Expectations are a funny thing to manage, especially when the reality falls so far short of the desire. The PhD, at least my efforts to submit it first time around, was in many ways a blessed gift of concentration. Nothing else mattered except finishing. It was wholly insignificant if I was lonely, or sad, or depressed. The only thing that mattered was it. It structured my days and it defined my time into neatly apportioned blocks. It did not matter if my supervisor did not read my work, and then accused me of things that were patently untrue. It did not matter that my boyfriend moved across the world and I entered a holding pattern. It did not matter as my life slowly condescend to a small grey office on the wrong side of the planet. I am, incidentally, infinitely proud of myself for those two months. I achieved on my own, that is if I have actually achieved it, what others have so much help for and in a situation that was objectively untenable. I owned myself for those months. I acted in a way that, regardless of outcome, I am happy with.
The refrain, no it was deeper than that, the mantra, that kept me going through all of this was that it would be worth it. That there would be if not a sunny upland, then at least a windy rise upon which I would alight at the close of it. It was not that I was unhappy, I was instead postponing happiness. I was investing myself in my future, in a future with someone and for something. It was a future that I should not have, although could not help but, plan, form and cherish in my mind as the practical drudgery of every passing day first exhausted, and then eroded, me.
It does not take a genius to realise that this was not the outcome that awaited me. My carefully guarded dreams were false prophets. I do not suggest that it is anyone’s fault except my own for listening to their calming whispers, but that in no way dismisses or diminishes the sense of loss and hurt and anger I feel at the revelation of their inaccuracy. It would appear that even my diminished notion of Elysium was built on little more than a flight of fancy. I find myself not lost, but painfully aware I am in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hurt more than I ever did before I finished, because now I have time to feel pain. Sorrow does not drip through a pinhole into my heart, it gushes in uncontrollable torrents. This is an interstitial moment, and I am caught once again between what I was and what I shall be. Between who I came to be and who I want to become. Questions from the existential to the merely pressing rain in upon me and each answer is so intertwined with every other one that I find myself powerless to choose because each act of choice is a whole picture of a future. Even where once there was unquestioned faith there is now only fealty to historical relics in the hope of return. As my futures unwind and recombine, so light and shadow reconfigure my past and present into more or less compelling narratives and previously sacrosanct hopes become tarnished with contingency.
I do not know what to do, and I have to “do” everything. There are no truths and there are no rights and wrong. There is only an unpalatable hegemony of choices constrained by expectation and hope and belief and love. There is the fear it will not work out, and the hope that it will. There is the love for others, in more forms and languages than I ever expected, and there is the darkness of being alone. There is the singing of my hopes, and the chorus of my doubts. Hymn sheets falling to the ground as new stanzas are written by hands not wholly my own, in notation I do not understand, for purposes lurking beyond my ability to discern.
As an apparition stalking through the periphery of sight, so it settled upon me as the first snow of winter, that other me I have come to know so well. The me that whispers of unmentionable doubt and pain, of the desire to be alone. I felt it wearing me, a uniform tawdry with age and let down, a shadow being drawn into that which casts it. It comes from time to time, there are no reasons to explain its presence, or formulas to predict when my other self slips into the retrograde.
It was not that I had to be alone out of a lack of alternatives, a buzzing phone testimony to entreaties to be the me I sometimes manage to be. It was that I was washed over with the exquisite self absorption that comes when my shadow returns home. I sat on a bench overlooking a lake hushed with anticipation. To the east, a crackle of drums before yellows and greens careen skywards, those Chinese fancies of celebration hurled with human abandon.
I do not believe in God. I do, however, have certainty that it is the nature of life to throw up alignments of self and place and time that, whilst not providential, are nonetheless moments of reverence if we listen. Every passing moment is a prelude to every one to come, and we ride the constantly progressing crest of now as we slip along the path, condensing infinite maybes into one was. Within this, there are interludes of resonance where everything that was is all that ever could have been possible, where you sit in the dark on a bench over a lake and rue at the echoes which explode in your mind just as the pyrotechnics explode in the sky.
I cried. I cried at the finality of closing doors. I cried with the exhaustion of it all, of running so far and finding myself at this place sitting once again with myself. I cried for friends I had discarded along the way as I switched modes. I cried for all those I love and have loved. I cried for having missed so much. I cried with the knowledge that I will look back in 30 years and regret. I cried at the life missed because somewhere within the incubus always murmurs of solitude. I cried with the realisation that in the future I know with a certainty that I will be on a different bench, over a different lake, and this will repeat itself in stony resistance to learning. I cried and my self’s sorrows reflected back the burning sky as the salty evidence of my constancy wet my cheeks.
Tears falling, fireworks climbing, refracted me’s caught on the beautiful vicissitudes between the two.
I do wonder what Noah felt when the rains stopped, the clouds parted, and the sun shone down upon a once again pristine world still half submerged in the remnants of deific fury. Was there hope in his gaze that the certainty of his path held him firmly on a tautological route preordained by powers greater than he. Or was there an understandable trepidation that all which he had held so dear had resulted in something so alien as to be beyond comprehension.
What would it be like to pause at such a juncture and realise that everything that had defined you for so long, the endless days, the never changing set of emotions and exhaustions, the monotony of a life submerged in long made decisions was at an end. Would you rejoyce at the breaking of those suffocating walls and the influx of fresh air to replace the miasmic fug in which you were ensconsed? Or would you fear the newness and the once again long for the comforting nearness of your imprisoning walls.
How would you react when someone asks, for the millionth rhetorical time, if you want to go out this weekend, and you say for the first time yes. What would you do if you have nothing to do except sleep 18 hours a day for a whole week and are still exhausted in a way that doesnt seem to shift. If you get confused about leaving the office during the hours of daylight.
I submitted my PhD on Friday February 27th at exactly 9.58am. I don’t know if it will pass, so I am holding off overly blatant displays of success until I hear, which may be a while.
