Identifying Goals, Or, I was an Insufferable Mess for Two Years

I have been a Masters graduate for roughly three weeks now, and, as I mentioned in my last post, have already been on a rollercoaster of emotions. This isn't a surprise to me--in the weeks and months leading up to graduation, I recognized that I would likely be an anxious mess (or, more so than I already am) upon foregoing my student identity. Losing a 24 year old identity can be scary for the reflective of sorts, so, like the true type 4 INFP that I am, I have taken to writing about it.

One of the hardest things about coming out of this intense 2-year period is realizing that I didn't get a lot of choice regarding where to focus my energy. While this is a common feeling for any student, I didn't realize the severity of this circumstance until like yesterday. College was demanding in its own right, but I had ample opportunity to explore professional, social, and personal identities. Having evolved into a less irritating, whiny, and narcissistic person by the time I got to graduate school, this kind of exploration was less necessary, but it was still an extreme transition to go from someone with two jobs, vastly different kinds of friendships, and interdisciplinary interests to either a comp teacher or a digital rhetoric scholar. That's it. Two hats.

Do you know how hard it is to mix and match with two measly hats?

My focus on these two identities was intense. I neglected essentially every social role I'd previously held while thinking, "yes, everything is fine, I'm juggling everything and have a life--look, I was in the mountains just 10 short months ago!" I insisted that I still had hobbies--like watching YouTube--only to realize that I'd maintained that hobby because, in the end, it was research. I had assumed that because I felt confident for the first time in my life, I didn't have any personal issues to work out. While I appreciated being able to fully immerse myself in my graduate program, it left me with a sense of loss and purposelessness immediately after coming out of it. Turns out, only feeling confident and worthwhile when you are pumping out research isn't exactly the healthiest thing.

I am feeling this sense of loss, and I'm still working on three academic projects. I can only imagine what will happen when I'm truly done.

It's easy to transfer a sense of worth from my job as a student to my job as an instructor/tutor. Professionally, I am still comfortably situated (okay, situated) in higher education. Despite the extreme irony in working on a website that discusses the dire nature of being an adjunct, only to face a very likely possibility of becoming an adjunct myself, I am in a place where I don't need to support a family and can continue to scrape by. I can still quantify my success, no matter what career I end up in. I am, quite honestly, a budding workaholic (hire me, plz!) and can pour my entire identity in my work. But maybe, after going through a jarring realization that there is little of myself left, maybe I don't want to.

The thing about working is that eventually you won't be (profound moments with Kira, everyone!). Whether that means during the summer, weekends, or retirement, there will be some moments in your life in which you have to get a grip of who you are outside of what you are paid to do. Yes, I was fortunate enough to apply my hobby to my scholarly work, but I can't just traipse around parties going, "have you considered the feminist implications of the beauty video lately?". I have a track record of going into brief moments of insanity during times that I'm not working--nothing big, just the usual nightly fear of getting robbed and murdered, and destroying the health of my body, mind, and all of my relationships. I'd rather not have to deal with these pesky depressive episodes every time I leave a job or take some time off.

I have had this desire to live authentically outside of work for a while now, but it wasn't until I visited with one of my best friends from high school that I fully grasped how to do that. A minor reality check was when she asked me, "so now that you're done with grad school, what kinds of hobbies will you revisit?", only for me to draw a blank. On a grander scale, however, we chatted like no time had passed, remembering the cringe-worthy stories that we posted for the other to read on Google Docs, our yoga adventures, and that time I accidentally encouraged a group of frat brothers to yell "tits out for the boys!". I articulated feeling 16 again, and recognizing that "student" wasn't a major facet of my identity at 16.

Feeling an itch to produce some form of writing, I was inspired by my friend's reference towards the fiction I wrote. Despite feeling irrationally terrified of creative writing (no mention of Judith Butler or phrases like "it is important to note that"? Madness!), I wrote some pages of a slightly-too-formulaic, slightly-too-autobiographical story. Hey, some habits are hard to break. But, at the very least, it's a habit I haven't been able to visit in 2+ years.

So, it's time to identify some more goals that have nothing to do with my professional or scholarly identity. If any of y'all have ideas for hobbies I could try or adventures I could embark on, feel free to share! And to those of you who are currently in grad school, take a weekend off, spend less time on an assignment than you might be inclined to, and remember your worth outside of your intellectual pursuits.

And in the spirit of reconnecting with the old,

Namaste.

Confidence and the Graduate Teaching Assistantship

In the final semester of my graduate career, I took a wonderful course called autoethnography. I was basically given course credit to reflect on myself, my positionality, and my culture, and I was encouraged to consider my growth as a graduate student. Given that I have well established that I am a self reflecting machine, I was ecstatic by the notion of using this persistent self obsession observation for academic material--I felt as though I had been training for this moment for years, and cited this blog at least ten times in a single assignment.

For our first assignment in this course, we were asked to reflect on our positionalities as graduate students, and conduct an exploration of our academic lives. While the professors, friends, and family members I interviewed saw me in distinctly different contexts, they all cited a dramatic change in my confidence levels as a reason for my growth. Even in my own reflections, I have recognized that, as a graduate student, "for the first time in my life, I [was] happy with who I [was]." This isn't to say that I didn't have moments of self-doubt or struggle (an impossible feat when working on a Masters thesis), but these moments were more akin to recognizing that I would have to work through temporary struggles, rather than thinking I was surely a complete and total failure who would never amount to anything.

Given my background with insecurity and anxiety, it was a nice feeling. One that I assumed most every graduate student was able to experience.

