Between the Devil and the Deep Sea

One of my classes this semester has been on the Bloomsbury Group -- complete, as you might imagine, with a healthy dose of Virginia Woolf. As I perused the last of her major works on our syllabus, her 1939 essay Three Guineas, I ran across the title of this post, which Woolf used to describe the state of educated women circa 1938. And while I am neither woman nor living in 1938, I couldn't help but relate to that quandary.

I've always been a proponent of education and a fan (albeit sometimes begrudgingly) of school, particularly literature. Books spoke to me from an early age much more so than math, science, and history ever did, and I've been rewarded at several points in my life with continuing affirmation of their power and influence. I can recall entering Princeton as a frightened, painfully shy, doubt-swathed young freshman and thinking that my plan of majoring in English should, at the very least, be up for discussion in such a prestigious and enlightening environment. But after a year's worth of immersion in most every subject that remotely interested me (including one foray into sociology that was amazingly close to convincing) I found myself in an 8:30am comparative literature class -- the only 8:00am class I ever took -- on short fiction. And for reasons I've never been able to nail down, that class sold me that I'd had the right idea all along.

Now, almost five years removed from that moment, I find myself in a very different set of environs: the basement of a local coffee shop in State College, Pennsylvania, sitting behind a computer and blogging because, despite having woken up early solely for this purpose, I just can't seem to bring myself to get any work done.

I'd be jumping the gun if I confessed to being worried yet. Sure, I'm sleep-deprived (although I've got a couple of theories on that one that I'm pretty sure can be easily substantiated), and sure, I need to finish grading my students' papers so that I can either a) go on to the next batch or b) continue working on drafts of my final papers, but I still feel as if I'm in a slightly better place at this point in the semester than I have been in recent semesters.

So what the fuck's the problem?

I feel that much of this blog's history has been a series of iterations on my lack of motivation where once I'd been of the headstrong, go-getter, overachieving type. It's a topic I've rehashed ad nauseam, in posts in which I've sworn to solve my issues and pull my head out of my ass and get into gear. Nonetheless, that really hasn't transpired.

And I'm in an even more awkward situation at this very moment, despite approaching a crossroads that is littered with equal parts clarity and uncertainty, the likes of which I've never known before. After much soul-searching, I've come to the realization that the academy, to which I'd been so confidently attached for the better part of my life, is not to be my ultimate destination. And while the vast majority of students make that (and I hesitate to use this phrase) real-world transition at some point in their lives, often right around my current age, I'm afraid that perhaps my transition is arriving prematurely.

I suspect that -- you knew the point of this post had to come eventually -- my increasingly intense disaffection for the academic world is what's stifling the larger part of my inspiration.

I'm not about to proffer this explanation as the sole and single solution to that which ails me, but it sure seems like a substantial part of the problem, for one especially convincing reason. For all my student life, I've had certain qualities that defined who I was, and though it took quite a bit of time, I eventually became very comfortable with the identity I'd carved out for myself. But as the stakes grew higher and I found myself learning more and more strongly towards complete immersion in academia as a career move, I've slowly and perhaps inadvertently started jettisoning components of my personality that I suppose I felt, at the time, were incompatible with my professional maturity.

Take, for instance, my writing. I lamented to my friend Emily a few weeks ago that I felt as if I've lost touch with my once fruitful creative side -- my neglect of my blogs is an obvious, palatable symptom of that disease. I recall being a voracious guitarist in high school, joining up with a few friends in a band that had no serious aspirations, but gave me an outlet to unleash my composition skills. In middle school and high school, I joined clubs and took classes that allowed me to write creative fiction in addition to my otherwise staid academic work, the realization of a talent I unveiled at the tender age of four on a notepad.

I was especially proud of my fiction, not because I was an especially good writer, but because I could see in my work potential. And to be fair to myself, I still see that potential occasionally when I wander off into my nebula on either of my blogs. Though I don't write here nearly as often as I'd like to, I enjoy it madly and adore it when people read and comment, because I know I'm reaching them and engaging in an interaction that is meaningful and satisfying.

But by the same token, I'm frequently overcome with the idea that if I'm going to be immersing myself in any project, it should be an academic one. Perhaps that's the right idea. Yet it is this project, the project of working towards a more personal, more self-satisfying goal, that I find myself drawn to.

Like Virginia Woolf and the daughters of educated men, however, I find myself caught between the devil and the deep sea: I know that once I finish my Masters in a few short months, I will be substantially more free to re-explore those parts of my identity that I've let fall by the wayside during my academic endeavors; but at the same time, I need to get those things done to reach that point, even though the passion for those projects has been long since smoldering to a cool ash.

I've diagnosed the problem, I'm fairly confident in the solution, but the cure is still six months coming. I don't know how to respond or react to that -- and, as this post has proven, it's safe to say my mind has already decided for me where it wants to focus its attention. The malaise, while far less apocalyptic than it's been in my admittedly-hyperdramatic past, is still there, staring me in the face. And the only way out is to keep tricking myself and reminding myself that the fruition of my hopes is coming.

Until then, it's time to see what kind of magic is left up these sleeves.