Wednesday, February 22, 2012

What is real life?

So I was just watching an episode of Scrubs.  It's from the second season, and it's the one where they get Jill Tracy to do the cover of Colin Hay's "Waiting for My Real Life to Begin".  It's pretty amazing just how much that particular line - not even the entire song, just that one line - really epitomizes my attitude towards my life, and how, surprisingly, that hasn't changed, despite the fact that I am, by anyone's estimation, participating in what could absolutely be called "my real life".  I mean, I am walking a very specific path, towards a very specific professional destination, am in an actual (albeit new) relationship, and am doing all those things that generally qualify as "real life".  Yet, somehow, I'm still waiting.  I feel as though I'm just playing a part, and what I'm doing at the moment isn't really what I'm going to do, or - and this is the important part - what I want to do.

Apparently this "crisis of faith" (it doesn't deserve capitals) is a common thing in graduate school.  At least, so I've been told by the professor with whom I've discussed it briefly.  It's the whole why am I here, what am I doing, do I really want to do this thing?  I guess it typically comes later in the journey - third or fourth year, rarely first - but it isn't uncommon.  It does as much to weed out potential PhDs as the actual application process.  I don't know how other people deal with it, but since my first semester here - nay, since my first day in this state, I've been wondering if I haven't made a truly colossal mistake.

I don't know if you remember (and why would you?) but at the beginning of my first semester, I was asking these questions, but with a different bent, i.e., that hadn't made a colossal mistake, but that the admissions committee had.  I began questioning my enjoyment of what I'm doing from the very start, but attributed it all to failings on my part - I wasn't smart enough, or motivated enough, or something-enough, and did not fundamentally belong in grad school.  But once I beat back those feelings - somewhere about mid-semester, after I got back my first paper, with an A and lots of solid commentary - and realized that the work itself wasn't hard, and that I could perform at the level required/imagined, I still had to find a way to cope with the feelings which hadn't disappeared, and which were, because of their non-disappearing state, very troubling.

Those feelings have plagued me from the end of last semester, and have worsened during this new semester.  They're terrifying, because they're not feelings with which I can reason (yes, I know, that's the whole point of feelings, but usually they're explicable in some fashion): boredom, frustration, irritation, disinterest, and general ennui.  I have absolutely no interest in what I'm doing.  And that is a serious problem.  It's not even that I'm not passionate about it, or that I don't love it - I actually don't like it.

It's hard to put a finger on exactly what it is that I don't like about it.  The reading is intellectually challenging, yes.  It raises interesting questions, yes.  It is thought-provoking, absolutely.  There are moments when I am genuinely interested in what I'm doing.

But seriously?  Most of the time, I would rather do anything else rather than read.  I mean anything.  Clean my apartment with a toothbrush and bucket.  Bathe my cat.  Count the resulting scratch marks from the cat bath.  Volunteer for electroshock therapy.  Get a lobotomy (and no, I haven't been reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest again).  Anything.  In fact, the amount of actual work I have put into this semester is shockingly low.  So low, in fact, that I don't think I have ever put this little effort into anything I've ever done (yes, there are lots of italics being thrown about.  It's necessary right now).

And here's the most terrifying part of it: I don't care.  I mean, aside from a certain degree of professional and personal pride, there is nothing else that keeps me going to class, and participating in a minimal amount of intellectual work.  I don't want to quit, because I don't have anything else at the moment.  But that's the only reason why I don't want to quit.  It isn't because I love what I'm doing.  It isn't because I'd trade my arm to be able to do it.  It isn't because it's satisfying, or challenging, or even interesting.  Perhaps, in a larger context, it is.  But in this specific context - as a graduate student in medieval English literature - it isn't.  Books which I may have picked up independently of any class are books I now boycott.  Today?  Instead of reading a book which might, by any account, be something I would normally enjoy, today I went and spent three hours playing pool.

So I have to ask myself: is not having another plan a good reason to be doing this?  Is not having something else that I'd rather be doing reason enough to spend the next six years in graduate school?  Is not having the testicular fortitude to pursue my true passion (writing) reason enough to settle for this path?  Is being 31, and scared to take a chance on something that really matters to me, because all those previous "chances" ended in fiery train wrecks and burning buildings, is that enough to keep me doing what is safe and respectable?

I don't know.  But if I still feel like I'm waiting for my real life to begin, then what happens six years from now, when I'm 37, and I'm still waiting?  I guess that's why this is a crisis of faith.  But this isn't about having faith in something or someone else.  This is about having faith in myself.  If I don't admit now that I'm not really doing what I want to do, and that what I want to do is very, very scary, and risky, and so without guarantees in any way, but that it's still what I should be doing, and I shouldn't continue to piss about and waste time doing something because it's the rational and sane thing to do - if I don't admit that now, then will I ever?  Or will I just steer blindly through graduate school, still waiting, and become a professor, and still be waiting, and then die, and never have started my real life?  Is it better to take the risks than to always wonder what could have been?

I really, really don't know.