Waves

by Lucy S.

I’m trying to write this final project, and once again, I feel like it’s falling apart. I told someone today that I feel like someone took a giant steel wool pad and jammed it down my throat to scrub my heart and lungs and stomach raw and bleeding from the inside. Melodramatic, I guess, but I didn’t consciously seek the metaphor. It just keeps coming to mind. I don’t feel well physically, and my mind feels heavy and obstructed, not quick, not intuitive, not sensitive.

My first two semesters back at the university to finish my undergrad degree (fall 2009; spring 2010), the metaphors that kept coming to me unbidden -- daydreams or memories -- were treading water and jumping waves. Mostly jumping waves, which came from memories of being at the beach as a young kid with my mom and siblings and family friends, or once in a while, my dad as well, and going out to where the water would come up to about my waist (not so high on the adults), and having people hold my hands and pull me up when the higher waves came in. Anyone who’s done this as a child knows that it can be a thrill. It feels so fun to be buoyed by the wave as your feet leave the sand.

Last semester in my graduate program, the metaphor that came to mind was of a girl at a middle-school where my parents used to work after my dad retired from the post-office. She’d compulsively pick up pennies, and other kids had noticed. Some mean ones started bringing pocketfuls to throw at her. They would encircle her and then throw them from all directions. She would then take her backpack off of her shoulders, grab it by the straps, and swing it around faster and faster as she spun in a circle as a defensive move while she yelled at them to stop it, and sometimes cried. My dad would get so upset about them doing this to this girl. When he took the boys who did this into the office, the principal (or vice-principal) said, “Well, she’s kind of weird anyway.” I think stories like this abound for working-class people – the stories we tell each other about how this or that person may be highly educated but lacks common-sense or decency.

I don’t claim to have any right to imagine myself as that girl, but again, it came unbidden, and I swear, I could feel myself swinging that backpack around. I don’t know what all this means. For me, I just thought of it as my hyper-defensiveness at times in the wake of feeling very hurt, and feeling that too many things were coming at me from all directions. But maybe it means more that I don’t grasp.

And now it’s the steel wool pad. The person I told said, “Geez, your metaphors are getting grimmer.” I think the swinging backpack is still close in mind, though. One thing about getting to this point of anxiety and emotional pain is that at a certain point, I finally have to see a dark humor in it, and sometimes that’s when I start to come back to what I think of as ‘myself.’

If it weren’t for pending deadlines, I could do other things on the days when I feel this way. But when I force myself to sit at the computer re-reading my essay, ordering myself to produce, that’s when I sink. I have trouble concentrating, and I cry a lot on those days. The other person who had the fellowship in my program told me last year that she cried every day of her first semester and half of her second and third. The stress is high, especially when papers or presentations are due. The end of the semester looms with the three 20-plus page papers to write in a short period of time. But that’s over; this is supposed to be the easier semester.  At the same time, I always know how fortunate I am to have the fellowship, and I love being there when I’m not in this kind of agony, so it’s hard to sort these things out. What is wrong with me?

Here are some accounts I know of other people struggling with depression and anxiety in academia.

Justin, my oldest son, worked at a writing center at the university, and one of his coworkers said that her partner – a grad student – had stopped functioning as a student and almost as a person. She said that he laid in bed a lot of the time curled up in a fetal position under the blankets. He stopped going to class, work, anywhere -- turned off his phone, withdrew from the world, all day, all night. 

A 21 year old sat next to me my first semester in this program; during those last few weeks, I watched her visibly sink. We’d talked and joked every week, but she became silent and morose. She slunk down in her seat, hunched over, staring at the table. She struggled to finish her paper. We’d become writing partners and kept in touch between semesters. She said she’d gone on anxiety medication and was better. The following semester, she sat next to me and would bring in books on panic attacks to pull out and page through with me before class started. We’d laugh at ourselves. After classes, we’d often walk out together and talk a bit more about our ups and downs. Near the end, she had to start cleaning houses on weekends in addition to her fulltime job in order to save up for the cost of the next class (over $2000).  This hurt her academic performance. In grad school, at least in literature, B’s are inadequate, and she got her second B that semester. She didn’t return. I talked with her one time on campus; I can’t remember why she was there, but she said to me with resignation and pain, “It’s all a disaster.” 

I keep thinking that I should have marched right into the professor’s office to say that this was how economic injustice gets replicated in institutions. I don’t know how I could have done it if she didn’t want to. And that professor had no idea that she was working so many hours or that she'd had to go on anxiety meds late in the previous semester. He cares about students and about social justice. If only we knew each other better in these institutions. I feel guilty, and so sad. I miss her. 

