People Ask me About Grad School

​People keep asking me about grad school. How’s it going? What’s it like? And I can say I’m reading a lot. I’m meeting a lot of new writing. Meeting a lot of people, some of them I like. But I don’t know where or when I am.

Winter as a concept is new to me. Snow and cold is novel and exciting, though not necessarily in a good way. I keep opening the windows in my apartment after reading the temperature on an app. I want to feel it and know what nineteen degrees feels like, and eighteen, and four. Inside I crank the heater as high as 76 and run the ceiling fan to push the hot air into the office where I sit most of the day in front of the computer: typing, talking, singing along, watching my little box to see if I look like I’m paying attention. I lose myself momentarily in the virtual place: leaping through tabs of email, twitter, group chat with my sisters, and when I look outside at the blank white yard, silent ice, there’s a moment of dissonance: where was I just at? How am I here now? Where am I? In a chair in a house in a city in Iowa in the middle of the country on the back of the world suspended(?) or at least twirling on an axis through space creating time? Wasn’t it just morning? Why is it dark out?

Anyway, I think winter is fucking me up. Or the pandemic is fucking me up. Or grad school is fucking me up. Or wanting this is fucking me up. I was pretty solid about what I was looking for when I said yes. I didn’t know when I applied, and I didn’t know in the year I meant to apply but didn’t. But on the way I figured I would eat up the education, the connections, the legacy, the experience, and the stipend. I’d write an amazing manuscript and eventually I’d make my way to a deserving community college and I would share my knowledge and experience. I could keep writing and contribute to society in a way that I know, and that I know actually does change lives. And that would be an adequate life. More than adequate. That would be a good life. It could be great with the right accessories.

But now it’s not right. Now other ideas come to me. New fantasies because my world is opening in new ways. So many times I have to stop myself from lending it too much weight. I already made it in; I don’t need to continue to crawl through the snow on my knees. Besides the way people act too cool to be dazzled by the big name makes me hide my enthusiasm for being the first person in my family to ever be awarded a stipend and a teaching assistantship. It’s not their fault all their parents have degrees. But just once I’d like explicit permission to be happy and proud of something regardless of the hollowness of the institution. No one ever gives anything explicitly though and it’s not my fault I’m so shy.

I think it might be the pressure of letting people get to know me. I don’t feel like myself. I perform myself a lot more because I’m trying so hard not to crumble into so many old habits. I’m pushing myself to be the self I am when I’m by myself because I never let myself be her (as if that’s not a sentence to tell a therapist). I’m trying not to squander moments because they all feel so crucial.

You see, there’s just a lot to juggle and it’s hard enough to will my body out of this hand-me-down bed in my hand-me-down apartment towards my new possessions: My laptop, My electric kettle, My collection of oddly shaped jars that I promise to turn into something useful since Iowa doesn’t recycle glass. That’s my artist’s rendition of telling you I borrow and lean on others to move towards what’s new and good and meant for me. That’s how I’ve always gone through life, not because I’m humble and good hearted. I am also those things, but because I had to. I feel like I have to give this context whenever I do anything here. If I write something I gotta tell all the stories and the stories’ stories to make sure they know what I’m talking about. If I’m lost, I have to explain where I’m from and why I’m here, how lost am I exactly? I never feel like I simply exist, I explain.

The weight of the differentness I feel for being my age (somewhere between 36 and forever), for my race(s), for my background, for my body, for my teeth, for my hair, blah blah I suffer anxiety blah, falls on me. I feel my differences more than anyone else does. But sometimes I want you to know I’m different. I like that I’m different, though not in all those ways. I know that those things can be flipped over like a reversible figure and become the word “strengths,” instead of “weakness.” It’s just so tedious to not be “like everyone else.” I feel like I have visible training wheels and they can all see me struggling to catch up.

The other day I got so anxious to speak in a workshop I start to panic. I started to not make eye contact with my little box in case someone saw me. I tried to fix my face into blankly studious. I turned my camera off and ran to my bathroom to breathe hot and dab under my eyelashes and not scrape eyeliner down my cheek. I come back and practice a blank look. Camera on and I fidget. I pretend to look at my notes. I pretend to listen intently. I try to think of something that hasn’t already been said. I think they all know I haven’t spoken. I prime my lips to open and I feel the sharp knife of tears in my nose, so I turn off the camera again and pray to nothing that no one calls my name or asks me for anything. When the host has ended the meeting for all I want to throw it all away. The tears, especially, but the fear too, the mean subconscious voice calling me a dumb bitch for having the audacity to have the same thoughts towards the workshop piece that someone braver voiced before I did. I sob and feel sorry for myself. I try to remember to be grateful. I try to remember I asked for this, all of this.

It was one time. Let it go, let it pass. It happened a few times last semester and there was the time you cried for an hour after the Halloween party but that might’ve been because you started drinking at 2pm and mistakenly thought someone’s costume was just their regular look and were judging them for trying to look like David Foster Wallace (tell me you’re at a writer party without telling me you’re at a writer party) and you felt really bad about it. You’re sensitive and that’s a gift. No one does what you do, because they didn’t live the life you’ve lived. You’re the only one who can tell these stories in just this way. So, you were sad today, tomorrow is another chance to do this again, try all over.
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They ask me how is grad school? What’s your MFA like? How’s Iow— Ohi— Idahuh--
it’s Iowa, right? And I usually smile my prettiest one and look down humbly, as if to say I don’t deserve all this when I know that I unequivocally, absolutely, and undoubtedly deserve every good thing that happens to me, including intentionally isolating myself from my family to teach rhetoric and talk about “my process” with a bunch of other nerds who miss the library like I do. I know that my life is changing, and I can feel myself floating just an inch off the ground unmoored from gravity as I adjust to the uprooted habits and the lost artifacts of the person I survived to become this one. I don’t know where I am, don’t know where I’m going, but I’m experiencing it all and spinning it into something resembling gold.