I think I need to start free-writing again. I obsess so much over improving my writing for my graduate work and I hadn’t considered the fact that free-writing might be a less strenuous help. I don’t imagine that I’ll have too much time for it, but I figure that even five minutes a day might help.
Today is easter and I’ve spent the whole day alone - mostly feeling sorry for myself. It’s not that I mind being alone, it’s just that I was meant to be in Denver with my family this week but my flight got cancelled. I stayed in LA to work and get ahead on some reading thinking this would alleviate some of my stress over school. Unfortunately, I feel almost more lost, more drained and like I haven’t had a “break” at all. Most of my stress over school has to do with the future - my future - in academia. I feel like the work I put out now will determine the field of study I commit myself to forever. I genuinely believe that I will be happy studying anything in English Literature for the rest of my life. All I want is to be in academia forever, constantly learning, working for something that will inspire me every day. What a privilege right? Not many people can call work a privilege. But what’s standing in my way is this immense sense of incompetence, and the feeling that I have to prove myself. I’m constantly battling the decisions between choosing a specific field that I’m good at - post-colonial studies, and choosing one I’m passionate about - the study of time in literature. The issues are these: On the one hand I feel like studying time in literature is for prissy pretentious white men who think they are God’s grace to literary intelligence and not only do I not fit in, but I don’t want to be a part of that community, on the other, I don’t feel like a privileged white person raising my fists for third-culture literature is any better, or any more respectable for that matter.
I am ALSO trying to reconcile the work I’ve been doing at LMU with what work I want to be doing in a doctoral program (God willing). I have to come up with something to submit on phd apps next year and it’s looking like the class that submission is going to come from is Melville. But how does that look? Another paper on another white male writer in the 19th Century. Another paper on
Moby-Dick. That’s not going to impress anyone. But the only other classes being offered next year are Shakespeare, Chaucer and some contemporary author from LA.
I’m incredibly frustrated that I’ve somehow managed to land myself in a program that is still stuck on the Canon. None of this is going to get me anywhere. Not to mention the white-male faculty that is full to the brim with the aforementioned pretentious assholes.
I just.. feel so much pressure to come up with something intellectually innovative, and to publish (publish or perish is very real, and very scary), but it’s hard when I’m working with professors who don’t have time for me, or think I’m worthless, and texts that have been analyzed inside and out, this way and that, for the last century. I want to write about something that I’m passionate about, and something that matters, something that will get me the respect I know I deserve.
One of my undergraduate professors warned me about academics like these, and thinking about how she treated me, with such genuine respect, and interest in my ideas, and with such support, makes me want to turn right back around and devote my life to the valorization of Native American literature in all it’s critical complexities. Just to thank her, just to be around more people like her.
Up until this point I hadn’t really ever felt lost, or defeated. I know this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life, I just need to get myself there.
Loading comments...