Fear and Self-Loathing in New Jersey
I've never understood the aphorism, "When it rains, it pours." It's not that I don't get what the phrase actually means -- that's obvious enough -- but rather that I never figured out how it manages, without fail, to manifest itself as truth all the time. Isn't there any sense of balance, some distributive force, going on in the world? I suppose it's not that simple, but then, I've been learning that there are far greater things, in far greater number, that are far from simple.
This week has been a week of hard lessons, and while I'm not typically the one to delve too deeply into the more private forays of my life in a public setting, I need to get these thoughts out there because I cannot believe for one moment that I'm the only one experiencing them. The experiences I've been having -- the anger, the frustration, the disappointment -- has manifested itself in an growing wave of melancholy. When I bitched far too abstractly about a specific situation in my last post, I presumed at the time that my bad humor stemmed from a particular incident and that, consequently, once I moved past that incident, it would be over and I would start feeling better. But I haven't; far from it, in fact. Tonight, with a midterm breathing down my neck tomorrow, I haven't been able to summon up the motivation to study. I have a paper due Thursday on a topic of which I am really not certain. My thesis is due in approximately seven weeks and I haven't gained that sense of cohesion that I'm looking for. Things, generally, are not going my way.
Granted, the thesis thing is something that will require time, and the work will get done. Just like the paper and the midterm will get done, and most likely in a satisfactory (grade-wise) manner. But those are only temporary concerns, issues that will go away in three months time when I slip the bonds of Old Nassau and escape the orange bubble. They will be non-issues, I will have conquered them, and they will be over. It's the other things, the things that don't end when my Princeton career ends, that are bothering me now.
For one thing, I have to consider the fact that, almost two months after its submission, my portfolio still has not been approved by the powers that be at Teacher Prep. And quite frankly, that's really fucking irritating. I understand that there have been issues over there with regards to my case, and like a fool I've nodded and taken all their assurances and apologies up the ass all while forcing a smile on my grossly contorted face. But at this point, I don't feel like I really owe them the same kind of commitment I gave them in the fall, the same kind of commitment that wreaked immeasurable havoc on my emotional state and almost threw me headlong and unapologetically into an emotional breakdown. No one in that office was there for me when I went through that, and when I came out the other end and jumped through what I presumed was my last hoop, there was no sense that anyone really cared.
In fact, that's the single most troubling part of my experience: I've never once felt like a priority to them in that tiny little department. In my experience dealing with the rather larger English department, I've never once had a problem with either classes or bureaucracy, and my advisors and professors have been wonderful, patient, and genuinely concerned with my success. I don't get that vibe from the folks on William Street, and at this point, it's way too late for them to provide that feeling enough for me to really believe it to be true. And I see remnants of it now, with the fiasco that has been scheduling my portfolio defense -- where has the communication been? If it's so important, why has it been consistently put off for so long? Hell, even my English professor got frustrated with them, and she only communicated with my advisor for one weekend. I've reached the point of saturation with feeling unimportant, and I'm not about to start sticking my neck out for people that won't return the favor for me.
This is all notwithstanding the fact that the ultimate goal of my certification is to teach high school, a career path that has -- surely, to the great relief and happiness of Leslie Leogrande, if no one else -- fallen off the radar. I'm sure it would break lots of hearts to hear me say this, but I just don't want to do it. It doesn't feel right to me: I cannot believe that the bureaucratic bullshit alone and the struggle of dealing with the conflicting emotions of the August break-up could have really thrown me that far over the edge. I have to believe the stress of the job, the incessant pressure to keep focusing, and the subpar performance reviews -- all of which flew in the face of my own beliefs that I was focused and was working as hard as I could -- were a strongly mitigating factor.
I was not surprised today when my professor haphazardly offered a commentary on how quickly teachers burn out, and was even less surprised at her immediate attribution of the bureaucracy of preparation programs as a contributing factor to that burnout. I've done that once already, and I'm not ready to go down that path again. It scared the fuck out of me. It caused me to almost completely forget who I was and what I stood for. It cost me a lot more than I'd like to admit, and while I'm a better person now for surviving it, I also know I don't want to have to end up there again. And I'm really confident that being a teacher will send me down that path. I don't have the composition to do that, and it will make me horribly unhappy, but at this point I've earned the certification and I damn well deserve to have it. But for right now it's only adding to the frustration.
