This is the timeline of the next 11 years of my life, in three possible realities, from my final portfolio for Introduction to Doctoral Studies. I pretty much manage to crack myself up on an hourly basis, which, that’s good, right? Because the cat’s just not very funny sometimes.
I am trying hard, I am trying harder not to, this is what trying looks like on a Tuesday, I am practicing distress tolerance, I am improving the moment!
Tonight, for lack of any brighter idea, I ran up and down the length of the English department building, during our fifteen-minute break from Introduction to Doctoral Studies, desperately cheerful, skipping and windmilling my arms just to effect some kind of dramatic change of mind-ground/mood-state. On one of these circuits I flailed past an open classroom door and saw my workshop leader, sitting in her own class and either politely ignoring me or just not noticing (my long knitted Doctor Who scarf dragging the floor, my wrinkled skirt flapping zanily). I am accepting reality, I am turning the mind! I am doing all the behaviorally helpful things and still by Tuesday night I have been fighting my feelings for hours and sitting still and being effective and wearing my persona stapled to my face so tightly that now my entire body hurts and I can no longer pass for neurotypical, I find myself rocking back and forth in my hard plastic little-kid desk and squinting against the fluorescence and twitching and exhaling and alternately tensing and releasing different muscle groups and wrapping my arms around myself tightly and grimacing and grinding my neck to loosen it. For the second half of class tonight my sweet and very observant Intro to Doctoral Studies instructor was sitting behind me and I realized I was acting like a coke addict and what must she think. What do they think.
yes it's reached that point in the semester
What do I think. I am beating myself up pretty bad about it, about why am I so negative, why everything here is lately so negative, I don’t want to be a nattering nabob, my friends are posting funny exciting art on Facebook and cool videos and awesome articles about beautiful ideas, everyone is like the poster says, getting excited and making things, millennials and Gen Xers alike enthused about the world, and here I am in some kind of state where all I think about are dead acquaintances and Rick Perry and Herman Cain, and maybe I’m always in that state and am just now noticing it and finally being appropriately appalled and chagrined, maybe she’s right, maybe they’re right, what if they’re right. I think about whether they’re right all the time. Then they would say, so just be different! Just admit we’re right and fix the poems and make them better like we say! And that does not seem to be so simple to me. Or even, if I am being honest, possible.
Probably just going back to school as a grown-ass person looks like this.
So I’m trying not to beat myself up about being who I am right now and about my poems being what they are right now. I am anyway, beating myself up because I am lonely and don’t think I should be. I am beating myself up because I can’t think where else to put these words and but now this place is complicated and compromised and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. The phrase “beating myself up” is starting to lose meaning and seem funny, which is a relief.
I am beating, beating myself, beating myself up because I am too upset about the banana trees, no one should be so upset about the damn banana trees; but I came home from school around 9 pm (half-crying with happiness in the car, my brief academic imprisonment ended, Polly Harvey wailing and grunting, now how could two people who came up listening to the same music turn out so differently, and are we different, when we both love the same things, the same words, how could we be different)—came home to find the backyard, formerly lush with greenery and foliage, bulldozed into a mud flat, revealing a bare ugly building wall the height of the house. It’s completely hideous. I wrote the property manager:
I’m not quite sure how to put this, but feel bound to register my disappointment somehow. The freshly bulldozed backyard looks genuinely awful. I can’t imagine what the thinking was behind the decision to rip out the banana trees, or whatever they were. The yard was a very pleasant place to sit outside and now it has the overall appeal of an unpaved parking lot. I rather dread further improvements.
The neighbor and I stood disbelievingly in the backyard surveying the carnage. Pyewacket sniffed at the raw wet mud. A brown toad hopped around, newly homeless. We looked at the wall.
“We could project movies on it.”
“We could paint an urban mural depicting people of color doing funky colorful urban things.”
