June 2000
A
decade ago, I stood on the amphitheater stage and delivered the
senior-class speech to our motley group: the Class of 1990. Though,
unfortunately, I can't be there this summer to celebrate our reunion,
I feel moved by the occasion to share some reflections on the
developments of these past 10 years. As I made my remarks that
graduation day, I was earnestly optimistic--full of the conviction
that we were all on the brink of some interesting travels. In fact, I
concluded by wishing you all a "most excellent adventure."
Although I'd felt adventurous at times in college, my travels then were well within the lines. Even my thrillingly independent junior semester abroad was sanctioned and supported by school and family. I went in order to return; there was no question of ending up somewhere altogether else. A quite different, less scripted, set of adventures awaited me--for which I was strikingly unprepared. To start, my outfit was all wrong. It is as if I stepped out into a boundless universe of limitless possibilities and selected to wear not a pith helmet, nor some sturdy climbing gear, but a straightjacket. Just the thing to keep me protected and secure from the bogeymen of the "Real World."
My straightjacket, I see now, was woven of a constricting blend of fear, arrogance, and the desire to please (a combination more confining than the tightest of spandex fibers, I assure you). And, for extra tug, I was bound up in a particular set of beliefs about what it meant to be a good grown-up. I thought adulthood meant a climb ever upward, toward the advanced degree, the Important Life Work, the soulmate, the children (and their college funds), the house, the accolades and accomplishments that make great copy for the Class Notes section of this publication. I know now that real humans don't develop along perfect upward slopes, easily graphed in two dimensions. We leap, we forget, we crash, we cha-cha, we stumble, we get stuck, we start again.
When I graduated from Swarthmore, I'd never hunted for an apartment, paid rent, gotten a phone or gas line hooked up or disconnected, grocery shopped for myself, driven a car, held a credit card, been in a serious romantic relationship, or held a full-time job for longer than a three-month summer break. These and countless other practical "details" of real life quite terrified me. And, because I was passively awaiting the thunderbolt that would reveal to me my Important Life Work, I also had no particular direction in which to travel. I started my adventure by taking the road back to my parents' home in Albuquerque, N.M.
My backwardness in the whole arena of "life skills" contrasted sharply with the grandiose, idealistic dreams I held for myself as a Swarthmore graduate. If fear limited my movement, my expectations of myself were downright paralyzing. I had deeply internalized the message that, as a Swarthmore graduate, I was among a privileged few who were invested with social consciousness and charged with making a positive difference. This is not a bad message, mind you, but my sense of scale was way off. I think now that the problem was twofold: First, I had all the arrogance of someone convinced of their bestness and brightness without the ability to ask for help in translating that potential into purpose and action; second, I had what I now see as a very narrow definition of what counts as positive social action.
In part, I had social action confused with political activism of the sign-carrying, civil-disobedience, speech-making kind--something I idealized, yet had no real aptitude for. In another way, I thought it had to do with being a "big" person, someone who "makes a name" for herself, with a shelf of degrees or titles to signal her worth. I was sure it had something to do with saving the world: grand gestures and big changes. I believed it was important to stand for something, yet I hadn't learned to stand up for myself.
On the premise that at least I knew my way around a classroom, I went to Southern California and began what was to be a tremendously challenging eight-year trek through the graduate program in communication at the University of California-San Diego. There, I undertook the serious project of becoming a feminist social theorist. And boy, was I serious.
Intent on being a good grown-up intellectual, I gradually leeched most of the joy from my life. In my attempts to adopt the proper critical, detached stance of the theorist, I moved steadily farther away from the engaged, creative self I'd taken for granted in earlier years. I gave up the acting, poetry and play writing, journaling and crafting that had, since childhood, been my way of metabolizing intellectual and emotional learnings. It seemed clear that these were frivolous pursuits, peripheral to the weightier matters of deconstructing gender, problematizing culture, and interrogating power. Left with nothing but gravity, I became seriously depressed. (Those of you who have lived with depression will know that it functions too well as a straightjacket in and of itself.)
Because of the straightjacket, though, I couldn't give up. Scholarship was to be my Important Life's Work and my ticket to being Somebody. With each passing year, I'd invested more time, and it seemed like a bigger waste if I quit. I would let people down. For so many reasons, I was determined to rise above my character and find a way to succeed. I fought endless internal battles--disinclination vs. determination--fearing failure and success equally.
One image that captures my relationship to my academic career is of a rather vain lady who's purchased a pair of gorgeous and expensive shoes that simply don't fit. She loves the look of them and loves even more the admiring glances she gets from others, so she pretends for the first few steps that they don't really pinch that much. She continues walking (maybe they'll stretch?), trying to hide the grimace of pain. Finally, many bloody blisters later, she is forced to admit that her feet are not going to change. It's the shoes that have to go. Alleluia.
I took a yearlong leave of absence in which I supported myself with temp work, tried to remember how to write without extensive citations, and played with paints and my glue gun in a makeshift garage studio. And, in the process, I began to entertain the possibility that perhaps I was something other than a "failed" academic; perhaps I was a nascent successful something else. Maybe the blood-flow problems caused by life in the straightjacket had caused me to misunderstand the relationship between those "extracurricular" creative undertakings I'd so enjoyed in the past and the scholarship that was making me so miserable in the present. Perhaps it was the creative work that was at the core of my talent and passion, and the critical analytical work that was secondary. Aha.
After one last try at conforming to the dissertation process, I gave up the climb toward the Ph.D. and followed, instead, my passions for color, texture, and the man who will become my husband later this year. I live now back in Mountain Time, in Northern Colorado, where expansive vistas of brown earth and blue sky don't quite equal an ocean yet are strangely comforting to my New Mexican eyes. I teach creativity workshops to frustrated artists and blocked writers; I write and craft and look forward to starting a family.
The work I do for money isn't quite Important Life Work, but it serves people well and enables the continued development of my real-life dreams--the ones that begin from what I love to do, not from what I imagine I want to be. I'm proud to have wriggled my way out of the straightjacket, to have learned to feel safe within looser limits that allow for mistakes, play, and improvisation. And I've noticed that there are more ways than I ever dreamed to engage the world and transform it for the better.
I would guess that most all of us have found the world far more complicated than we imagined. If we're lucky, we've learned a great deal in the last 10 years about our characters. And if we're really lucky, we've managed to forgive ourselves some of our flaws and cherish in ourselves those things that really make us who we are. Perhaps, for some, life flows simply: Choices are easily made, your inner truths are congruent with your outer deeds, you sleep soundly each night knowing that through you good works are done. I've come to believe that the real adventures happen in the tensions between who we are and who we thought we were, what we have to offer and what we value, what we imagine and what we create. A car in my neighborhood sports a bumpersticker that reads, "Not all who wander are lost."
"Yes," I think each time I pass, "and some aren't wandering at all; we're just having excellent adventures." I wish you many more.
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