Backwards and Forwards

or
Your College Education Is a Flotation Device
or
Mi Ritrovai

Commencement. The ceremony that pulls you backwards (all those medieval robes, the old marches played as everyone processes and recesses, the story-telling in conversation and by speakers about life in the last four years) and the ceremony that launches you forwards (all the advice about how to handle what comes next, the questions about what comes next, the weird feeling that whatever comes next is like a suit that you haven't grown into yet).

Graduation is a great day, but it is a confusing day for many because it is a ceremony that pulls us in two directions. I think it's supposed to.

I remember my own graduation very clearly. Afterwards is a blur of goodbyes and packing and heading to the beach with friends, but I remember everything leading up to it with the clarity of a pirate captive walking the plank. Don't misunderstand, I was thrilled to be graduating, I just wasn't done being in college. I wasn't ready to leave.

That's me in the middle, happy... and terrified. 

My unreadiness for life after college was the direct cause of everything that came crashing down in the months after graduation. I went to my graduation elated to have accomplished a degree, but with the feeling that we were partying at the edge of a precipice and I was going to fall off any second. And fall off I did. I had a summer job but nothing after. My grad school plans fell through and jobs were nowhere to be found (1). I waited tables while I figured out what to do, in what would turn out to be a time in my life I remember with passionate gratitude for the space it gave me to learn how to grow up, to manage money, to try multiple paths until I found the right one for me. It was the early- to mid-90's. If I could distill those years into a single image it would be of me eating my shift meal and drinking a Red Stripe in the afternoon light coming through the bar windows, filling out my deposit slip for my tips, with Pearl Jam coming over the speakers. Here is another: in jeans, boots, and a flannel shirt over a v-neck undershirt, at the Caribbean Cafe working my way through an imported beer list (2), learning to play darts and listening to STP "Plush."(3) Not the typical image associated with completion of a college degree. I was most parents' nightmare: a college graduate waiting tables and living in a rat-hole apartment. I think I gave my parents several ulcers in those years. I nearly gave myself one. It wasn't stress-free. I developed TMJ. It is hard living close to the bone. It was the best life lesson I could have ever gotten. I often felt, in those years, that I had somehow wasted my college degree, or even that it was a waste. I was floating.

But I was floating deliberately, and I was using my education in ways that I couldn't perceive at the time because once you know things and develop skills they feel natural to you and you can forget that you had to learn them. There is a difference between just floating because you don't care about having an anchor, and giving yourself permission to float because it gives you a decent view and you're still choosing your horizon. A book by clinical psychologist Meg Jay, The Defining Decade, seeks to understand the function of the 20's in an era in which that decade is now held up to young people as years in which they are nearly expected to float around. I think everyone in the whole entire world should read this book, even if your defining decade was decades ago. Jay doesn't have a problem with people figuring out what to do with their lives in their early twenties; she's concerned when they're still in their late twenties and they haven't made any meaningful moves towards a life that can make sense in their late thirties. The floating is supposed to lead somewhere. And what you learned in college is helping you. I promise it is. When you're doing work you never thought you'd do, wandering in ways that seem to have nothing to do with your college degree, you will be very tempted to think that you could be floating in the same way without that degree. But what you learned in those years is with you, is in you, giving you the resources to float high enough to make good decisions about how to spend your life and whom to spend it with.

I didn't feel sure about my direction at age 21, so I gave myself time to figure it out. I went backwards, to Boone, the place where I had gotten that college degree that didn't seem to be getting me anywhere. The place where I last remembered being happy. While I waited tables there, I tried other side jobs, I even took a real estate class, I studied graduate school options, and I took a good, hard look around to see what I wanted. It wasn't until I was talking with a coworker about a poem he was reading for his English class that I realized what I wanted to do. I realized that I could make a living explaining poetry to people (4). So I started making moves towards being an English professor and a few months later I was sitting in Literary Criticism and Bibliography and wondering what I'd write my master's thesis on. I was back in school, going forwards. If I hadn't given myself permission to wander, I couldn't have wandered into this profession that I love so much.

To go through life from moment to moment with  perfect direction and planning is probably the tidiest, most efficient way. Those who do will not waste anything or get lost, ever. And that is fine for them. It probably doesn't have any fear in it, or messiness. But it is not for me, in the same way that a tour in which a guide carefully shepherds the tourists from site to site is not for me. I couldn't do it if I tried. I'd see some interesting view I wanted to get closer to and I'd wander off and get lost and miss the bus and have to find my way back to the hotel by myself.  Sometimes we have to backtrack to understand where we are. Sometimes we have to launch forward into things we don't understand yet with the faith that we can handle them. Sometimes we have to get lost to find our path.