I have to remember I am okay in this world. I am practicing taking it all on the chin. I can’t make my poems to everyone’s taste (or maybe even anyone’s), can’t singlehandedly improve everyone’s classroom experience, can’t make Tuesdays a better place to live, can only get through them, try to make a joke that lands with a thud, get misunderstood, say nothing rather than correct the misrepresentation, because to say something would come across as defensive, to say anything would just cause more problems, so nod energetically, do my best to look cheerful and be willing, find willingness in my heart, patch it up, get through it, tolerate the distress, improve the moment, be a lover of reality, run up and down the department building corridor with determination to shift my affect, play little games with myself, like let’s count to fifty while I listen to this person talk! or, let’s read this poem backward! let’s draw five squares in a row and shade them different colors of ink! I feel I should have gone through a dozen pens today alone, writing words in italic and copperplate all over my handouts like a high schooler, practicing lettering to like a professional illustrator degree.
I do it for the joy it brings / because I am a joyful girl—
I haven’t had such a hard time in poetry school since Boston and leaving Derek’s workshop during the halfway break to cry, hard, in the bathroom, and then wash my face and come out and go on like nothing had happened. Or was it this bad in Arizona and I just don’t remember? But wasn’t I blessed with such wonderful friends to help me through? I saw someone today in the student union who looked like one of the Brians (glossy black hair, a particular shape of eyeglasses) and my heart skipped a beat.
Someone a few years ahead of me in the program wrote to me very kindly, in an email, there really should be an “It gets better” ad campaign for this program; and I am clinging to that in my heart like you would just not believe, you would totally laugh if you knew. Caveat: I am sure he was not saying there was anything bad about the program! Just that it is hard! To be in any program at all! It is hard! It gets better!
Ya basta—I swore in my heart this wasn’t going to be a long post, but then of course it was. (Must write shorter posts. Be more reader-friendly!)
Here are five really good things that happened today:
1. My film studies instructor passed me in the hallway and, busy going somewhere else, stopped nonetheless to tell me not to panic about my David Lynch research proposal, that she still thinks I can make it work, that she has concrete suggestions she will give me tomorrow. She is warm and direct and I respect her and she could easily humiliate me if she wanted to, but she encourages me every chance she gets, and I find myself unbelievably grateful.
2. I had a really long hot bath last night, and so my hair was curly and reasonably cute today, and I wore my favorite turquoise t-shirt. I may be getting fat but at least I have decent tits.
3. I run into various colleagues in the grad lounge and they keep being really sweet to me, and asking me what classes I’m taking, and telling me about the classes they’re going to take. One person offered me a hug tonight, unprompted. I tried not to fall all over him with relief. Various ones have also quietly voiced their support. I need to keep an open mind. I need to stay available and curious and happy.
4. I pitched an essay to an online magazine! Who haven’t written back yet, or maybe ever, but still. I did it.
5. This poem by James Schuyler is just so lovely and tears came to my eyes in class when my workshop leader played the recording of him reading it. The last lines. Mmm-hm. It’s not a poem I could write, but. Her taste is impeccable. (And many hours later, buried like an almond at the center of the cake, there was a Dante Gabriel Rossetti sonnet, in Introduction to Doctoral Studies, and that was wonderful too. It is worth it, worth it, worth it. Surrounded by all these poems! Imagine!)
The Bluet
And is it stamina
that unseasonably freaks
forth a bluet, a
Quaker lady, by
the lake? So small,
a drop of sky that
splashed and held,
four-petaled, creamy
in its throat. The woods
around were brown,
the air crisp as a
Carr’s table water
biscuit and smelt of
cider. There were frost
apples on the trees in
the field below the house.
The pond was still, then
broke into a ripple.
The hills, the leaves that
have not yet fallen
are deep and oriental
rug colors. Brown leaves
in the woods set off
gray trunks of trees.
But that bluet was
the focus of it all: last
spring, next spring, what
does it matter? Unexpected
as a tear when someone
reads a poem you wrote
for him: “It’s this line
here.” That bluet breaks
me up, tiny spring flower
late, late in dour October.
Maybe I just needed to do some everloving WORK. I finally managed to crank out a nine-page paper for the time-wasting Introduction to Doctoral Studies (the only thing that keeps me showing up for that class is the horrifying thought that if I don’t pass it I’ll have to take it AGAIN) and I’m all sanguine now, zestily eating romaine hearts dunked in blue cheese dressing, like a happy normal person. Maybe if I would just stop distracting myself with my own crazy EMOTIONS and do my JOB I would be a more acceptable human being. Dear Baby Jesus, I promise not to fall in love with any more of my girlfriends if you will just help me finish this book review.