying this. One of them is that God is forming you into the somebody (the Masterpiece…all God’s works are Masterpieces) He wants you to be. The agonizing pressing and squeezing that you’re enduring now is part of the sculpting He’s up to. He did not leave you to sculpt yourself into an academic or an author or a mom or anything else. Who is in control of your life?
We ought to have coffee. (By the way, Shelby misses you and is sad not to get more time with you; she made a point of telling me so.)