"Loss and betrayal are not punctual events"
I'm in a space right now where I'm working really hard and a bit frantically on some writing for school. It is hard, challenging, exhausting and exhilarating work. Not at all coincidentally, I'm working pretty hard at growing as a person as well. An acquaintance of mine said it best last year, I think: when asked what she was working on, she casually said, "Me-search, like we all do." and then she laughed, self-mocking, as she took another drag on her cigarette.
She was right, though. And the more I ask other phd students what they're working on, the more it seems true. We dig and dig at certain ideas because we find them fascinating, even though - perhaps mostly because - we can't quite figure out why.
Right along side this investigation, this driving curiosity about something, seems to come depression and anxiety. The connection between depression, anxiety, and graduate school is fairly well documented. I've seen statistics on depressed grad students from as low as 67% to as high as 88%. That low number isn't actually very low, especially when compared to the general population in the same age and economic groups. It is unclear, however, whether people who are more prone to depression and anxiety are drawn to graduate school, or if the system itself is the cause.
My best guess is that doing a lot of digging into the stuff that fascinates you means that by default you do a lot of personal growing stuff. Which, you know. I've got some things I'd prefer not to look at in my psyche. I'm not alone. In my immediate friend group of say 20-ish people that I see frequently, 97% of them are in regular therapy and/or on medication to help. The remaining people have obvious, explicitly self-harming coping behaviors. From talking with them about *their* circles of friends, this is pretty average for our R1 university.
With that said, we're mostly a pretty happy group, and I think it is because as a group we're open about our struggles in a way that is sometimes hard to come by in the larger world.
All of that was to say that after talking to a friend who works in a related field about this yesterday, she sent me the following quotes, which I'm posting here because I want to hang on to them.
Let me say one more thing about embodiment and political depression. In the book I’ve just finished, I tried to think about depression as the residue of long-term histories of violence. I think of our bodies as this site of weight-bearing. If you think of yourself as a sensory body who is feeling the atmosphere around you when you are connecting with people in a room, sometimes you carry their heavy energy as much as you are buoyed up by their joyous energy. We are a sensitive interface with the world. We are carrying historical residues, collective residues. I’ve been thinking about racism and sexism and homophobia as these things we are carrying in our bodies from previous generations, whether from our families, our own experiences, or the fact that the world that we live in is physically shaped by histories of violence. You can choose to open yourself up to feeling that. That stuff is inside of you, but what does it mean to try to notice that? It can freak you out and bring you down [laughs]. It can be a very heavy weight. For a white person, for example, to actually be open to hearing the experiences of everyday racism that even my middle-class black academic colleagues face. To me, political depression is about accountability to those multiple generations, a way of bearing that weight and then also moving it-someway, somehow.....
I am trying to remember that as I stand on the brink of publishing this new book on depression. I’m terrified about it-I feel like it’s stupid, the writing is bad, it’s too personal. But I need to remember that it is an act of bravery to be persistent in the face of feeling bad about ourselves. I am interested in thinking about depression in terms of everyday feelings like the self-hatred that we are often weighed down by. The battle against those feelings is also part of the battle against larger systemic violence. That’s where political depression lies. It is very physical for me. Building everyday habits of survival is a practice that will move us forward. The use of art, or listening, or whatever tools we have to craft or create sociability is really important, whether it’s just on a small intimate scale or morphs into something larger.
“Cruising the Archive with Ann Cvetkovich,” Recap Magazine
As usual, there's a lot to unpack in Ann's work, but I like how positive she is here, right in the face of fear, that she's open about how these things go right alongside together. One of the things that has always drawn me to fandom is that same impulse - that curiosity and drive to think openly about the tricky things, to figure out why one is attracted to x and afraid of y (or both at the same time), to work it all out in text.
Me-search.
This entry was originally posted at http://concinnity.dreamwidth.org/53862.html. Comment wherever you like.