Yet the career thing is precisely the problem on the table right now, since it's all but secure that the next five years of my life, which had been so meticulously planned out, will not go at all as I had hoped. I've officially heard back from 5 of my 7 graduate schools, and received word that of the two remaining, I have but a tenuous hope remaining of getting into one of them, and nothing more. While there are those who would believe that I should take the high, optimistic road and hold out hope for the next few weeks, today I was forced to resign myself to the fact that I am most likely not going to grad school next year.
Even as I type those words, it breaks my goddamn heart and stirs up the fucking bile in my soul. Part of me understands the rational aspect of the whole thing: the gigantic applicant pools, the small numbers of spaces, the limited availabilities, the popularity and prestige of the programs to which I applied. I get it. It all makes complete sense. What doesn't make sense to me is why, of all the people I know and have talked to, I am the only person around here who isn't getting what they want next year.
Yes, I'm aware of how snobby and self-centered and childish that is, but I'm throwing it out there, like it or not, completely unapologetically. It boggles my mind. I'm not the greatest student here, I know, and I'm more than comfortable with the rung upon which I sit on the academic ladder. I am friends with a great many people on campus in the first quintile of GPA, who have oodles of grad school choices or offers for lucrative jobs of which they are very highly qualified, and I begrudge them nothing. They worked their asses off and earned these things, and they deserve them without question. But I also know people at the opposite end of the spectrum, who may not exactly be getting the slots in graduate courses, but are at the very least entertaining offers and seeing their plans for the next few years coming into very clear focus. What do they have to offer the world that I don't?
What exactly have I not done to be able to deserve to keep busting my ass and getting to where I want to be? Maybe the problem is that I'm too naïve or stupid to know the ins and outs of getting what I want, that I never learned the ropes while everyone else did. But I guess I wonder how the fuck I could have fallen so far behind in four years. Everyone around me seems to have that clarity and focus and understanding, and they're seeing their dreams being fulfilled. I, meanwhile, am sitting at a computer, bitching to God knows who (read: no one), and with my plans sitting in a ruined mess at my feet.
I'm horrified at where this leaves me and my immediate future. I know already that I don't want to teach, but what else exactly am I qualified for? Danielle suggested that there are a number of freelance writing opportunities available, and I could surely take some of them during my off time, but my passion is academia, and I truly want to be there. I'm horrified that I'll fall into some job for the sake of making money and then will never be able to escape and rejoin the career path I'm hoping for. I'm sure there are ways to stay in touch with the environment in which I ultimately hope to be, but I don't want to lose sight of it because of the logistics of independent living.
I never thought of school as an escape from independence but as a gateway thereto, and with the serious prospect of that being cut off far sooner than I was prepared for, I feel like I'm floundering. How will I afford to buy a car? Or car insurance? Health insurance? Gas money? Credit card bills? And what about all the other shit that's part and parcel of living on my own? If I need the money to do that, how can I remain focused on reaching the goal of a Ph.D and a professorship?
Then, of course, there's the issue that none of this affects only me. The recent string of engagements amongst my friends and family have served to remind me that I'm essentially biding my time until I can join those esteemed ranks. But how will I know when I'm actually ready to take that step? I need to evaluate many more things than just how much I love her (that much I'm certain of), and while I don't want to put that off any longer than I have to, I also don't want to end up not being able to support our life together because I'm trapped in some financial rut.
I guess the take-home of these meandering paragraphs is that my life and my happiness is very strongly based on stability. I don't mind the ups and downs, the twists and turns of life, but my vision of success and my emotional condition are inextricably linked with a sense of certainty, direction, and unequivocal purpose. Up until now, those things have never been an issue for me, and I've gotten from life everything I've hoped to. But now, the very foundation on which I was hoping to build the rest of my life feels like it's being swept out from under me and I don't know what to do or how to replace it.
All I know for sure is that each day is starting to feel like a ticking clock, a countdown towards some unknown inevitability, and it's not bad enough that I don't know how much time I have left -- I don't have a clue what happens when that time runs out.
This week has been a week of hard lessons, and while I'm not typically the one to delve too deeply into the more private forays of my life in a public setting, I need to get these thoughts out there because I cannot believe for one moment that I'm the only one experiencing them. The experiences I've been having -- the anger, the frustration, the disappointment -- has manifested itself in an growing wave of melancholy. When I bitched far too abstractly about a specific situation in my last post, I presumed at the time that my bad humor stemmed from a particular incident and that, consequently, once I moved past that incident, it would be over and I would start feeling better. But I haven't; far from it, in fact. Tonight, with a midterm breathing down my neck tomorrow, I haven't been able to summon up the motivation to study. I have a paper due Thursday on a topic of which I am really not certain. My thesis is due in approximately seven weeks and I haven't gained that sense of cohesion that I'm looking for. Things, generally, are not going my way.