Someone I was friendly with for a while – a part-time adjunct – had to go on anti-depressants because her inability to secure fulltime teaching employment ate at her sense of self-esteem. She’d lie on the couch for hours, crying and crying. Her partner would be annoyed that she seemed to get so little done when she only worked part-time.  I wonder how many people have gone on pharmaceutical drugs for mental health problems triggered by aspects of academia.

The most poignant was Andy. I didn’t know him well, but I saw him deteriorate. He was the T.A. for a political science class I had in 2006. (I wrote about this here: http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/03/andrew-and-catherine-taking-citizenship.html )  He was a low-key person from what I could tell in our class and conversations we sometimes had afterward – a truly nice person, a bit nervous, a little under-confident in his demeanor, but smart and seemingly fine. Later in the semester, he looked down a lot when he talked; he mumbled more; he too visibly sunk. In late April, we all went to class one day to find a different professor in our classroom, telling us that Andy had been killed. He told us that what most of us hadn’t known was that the professor for the class also happened to be Andy’s mother. Later, she said that Andy had struggled with mental health problems before; when his grandfather had died, he’d had a kind of breakdown. But he’d been fine for some time, and then something had apparently given way. He’d run out of gas and been running on the side of the freeway in the dark with no shoulder-lane when he was hit and killed instantly. A horrible accident. But his parents also connected the risky act to his bipolar problems getting much worse. Since then, I’ve thought about the point in the semester in which this happened, with the big graduate papers coming due.

I don’t want to ‘use’ Andy’s tragedy too strongly in my questioning of academic stress and alienation and profound existential pain, because I didn’t know him well enough (though I did get to know his parents better later). But I know that those elements could not have helped him.

The answer that some people give to these problems is basically a ‘love it or leave it’ answer.  ‘This is academia – take it or leave it,’ can be the stance. I vehemently disagree. These are OUR institutions, all of ours, and they need to make a place for all of us, not just a small group who gets filtered in because they somehow manage the high stress at who knows what cost to themselves and their loved ones and their society.  I LOVE my education, and I don’t see why I have to always feel at risk for being hurled out if I can’t perform on demand. What is the sense in approaching education this way?  We need to hear from many perspectives, not only a certain kind of learner, and one who in various ways may have been more privileged than those who struggle. I don’t mean to set up a race to misery competition by saying that. I do not begrudge anyone their previous learning and good habits and excellent writing. I am only saying that we all deserve to learn our whole lives. And don’t they want us there?  If this learning is important and valuable, isn’t it important and valuable for everyone who wants to learn?

I’m not as bad off as the student curled up in a fetal position or the one in my program who went on anxiety meds or the deeply depressed part-time teacher or Andy. But I understand how people slip further and further down into these collapses.

People lift me up. My kids do every day. I can talk to them or even just hear them talking and laughing and playing music. They’ve always kept me alive. My parents and extended family who I usually end up talking to by cellphone while on my way to or from somewhere. My sister. My aunt Dolores. Good friends. A friend stayed with us last summer; she’s now far away, but she knows my academic struggles because they’re similar to her own, though hers are far worse. She’s under such pressure. We email short encouragements to each other most days, and sometimes we Skype. I miss walking across campus with her, laughing, or talking at coffee shops about politics and relationships and so much else. I have a friend who takes all my panicking emails when I’m in the throes of these downs or even the ups that follow them in a somewhat manic way, or all the in-between ‘great idea’ times. Writing can be so isolating, and this is one way I reach out to another person to lift me from the worst of that isolation. He’s such a gentle, generous, passionate person who does so much to care for so many people, a heroic person. I have a friend who comes here on many Sunday evenings with her partner and two sons, and we have lively discussions about how to live, sometimes cutting up food at the same time. I have a dear friend I met in my undergrad program who makes me tea in his apartment or sometimes halal meat and rice, and we talk for hours, and walk around his neighborhood. We’re so blunt and sarcastic with each other, yet not unkind, and we laugh so much. I have a friend who was my honors thesis partner, and we had such passionate discussions about education every week over lunch back then. When we meet, we still talk about our ideals and dreams bound to what we believe education CAN be. I have friends who have created an intentional community in Vermont, friends who live with such integrity and warm joy and wisdom. And Gloria, always Gloria, the friend of my lifetime, who grounds me, who long ago became family, whose voice weaves the years together. We know what we've been through. Many others. This paragraph swells like a big wave with all of these people, and I feel buoyed by them after writing it.

And there are many in my program who care -- who put out their hands to help lift others. 

Together, we all ride the salt-water waves.