A college degree, even one that isn't in the field you end up in (5), prepares you for a life of uncertainty. And life is uncertain. Tour buses break down, and you may find yourself walking back to your hotel anyway. You might find yourself floating at any time, suddenly and even horrifically detached from the tethers that you thought you could count on like you count on the sun coming up in the morning. You can deal with it, because you have resources. Dante opens The Divine Comedy with a stanza that translates to:  "In the middle of the journey of my life, I found myself to be in a dark wood, for the straight path was lost." The original Italian, mi ritrovai, is an interesting choice because Dante deliberately uses words that mean to discover oneself and also find oneself at the opening of a long story about having to go literally through hell before being able to find one's way back home.

Dante is lost and scared, but it's going to be okay because Virgil is going to show up in a minute to help guide him.
(Symbolic??? I think so. Your education will show up to guide you, too).
image by Gustav Dore, nicked from nybooks.com

I could make sense of the backwardness and forwardness in my own life because I had Dante in my heart, because my college education put it there. I also had Shakespeare and Tennyson and history and philosophy and, yes, some math, and biology and lots and lots of theatre (6). I even had some recreational dance, a class that took care of a phys ed requirement, and it's a good thing, too, because it turns out you never know when you may need to foxtrot.

I had the tools to make floating meaningful and useful. I could rise up and see the many paths, the opportunities, the horizons available to me, and  make sense of them for myself. I had the ability to grab the thing I wanted and make a life of it.

So don't be afraid of going backwards, because it might be your way home. Don't be afraid to float, because you can float meaningfully and come down when you're ready.






(1) It was 1993. My coworkers at the first restaurant where I worked included people with graduate degrees from Ivy League schools. It was a brutal time.
(2) That imported beer list took me two years, and in the process I learned to be a beer snob. See? Everything in life teaches you something. I also still have the mug I earned.
(3) "Plush" still puts me immediately into a zen mode.
(4) The poem was Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" and that moment was so earth-shaking for me that I could still, 18 years later, reconstruct it in its entirety in perfect detail, down to what time of day it was and where we were standing and what we were wearing.
(5) i.e. Theatre, in my case.
(6) Forthcoming, on this blog, a study of how my theatre training made me a stronger and better person.

The Not-Lost-After-All Art of Gratitude

subtitle: Cultural Materialism/Actor-Network Theory for Real Life


Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Words said so often they might seem to be rendered meaningless. Words often left unsaid. Who among us hasn't brushed over these words without thinking about what it takes to stop for a moment and express gratitude? "Oh, you're welcome." "It was nothing." "Don't mention it."  Who among us has not wished for an expression of gratitude that never arrived? "All that work and I all wanted was a little recognition."

I am fortunate to work in an industry I adore. I do adore academia. I love that there are places where people can gather to think and talk and figure out problems the rest of the world doesn't have time to stop and consider but which inform our very existence as human beings. I loved being in college, and I love being around people who are in college. I love being on a college campus for my day-to-day work. It is a place of a lot of stresses, but also a great deal of joy. A few years ago, I was walking by a spot in our lovely Dell that dips significantly, a spot which was filled nearly level with the rest of the Dell with leaves piled high by the grounds crew, when a student took a running leap (backpack and all, arms spread wide) into the pile of leaves with a wild, wonderful cry. I laughed and thought "I can't believe I get to do what I do for a living." I am grateful, every day, for the place I work and the people I work with.

A small note makes a big difference.

But some days I am just worn out with it. I have been feeling worn thin lately. Tired, yes. But not the kind of tired I've been at the end of a semester before. More like fabric where the fibers are thin and stretched, like jeans where they're worn out on the knees or the butt. I think if you held a scholarly article up behind me you could read through me. Some days my skin feels less substantial. I am tired.* Some days I wonder if anyone notices that I'm knocking myself out. Yesterday, on her way out the door, a student left me a handmade thank you note telling me how much my class meant to her and how much she appreciates all my work for my students. I didn't know how much I needed it until I got it. It changed my whole perspective. You're welcome, you absolute darling. My pleasure. Seriously. You are why I do this work. I am reminded how much the words mean. Thank you. If you tried to read that article through me today it would be a little harder to make out the words.

The best stuff in the world has to be gratitude for helping someone who got the thing. Sometimes these have gifts attached! I've gotten food and even gift cards for Starbucks or other restaurants, for writing recommendation letters or for helping with a tenure portfolio. I like the gifts, don't get me wrong. The biscotti is great and the gift card is greatly appreciated, but the greatest thing of all is the note. It takes time to write a note. It takes thought. I keep the notes forever. It's so easy to forget to be grateful when exciting things are happening. It's easy to forget that we didn't do it all by ourselves.

Months later, I still have one of these things. 

