i have almost drowned four times. i can’t remember if i’ve wrote about this before here, but the feeling of sinking is my earliest memory. i am in a hazy blue pool, looking at my mothers legs blurred by the water. the second time i am 8, and looking toward the surface, but feeling so heavy i can’t rise up. then i am at my cousin’s pool, playing with a bat in the water, i fall in and begin thrashing, doing an unsophisticated doggy paddle. my feet hit the floor repeatedly, and each time i panic because the floor is farther than my body reaches. now i am at a beach in hawaii and the pacific is so much stronger than those quiet pools. the waves knock me over, i swallow water and my eyes are stinging. i try to tell myself that the waves will push me in while fumbling to gain ground–the thought of something under my feet is comforting, even though the ocean floor is slippery and misleading.
there’s a difference, between these stories. i have no emotional register for the first and second but lack–lack of my mother’s hands under my stomach, lack of my body’s buoyancy. but at some point between 8 and 10 i learned to fight back, to resist the will of water although it’s unclear if this reaction is about trying to survive, not wanting to die, or even having something to live for. i mean, it’s unclear if this is about fear or something else, some other kind of feeling because avoiding death isn’t really the same as seeking life, not at all.
lately i cannot breathe. i don’t mean this to say my asthma is particularly bad, but in the metaphorical sense (forgive me, reader, for i am a cliche) that i cannot think or focus or see. everything is blurry around me and eerily, terribly calm. i am 8 again and i can see the surface, but my body doesn’t understand how to reach it, or why one would even try. i am just suspended in time and space without any tether to the ground or contact with the surface.
“in sum, mood is neither anchor nor plot.” L. Berlant
there is a white page with a list of titles at the top. i have been looking at it for the past 72 hours. the number of characters has stayed exactly the same. i am just the same as i was when i entered this program three years ago. i am still cocky when i should be wary, and fleeing when i should fight, and fighting when it matters least. i am still scared of my own failure, and confident in my ability to fail better than anyone has ever failed before. i am still cruelest to myself, and crueler than i should be to others. graduate school has not made me better, or smarter just more of all the terrible things i was before.
“in sum, mood is neither anchor nor plot.” L. Berlant.
i gave up at teaching. i did. i didn’t trust my instincts, and i didn’t take enough time to make it right, to make it matter. these things show to students, and more rapidly than any other group of people, students know when you have failed them. it is not that today is everything, or that teaching is everything, but lately it is what i had, and it was humbling to realize i didn’t have it at all. that in this, too, i fell short of reasonable expectations. if i can’t think and i can’t teach, than i have nothing and i don’t belong here. i am just a body taking up space, suspended between the ground and the surface, with no will to reach up or root, just the acute awareness of lack and how quiet things are in this world.
Academia is a weird, weird universe. Included in that universe is the faulty assumption that smart people who want to learn and develop and research and discover cool things and create cooler things must ALSO want and love to stand at the head of the classroom. It is a weakness in the system, not you, that these very different areas of interest are conflated.