However, this autoethnography course challenged me to consider my status as a (GTA) Graduate Teaching Assistant, and to reflect on the position of power I had been afforded. While, for the first semester of my graduate career, my reflections stopped short at "no, surely I didn't get this assistantship! Who in their right mind would trust me to teach college students?", teaching later became a source of frustration, and, in hindsight, bonding with fellow GTAs. Yet it was also a major contributor to my confidence as a graduate student, as I was constantly being reaffirmed by professors that this was a competitive position, that professional opportunities would open up because of my teaching (this is a mixed bag, but more on that later). I had to force myself into a leadership position and use confidence as a survival mechanism.

Not to mention the assistantship erased insecurities about debt, and nicely aligned with composition strategies we talked about in class.

Not every graduate student gets this opportunity. And, as I later realized, there are graduate students who applied, didn't get the assistantship, and took on that debt to go to school.

Despite my background with social anxiety and awareness of feeling excluded, I participated in an environment in which GTAs talked about their students and made inside jokes about CO150 in front of non-GTAs. Even after being made aware of this power dynamic, I still joked around with fellow GTAs about the rhetorical situation (a device that we teach to our students 20,000 times over, only for them to still not get it) in front of those outside of the GTA cohort. I have experienced that horrible feeling that I wasn't in on the joke, or wasn't invited to the party, and have been furious and hurt that people talked about those things in front of me. And yet, here I was, participating in the very acts that hurt me as a college student.

It's dangerously easy to find comfort in our positions, particularly if they are positions of power--this is a lesson that Rhetoric & Composition has emphasized from the start. I knew this from a theoretical lens, but it's challenging to really understand from a personal angle. My position as a GTA and as a member of an academic family gives me ample opportunities to be reassured that I am worthy of the academy, and that graduate school is a productive time investment. It also exposed me to a larger social circle, and even though I wasn't close friends with every GTA, I knew who they were, and felt a connection with them, as we were all going through the insanity that is teaching freshmen.

I frequently tell my CO150 students, "know your audience. Make them feel valued, don't insult them, and make an effort to understand where they're coming from." While parroting these words in the classroom, I failed to do this while speaking with colleagues who are not GTAs. Just as I spent time crying in my dorm after being told I "had no friends," I probably would do the same if I were a non-GTA who was constantly being inundated with the message that GTAs were somehow superior.

I cannot change the entire structure of the English graduate program--and I know that the faculty desperately want everyone to receive funding and have equal opportunities. But as a member of an "in" group who has so frequently been left out, I want to show current and future GTAs that there are others who might not have access to the confidence-building that occurs in this cohort.

Love in the Time of Caller ID: Embracing the Unknown

I'm sitting at the table of the restaurant my partner and I frequent at least twice a month. Swallowing a bite of pesto and goat cheese sandwich, I sigh at my phone.

"One of the worst parts of the job search," I say, "is having to answer unknown caller IDs."

There are many worse parts, like spending an hour picking cat hair off my one good blazer, and the crippling notion that I don't know where I will be living, how much money I will be making, or who I will be working for in two months, but at this moment, the idea of simply answering the phone makes me want to vomit.

I haven't even been a graduate for a full week, and I've already gone through the cycle of complete, unadulterated joy, crippling anxiety, mind-numbing sadness, acceptance, and back to anxiety again.

"I thought you didn't have to answer these calls anymore," my partner says, referencing the part-time adjunct job I'd accepted a week prior. I was going to start in the fall, we were going to move into a cozy one-bedroom that didn't cost ten thousand dollars, and we were going to have a plan. We were going to be settled.

If there is one thing that I love more than having enough money to eat out multiple times a week, it's having a plan. As a kid, I was so obsessed with having a plan, I would write a detailed schedule of all the fun I would have on Christmas. My future plans looked no different.

"But this could be better."

"But this could be better" is a phrase my partner has heard a lot in the last few weeks. It's as though I'm desperately trying to find the loophole that will get me out of the recently-graduated-and-feeling-hopeless-millennial drudgery I've been so fearful of. It's almost like I'm trying to prove wrong my advisor, who told me I would probably have to patch together a series of part-time jobs. It's a giant leap of faith that I don't deem myself qualified for until I'm 40 with gray hairs and a dental plan. It's wildly different from my cries of "I just want something!" I kept repeating just a month earlier.

One of the scariest things about the phrase "this could be better" is that there is a very likely chance it won't be. Out of the few hundred applicants for any given job, there is usually only room for one person. That's less than a 1% chance. Statistically, I am an idiot, and will likely find myself in a shack, eating corn from a tin can*, wondering why I didn't take the safe route. I find myself wishing that if I were to take this leap of faith, I would have a guarantee that a good job with benefits would be at the end of it--which defeats the whole "leap" and "faith" bit and makes it more akin to a tiptoe of logic.

While I've been my usual ball of anxiety this past week, I find that despite the unknown of literally everything, I have found more moments of calm and ease than I had when most everything was figured out. This is terribly confusing for someone who privileges logical choices and long-term investments over anything else, and may very well result in an upcoming "identity crisis" post. But somehow there is security and comfort in knowing that I have the tiniest belief that maybe I am that person who is qualified for something better--that maybe I am worthy of a consistent salary and benefits. Despite not having any answers now, I know that I took a risk and openly rejected the safest option. I will continue to answer those unknown numbers, and I will continue to embrace the unknown.

*I already eat corn from a tin can, so this really isn't an altogether terrible outcome.