Another tuesday morning at Tea Lounge and I keep questioning what I'm doing with my life. I'm turning into the tired stereotype of an advice columnist who has no idea how to make her own pressing decisions. Mostly I'm worried about what to do after college.
I used to be
so sure that I wanted to go to grad school. It was easy to be sure because my love for my classes was its own argument. Grad school, I thought, would solve all my problems: by keeping me stimulated, it'd ensure that I wouldn't slip back into depression; by keeping me interested, it'd fend off mental atrophy and even insanity. (I'm aware that I walk around with some pretty bizarre phobias on a daily basis. More on this later.) I'd keep writing, maybe finish a book before I got my PhD. I'd have the kind of amazing absolutely-in-love no-room-for-doubt friendships that I treasure so much now. I'd become incredibly well-read and I'd travel the world and everything would be great. I'd be broke but I'd have everything that mattered to me, so I wouldn't care.
There are a few foreseeable problems with this plan. The first is that eventually I'll want to have kids. The timing just doesn't work out too well with grad school and the biological clock. Even if I finished by 28, I'd have to get a tenure-track job pretty much right away to be able to even
afford children. And it'd be hard as hell to work and raise kids at the same time. I'm not all that concerned about it, though, to be honest, because I decided a long time ago that planning for having children is a bad idea. It just seems to lend itself to compromise, you know? I'd rather not have kids than have them with someone I'm not absolutely sure about. And since I can't count on meeting someone like that, I certainly can't count on wanting kids. So I'll dispense with that concern for now.
The second problem is location. I'm just absolutely committed to living either in New York or in another country, and neither seems likely given the difficulty of getting professorship positions these days. I just can't see myself out in the middle of nowhere. I don't even know how to
drive. Nor do I want to. Anywhere where a bike or moped won't do is out of the question.
The third problem is inspiration. I count on being continually interested and stimulated and all of that. But friends have told me, in sober tones, that a lot of grad students lose that "spark" and find themselves trapped in these expensive programs with no job prospects. The deal, for me, is that I give up on being able to do basically anything else, in exchange for getting to do the one thing which isn't glamorous or lucrative but which meets my (rather high) lifestyle requirements. If that ceases to be true, it suddenly becomes a very bad deal. ("That's bullshit," S told me, when I expressed my fear. "I absolutely loved grad school. Anyway it's
you.")
The fourth is that I'm a woman. I guess this relates to the kids thing. It's all well and good for S to Peter Pan it, living on the lower east side, dating hip younger women (hee hee), looking 25 into his thirties, DJing on the weekends, recording with his band, sticky-tacking posters to his walls and getting his furniture off the street. But when I'm in my thirties, I'm not going to look like an undergrad. And somehow I think that'll make all of the bootleg-ness less glamorous and more.... I don't know... degraded. "I don't want to be living off of twenty-seven dollars a day when I'm thirtysomething," my friend Lucy said bluntly. "And I don't want to be going to Rubulad." I want to be an independent, powerful, gliding kind of woman, confident in my own intelligence, a kind of Sontag figure, when I'm in my thirties and fourties. But what if I just end up being cranky and lonely and a burden to the few people who stick by me? (While I get a kick out of things, I've never been all that
fun, to be honest. I'm deeply serious and literal, and it's offputting.) Janice on
The Sopranos is my worst nightmare. Being desperate that way... ugh.
I'm also concerned about my psychological motives. I worry that going to grad school would just be a way of validating my claim that I'm more intellectual than the people around me, a contention that I have to admit is central to my sense of identity and which is also probably a defensive mechanism, to some extent, leftover from a time when I felt excluded by the social community I was trapped in. That doesn't mean that I don't think I'm right to value intellectualism so highly, but I wonder if it's really in my nature to the extent that I think it is, or whether that's just something I need to believe in order to respect myself. I also worry that I only feel like I
can't go to grad school or pursue an un-lucrative career because no one in my family has. (S, on the other hand, is the progeny of two PhD.s.) Do you see the quandary I'm in? If I go to grad school, I worry that I'm just rebelling against my slightly anti-intellectual parents. If I don't, I worry that I'm caving to them. I have to try to think objectively about the thing, because psychologically my stakes in it are way too high to trust my reasoning otherwise.
I hate that I know I'd think differently about this if I were a man.
The funny thing is that despite how thoroughly I've questioned going to grad school, I really don't see any other options. I'm not very employable.
Wow, writing this was incredibly cathartic and clarifying. Whew. Okay, back to work...
