school

Over beers at a dive bar on Massachusetts Avenue on the coldest day of the year my advisor tells me I’m not the kind of person he could ever picture crying and I think to myself, wow, self, you have gotten through graduate school without anyone knowing you at all, just like you wanted, and I feel about one inch tall.

It’s my last semester. I struggled. I settled in exactly noplace and it was my own fault, my first year at Emerson all over again, that nasty part of me that refuses to engage or just doesn’t know how to, who’s sure the thing she said is the wrong thing, who can’t come to your party because she needs to be in bed by 10pm. That part of me can’t countenance loud noise or slimy cafeteria sandwiches, that part of me wrote How To Love and every other sentence I’ve ever strung that was worth half a damn, that part has her head tilted back on the sofa cushions thinking maybe I did this totally wrong after all, who can say.

Who can say?

I’m not someone who thinks it’s worthwhile to be vulnerable everywhere. I am easy to chat with but not easy to learn. I can see from the outside how that looks the same as snobbishness. I have always taken more than my fair share of work to get to know.

It’s occurring to me, slow and a little sadly, that I may regret not working harder myself.

For the last year and a half my standard answer when people have asked me about this program is that you get out of it exactly what you funnel in, and the truth is if I had it to do all over again, I think I might give a little more. Not in terms of nouns and verbs and characterization but in being present in the nowness of it, of committing with both hands and feet. I’ll earn the paper regardless, I’ll get the letters after my name, but six months out from graduation I can’t help but think it might have helped to do a little more actual living before I slammed it all down on the page.