Granted, the thesis thing is something that will require time, and the work will get done. Just like the paper and the midterm will get done, and most likely in a satisfactory (grade-wise) manner. But those are only temporary concerns, issues that will go away in three months time when I slip the bonds of Old Nassau and escape the orange bubble. They will be non-issues, I will have conquered them, and they will be over. It's the other things, the things that don't end when my Princeton career ends, that are bothering me now.
For one thing, I have to consider the fact that, almost two months after its submission, my portfolio still has not been approved by the powers that be at Teacher Prep. And quite frankly, that's really fucking irritating. I understand that there have been issues over there with regards to my case, and like a fool I've nodded and taken all their assurances and apologies up the ass all while forcing a smile on my grossly contorted face. But at this point, I don't feel like I really owe them the same kind of commitment I gave them in the fall, the same kind of commitment that wreaked immeasurable havoc on my emotional state and almost threw me headlong and unapologetically into an emotional breakdown. No one in that office was there for me when I went through that, and when I came out the other end and jumped through what I presumed was my last hoop, there was no sense that anyone really cared.
In fact, that's the single most troubling part of my experience: I've never once felt like a priority to them in that tiny little department. In my experience dealing with the rather larger English department, I've never once had a problem with either classes or bureaucracy, and my advisors and professors have been wonderful, patient, and genuinely concerned with my success. I don't get that vibe from the folks on William Street, and at this point, it's way too late for them to provide that feeling enough for me to really believe it to be true. And I see remnants of it now, with the fiasco that has been scheduling my portfolio defense -- where has the communication been? If it's so important, why has it been consistently put off for so long? Hell, even my English professor got frustrated with them, and she only communicated with my advisor for one weekend. I've reached the point of saturation with feeling unimportant, and I'm not about to start sticking my neck out for people that won't return the favor for me.
This is all notwithstanding the fact that the ultimate goal of my certification is to teach high school, a career path that has -- surely, to the great relief and happiness of Leslie Leogrande, if no one else -- fallen off the radar. I'm sure it would break lots of hearts to hear me say this, but I just don't want to do it. It doesn't feel right to me: I cannot believe that the bureaucratic bullshit alone and the struggle of dealing with the conflicting emotions of the August break-up could have really thrown me that far over the edge. I have to believe the stress of the job, the incessant pressure to keep focusing, and the subpar performance reviews -- all of which flew in the face of my own beliefs that I was focused and was working as hard as I could -- were a strongly mitigating factor.
I was not surprised today when my professor haphazardly offered a commentary on how quickly teachers burn out, and was even less surprised at her immediate attribution of the bureaucracy of preparation programs as a contributing factor to that burnout. I've done that once already, and I'm not ready to go down that path again. It scared the fuck out of me. It caused me to almost completely forget who I was and what I stood for. It cost me a lot more than I'd like to admit, and while I'm a better person now for surviving it, I also know I don't want to have to end up there again. And I'm really confident that being a teacher will send me down that path. I don't have the composition to do that, and it will make me horribly unhappy, but at this point I've earned the certification and I damn well deserve to have it. But for right now it's only adding to the frustration.
Yet the career thing is precisely the problem on the table right now, since it's all but secure that the next five years of my life, which had been so meticulously planned out, will not go at all as I had hoped. I've officially heard back from 5 of my 7 graduate schools, and received word that of the two remaining, I have but a tenuous hope remaining of getting into one of them, and nothing more. While there are those who would believe that I should take the high, optimistic road and hold out hope for the next few weeks, today I was forced to resign myself to the fact that I am most likely not going to grad school next year.
Even as I type those words, it breaks my goddamn heart and stirs up the fucking bile in my soul. Part of me understands the rational aspect of the whole thing: the gigantic applicant pools, the small numbers of spaces, the limited availabilities, the popularity and prestige of the programs to which I applied. I get it. It all makes complete sense. What doesn't make sense to me is why, of all the people I know and have talked to, I am the only person around here who isn't getting what they want next year.
