Inchoate Ramblings

So, that which has vexed me all this while, and which has caused renewed silence here has been, temporarily, possibly, resolved. Basically I needed to apply for an extension of my candidature, which meant I needed to renew my visa. Today I finally found out that I am getting my candidature extended which means, allowing for the meandering of bureaucracy, that I wont be deported, that I will be a Dr and that my life is back on “track” (and by “track” i mean a sorta vague path that once made sense, albeit when I was probably drunk).

These last 4 weeks have been hell. They have been crying uncontrollably on the phone to nathan, and they have been getting blindingly, insanely, drunk with Miki. They have been sitting with JL in absolute stone cold silence over tea, and they have been pretending that everything is wonderful. They have been unable to talk to my parents for fear of letting them down in a rather definite way, and they have been staring at the celling at 4am with no hope of ever feeling anything except a rather proximate panic. They have been worse than my break up with the ex, indeed they have been worse than any other weeks that I have had the misfortune to live through.

They have revealed in excruciating relief that there is little else in this world to keep me afloat apart from those little mistruths that we spin to ourselves that everything will be OK, that everything is on track and that the path from here to there is linear and lined with roses. Whether it is singing songs all night because you are too scared to sleep, or eating food you shouldn’t at places you cant afford with past lives across the table, these tawdry baubles of constructed fate lay as shimmering testament to my ability to sublimate the tomorrow to the today. These water coloured smudges of lives lived and imagined that bleed into each other as the illusion starts to fray are my companions and my bed fellows.

I don’t know whether this is a good thing or not. These lies that lay like balm over reality. On the one hand, it causes me to ignore the pressing realities of the world and my place in it, but on the other it gives me comfort and pleasure that otherwise I would not have. Would I be me if I was efficient with these things, if I dealt with the world rationally.

I knew this was going to be hard, I knew that this would interact with my worst character traits, but I didn’t realise that it would be like this (and this, oh and this). I did not expect that it would suck me dry and leave me sitting on sunday afternoon with simply no words to share. It is paradoxically the best time I have ever had, the fulfilment of my potential finally and the revelation of some sort of clarity as to my career, and the most god awful experience that I could ever have wished upon myself. It has cut me off from everyone who doesn’t understand “this”. It has caused me to yearn for the comforting respite of stupidity and to revel in all that makes me me. It has both vindicated my choices and condemned them with an eloquence that I will never match.

What I do know with certainty is that I have lived the last four years exactly as I wanted to, albeit slower that perhaps would have been optimum. I could not have been one of those students who only have the PhD to keep them company. I needed Cameron, I needed to be hurt by him and to hurt him, just as I now need Nathan in an altogether healthier way. I needed to spend days at the shops with JL, and to fall asleep in strangers beds because a bottle of vodka really was the fun thing to do. I need to spend hours working on other things, I need to have tutored for the last three years because it is all these things that give me a reason to be here in the first place. My PhD could never, and will never, be my life and frankly I think that those to whom it is have made a catagory mistake of a fundamental nature. This comes at the cost of slowness, of pain and of tears. But it also gives me happiness. It gives me memories of summer days at the coast and friends in various configurations at varying times. It gives me context and it gives me roots and it makes all the pain that has come with this work something that can be carried because it gives it a point over and above this little office. It is simply how I work, who I am and what I do.

And so I sit here, possibly restored to normalcy, or lost within the labyrnthine recesses of my delusions in awe at the byzantine grandeur of my own construction. I will finish, I will be a Dr and I will be successful, but at some deep level, that has never really been in doubt. Not only have I learnt about socialisation and rights and Critical Realism, but I have learnt what I hold dear, who I am and what it is that I value. I perhaps should not be surprised that such an education was anything other than painful….