But I am wrong. The best stuff in the world has to be gratitude for helping someone who DIDN'T get the thing, because we all know it takes a little more character to feel grateful when we're disappointed. It frustrates me when students ask for reference letters but then don't tell me how it turned out. Did you get in? What are your plans now? Can I help in any way? I didn't get some fellowships I applied for this year. (Damnit, damnit, damnit - I tried so hard for them!) I wanted to just shrink into a little hole and not talk about my disappointment to anyone. But remembering how it feels when I'm the one who helped, I sent thank you emails to those lovely souls who wrote recommendations for me, because writing a recommendation letter might seem small until you have to write lots of them, and these people took time and effort to read my application materials and craft the best letter they could. They deserved to know that I am grateful, even if it was hard for me to tell them that I'd failed.

Gratitude matters. Experiencing gratitude makes us better people. Read Paradise Lost and tell me that humility isn't the difference between good and evil. Expressing gratitude makes other people feel better. Years ago, not long after my book had come out, I was chatting with a writer-in-residence who mocked me for having an acknowledgements page. He said "You're the one who wrote it, why would you thank anyone? I never thank anyone." This guy was one huge jackass, too. He allowed himself to be unaware of the forces in his life that made his life possible.** None of us acts alone, really. Proponents of something called Actor-Network Theory argue that nothing in nature, including humans in our own works of innovation, ever acts alone - that all things are contingent on the forces around them to make what they are doing possible. The actor is dependent upon the network in order to act. In other words, Copernicus didn't discover the truth of the Ptolemaic, heliocentric cosmos all on his very own; because we're all influenced by the lives we lead and all that is around us, there were forces at work on his consciousness that even he himself could not, perhaps, have recognized. It's at work at every level. Those butternut squash seeds that sprouted today in my little egg carton planters? Not all by themselves. Indescribable forces were at work to make that happen, networks of soil and nutrients and moisture, including me sticking the seeds in the dirt. You're welcome, butternut squash sprouts.

Shakespeare in Love - an entire movie plot based on cultural materialism. 

In the study of cultural products like literature and art, this is called Cultural Materialism, or just Materialism now. It's the understanding that Shakespeare didn't just up and write Hamlet one day, his imagination was impacted by forces all around him including cultural tensions and drama among people in his community and the sights and smells and sounds of life around him.

I am a Cultural Materialist in my own literary research because I truly believe that what we do comes from what is around us. I am myself, and I have my own personality traits and gifts and talents that I was no doubt born with. But my gifts were nurtured by people around me. My interests were mocked by some, and so I have some issues of self-consciousness that I wish I could shed more successfully. I am me, but the me that I am is inflected by the people and the events and the forces in the life I am fortunate to lead.

A little note from a stranger can make that check seem worth it.

It doesn't take much to show appreciation for that. What people really want is words. Recognition. Acknowledgement. Yesterday, the Annual Fund at LC set up a table for students and faculty to write thank you notes to donors to the college. Because when people write a check, however large or small, they are happy to do it as long as they feel that it is appreciated. I was pleased to see how many notes were in the collection basket.

And today is Teacher Appreciation Day. So, in honor of that, I post this blog entry. And in it, I want to say thank you to the phenomenal teachers in my own life. Carol Moore, the first teacher to tell me I was good at something (7th grade, and it was English). That is one of the moments on which my life pivoted. All my theatre professors at Appalachian State, you amazing crew of Sages. I am who I am because of you. Constance Relihan, my mentor at Auburn and my friend today, whose "And then what?" questions drove me into territory I hadn't known I was capable of reaching. The teachers I work with every day at LC, who work themselves to pieces for students they love.

Also, thank you to LC for working to help me be the teacher and scholar I want to be. It's not very trendy right now to be grateful to one's institution. We're supposed to be cynical and snide about how unappreciated we are and to cite statistics about pay differentials and point out that life for academics used to be so much better. And I'm working on an entry about pay differentials, for another time. Today I want to say thank you for professional development money that will help me with my research travel when I didn't get those fellowships. I want to say thank you for investing in your faculty when other schools are cutting entire departments and dropping contributions to retirement accounts. I'll come back from my fall sabbatical with a book draft and with skin so substantial that you won't be able to read a damn thing through me.








*  Since I arrived at LC six years ago, I have taught over 15 new preps (most in the first few years). I have done all the research I can, work I love but seldom have time for. A conference paper is a monumental effort on my teaching load, with advising and other service added in. I love the teaching, but it's hard to not resent how it can eat away at everything else that I am supposed to be doing (and yes, I am supposed to be doing these other things, too - I was not hired to be a teaching martyr, I was hired to be an academic, which means contributing to my scholarly field).


** For example, he had no idea that he should be grateful that I didn't throw my drink in his face when he complimented me on my ass. I do not expect to appear in an acknowledgements page for that, but it would be nice: "My grateful thanks to that Shakespeare prof I was a jerk to for not throwing her drink in my face."