Yes, I'm aware of how snobby and self-centered and childish that is, but I'm throwing it out there, like it or not, completely unapologetically. It boggles my mind. I'm not the greatest student here, I know, and I'm more than comfortable with the rung upon which I sit on the academic ladder. I am friends with a great many people on campus in the first quintile of GPA, who have oodles of grad school choices or offers for lucrative jobs of which they are very highly qualified, and I begrudge them nothing. They worked their asses off and earned these things, and they deserve them without question. But I also know people at the opposite end of the spectrum, who may not exactly be getting the slots in graduate courses, but are at the very least entertaining offers and seeing their plans for the next few years coming into very clear focus. What do they have to offer the world that I don't?
What exactly have I not done to be able to deserve to keep busting my ass and getting to where I want to be? Maybe the problem is that I'm too naïve or stupid to know the ins and outs of getting what I want, that I never learned the ropes while everyone else did. But I guess I wonder how the fuck I could have fallen so far behind in four years. Everyone around me seems to have that clarity and focus and understanding, and they're seeing their dreams being fulfilled. I, meanwhile, am sitting at a computer, bitching to God knows who (read: no one), and with my plans sitting in a ruined mess at my feet.
I'm horrified at where this leaves me and my immediate future. I know already that I don't want to teach, but what else exactly am I qualified for? Danielle suggested that there are a number of freelance writing opportunities available, and I could surely take some of them during my off time, but my passion is academia, and I truly want to be there. I'm horrified that I'll fall into some job for the sake of making money and then will never be able to escape and rejoin the career path I'm hoping for. I'm sure there are ways to stay in touch with the environment in which I ultimately hope to be, but I don't want to lose sight of it because of the logistics of independent living.
I never thought of school as an escape from independence but as a gateway thereto, and with the serious prospect of that being cut off far sooner than I was prepared for, I feel like I'm floundering. How will I afford to buy a car? Or car insurance? Health insurance? Gas money? Credit card bills? And what about all the other shit that's part and parcel of living on my own? If I need the money to do that, how can I remain focused on reaching the goal of a Ph.D and a professorship?
Then, of course, there's the issue that none of this affects only me. The recent string of engagements amongst my friends and family have served to remind me that I'm essentially biding my time until I can join those esteemed ranks. But how will I know when I'm actually ready to take that step? I need to evaluate many more things than just how much I love her (that much I'm certain of), and while I don't want to put that off any longer than I have to, I also don't want to end up not being able to support our life together because I'm trapped in some financial rut.
I guess the take-home of these meandering paragraphs is that my life and my happiness is very strongly based on stability. I don't mind the ups and downs, the twists and turns of life, but my vision of success and my emotional condition are inextricably linked with a sense of certainty, direction, and unequivocal purpose. Up until now, those things have never been an issue for me, and I've gotten from life everything I've hoped to. But now, the very foundation on which I was hoping to build the rest of my life feels like it's being swept out from under me and I don't know what to do or how to replace it.
All I know for sure is that each day is starting to feel like a ticking clock, a countdown towards some unknown inevitability, and it's not bad enough that I don't know how much time I have left -- I don't have a clue what happens when that time runs out.
posted by Dave at 3/12/2007 11:17:00 PM
2 Comments:
Wish I had advice or help or constructive comments, but for now all I can offer is:
*hugs*
~Elissa
I don't have any job offers or anything yet either...and I've even had family try to help me out. It just happens sometimes that it takes some people longer than others, and it's not that we're not qualified. It's just that it hasn't worked out yet. I know that's no consolation at all, but it just is what it is.
If I have to get by teaching skating or working at a greenhouse again for $10/hr or so, I'll do it, and maybe teach SAT courses at night (those pay really well). It's not ideal, but it's a start, and at least some income is there while I'm still working on starting a career. You'd be surprised what specialized skills and knowledge you have when you actually think about it, like giving music/guitar lessons. Things just happen and life takes you weird places...I mean, I sew custom stuff and get paid pretty well for it (although orders are few and far between). Who ever thought I would end up being a part-time seamstress? It's not a career, but it's a start to having the funds for independence.
I don't think the issue is lack of qualifications...it sounds more like lack of enthusiasm. I know it's hard to muster up sometimes, but people recognize enthusiasm, and even if it's something you don't like, try to find some aspect of whatever your doing (applications, job, or otherwise) that gets you excited. And there is a slight difference between enthusiasm and passion.
Sorry, not sure if there was really any utility to my ramblings.
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