I cannot care so much about school. It is a practical exercise, a way to have gotten out of credit card debt (and before too long–by September, one would think–a way to get out of student loan debt). It is a means to have health insurance for your family, which someday you’ll even be able to use. It is a means to make connections so that once you’re done with whatever you need to be done with, you can get a job that you might like to have for 25 years. And, I hope, it’s a way to understand disability and embodiment more broadly on a deeper level, as a writer, in such a way that your actual creative writing benefits. That, certainly, has not happened much and the prospects for it happening in quarantine seem bleak. But the revisions of The Intimate Register, once the semester clears away in three weeks and before whatever obligations to school I have for summer … starting, say, July 1 or so, seem like a possibility …
May 2, 2020
Ah the obligatory end-of-semester, now-I’ll-get-writing-done post. I’m even starting to feel it now: the potential payoff of all this work, of 15 weeks of being force-fed grief memoirs and disability theory by my phone’s screenreader, 15 weeks of scrambling to alternate between making people happy and standing up for my own ideas, of balancing caring for students and offering the rigor they deserve, of being a teacher and being a ‘scholar,’ of being those things in balance with being a parent of children living through crisis and tumult, of doing all that on the one hand and managing to squeeze 19 hours of writing out of 14 April mornings, and (so far) two and a half hours over three days in May.
Maybe the hardest thing in this practical exercise is learning to “take” a fat old fastballs. In non-baseball terms, I mean letting some available opportunity go to someone else without an attempt to claim it for myself, realizing that the work in front of me is the work I need to do and do well. Six months ago, I had a phone call with a wise faculty member. This was part of me deciding to not do something I’d applied to do and been offered, and had been inclined to accept when I wrote for advice, but had changed my mind about by the time of the call. This was pointed out to me, and the two of us laughed about it for a good minute. Then, the person on the other end of the line told me: “You seem like the kind of person who doesn’t do things halfway.” This person was right–with the exception of some things that matter, like writing, which I do allow myself to do halfway in one of the most self-sabotaging habits I have.
Somehow the thing that makes me most whole and that gives me the most calm, it’s the thing I do the worst job of creating space for in the face of what I need to remember really is in most aspects a “practical exercise.” Writing cannot be the thing I fall into the trap of dismissing as self-indulgence, a narrative that allows me to withhold, to avoid, to flinch.
When I look back at this entry, from roughly a year ago, it reminds me of a certain mindset that I’ve lost a little about school. The clock-in, clock-out mindset was born the May before this one, on what I still think of as my day of Maximum Professional Humiliation, when I blew a campus visit, when I realized that instead of coming up with “a job that you might like to have for 25 years” I’d drawn a card that read, “Go directly to the Grad Center, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.” Since then, I’ve been rolling to get doubles, hoping to get out, watching the rest of the game go on without me.
(Can you tell I hate Monopoly?)
I can’t get so focused on rolling doubles; I have to keep my eye on the game. That mindset, of school as a thing I just do for the piece of paper at the end, is what I’ve been missing. That job I’d do with the paper I get is what I’m doing here. That job I’d do for the rest of my life is the basic, wonderful work that so many of my ‘peers’ deign to do, the vocation of ensuring that 20-year-olds have the ability to make their own kind of sense in these institutions, in this world at large. The focus on that, on the creative work that job should be sustaining, it gets harder to maintain the longer I spend on this side of the creative-critical firewall. Shiny things distract.
Not quite six months after that phone call, an exchange with Tune led me to not apply for something that could have been a good summer gig. It could have earned me some money but which also was definitely going to be consuming. It was a fastball. I let it go by. I don’t have 20 hours a week for something like this, was my basic feeling, even if I get paid $20 to do writing about disability. Sorry. Eyes on the prize: memoir, dissertation, done. Means, meet ends.
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