outer-jessie's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I should be writing something else right now My really truly LAST not-quite-final draft of my dissertation is due at the end of March. I am swimming in self-doubt at the moment. I remember the time when I was afraid I'd look at all my data and find nothing. Now I'm afraid that I'll look at it and find too much, much too much to ever be able to analyze and synthesize. Talk about having it both ways - make up your damn mind, woman. Anywho, it's time to write something else. I...have nothing in particular to say. It's been a while since I've written anything here; I skipped over a lot of things. My grandmother died, three months ago. I feel petty for not writing about that. It mattered to me a great deal, but not enough to write about, apparently. That is sad. Or maybe it mattered too much to write about. Or maybe, it's exactly this: My feelings on it were clear, did not need sorting out, did not require me to talk to myself about it in order to make sense of it. There was a moment, well a season (Christmas) when it made me especially sad, but I figured it out: I hadn't just lost my one and only Nana, I'd also lost access to a family tradition that is really gone. It was already gone, but this sealed the deal, and there is no turning back now. I mourned for that almost as much (more?) that I mourn for the woman herself. And I loved my Nana very much. Anyway, I got that sorted out, and there was nothing else to say. I guess this is growing up? It's lonely. It's lonely when you don't even need to talk to yourself anymore. Actually, it's not that. I do talk to myself, all the time in fact, but I think I've internalized the diary-ing process. I verbalize, to myself, the kinds of things that I might say here in this space, and as a result, the realizations begin to dawn without my having to take this step. I mean, it is kind of isolating, the fact that I'm no longer putting these things out to the world, or the little slice of the world that this diary reaches, but again, maybe that's just growing up. And it isn't like I don't still need people. I do! I very do! I miss the community I used to have here, and the communities I used to have in other places. I thirst for it. I hope I'll have another one some day. On that front...the some day. I've been here in the Midwest for a year and a half now, roughly, August 2011 to February 2013. (No, that's EXACTLY a year and a half.) It's not bad. There's nothing wrong with it. I still love our house, I still enjoy my job. But I still hate it here, especially but not exclusively in the winter. We're fine, honestly - we're warm, we're safe, our home is lovely if old-fashioned, we have a comfortable lifestyle, we have kind and fun people around us. But I hate it. No access to wilderness, no access to community, a feeling of complete disconnectedness from the world. At the same time, a sense of obligation: our administrators have been extremely supportive of both G's and my graduate work, even giving me release time to finish these imminently-due chapter drafts and allowing G to complete her master's work on a curriculum development project on campus. While they are simply very kind people who support their staff in pursuing higher education, I also feel that there is an unspoken "tit for tat" component to the arrangement: We will do this for you, and in exchange you will stay here with us. I know they know that we don't plan to stay here forever. I think they are doing what they can to keep us, and having us feel a debt is a part of that. I might be reading too much into it. Meanwhile, I have severe wanderlust. I want to pick up and go, literally anywhere but here. (I'm using "literally" figuratively.) My mind has been scheming ways to get us out, ideally without any feelings of guilt for leaving our campus or our house behind. "If a tornado were to blow through and destroy our house...if my boss quit so there'd be no one left to be loyal to...if a new, innovative math instructor would stumble in to replace me...if some act-of-god type event were to come and force me to leave in such a way that I would be blameless..." I've conjured up dozens of escape hatches to get me out of here, none of them realistic, while the realities of selling the house, passing the gauntlet to a new instructor, finding a new job, buying a new house, transferring all our accounts, etc. leave me nauseated with anxiety. So. In talking to myself about this the other night, I came to the same conclusion I've come to before: float on it. Something will come along; something will work out. I will find myself somewhere new doing something new, because that is how it's always been and likely how it will always be, periodic cycling to keep nutrients at the ready and sustain the academic ecosystem. It will come when it's ready to come, and it will take me where I'm needed to be. So is my hope. Maybe this time it'll be G's work that sends us back out into the world, or maybe it will be someone who calls on me in particular. Maybe it'll be something else altogether (like a crazy wildfire that destroys the whole area but somehow leaves me and G and the two cats unscathed but homeless, forced to move on but not at all culpable for doing so...it has been very draught-y here and the prairie does love to burn). The one thing I can't quite wrap my mind around is why exactly I think it will be this way. I narrowed down that I don't think I *deserve* it per se - except that, yeah, I kind of do think I deserve it. But deserving it doesn't make it so and that's a fact. I just expect it to work out. I'm relaxing my expectations, but I have faith that they will be met. It doesn't make sense, but it's what I think. Somehow, I think it's my own will that conspires to make things work out, and there is support for that idea in my past exploits. But there is also an element of chaos that can only do its work when I back off, and I guess that is what I'm trying to be mindful of here. It's a complicated little worldview I've constructed for myself, and I don't know where it came from, but I suppose it came from everything. What's interesting about this notion is that I re-discovered it in my own writing today as I was digging through my old files on my dissertation. In an old "Journaling" document, which was another instance of me talking to myself in writing, I found a message that I keep having to relearn but which is liberating each time I do: "Release the need to control. Let things be what they will. There is something here that has a life of its own, and I need to allow it to be expressed, rather than forcing it." I had written in this document how I'd seen this message in a book on research, and it had brought tears to my eyes, and it brought tears to my eyes again when I typed this up over two years ago. Today when I read it again, I full-on burst into tears. It's such a relief to let go of that need to be in control. I need to give myself that opportunity from time to time. 3:19 p.m. - 2013-02-24 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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