Ink and Vein

Eight years ago, I defended my doctoral dissertation and I passed.

I didn’t expect to. I knew the work I submitted wasn’t that good. I wasn’t sure I could’ve done any better, though I wished I had.

My defense was humiliating.

Looking back, part of me wanted to fail the defense so I could just walk away. That hour-long period was the culmination of some of the worst years of my life. Failing would’ve been proof that I should have quit when I wanted to, in my second year of the program.

Failing also would have crushed me, I’m sure, in ways I can’t imagine. And quitting the program could’ve left me with regrets, too, just as finishing the program did.

It’s irrelevant, since neither of those things happened (at least, not in this part of the multiverse).

After my defense, I went to my usual Wednesday night haunt: the Red Dirt Poetry Open Mic at Sauced in the Paseo. I decided to do standup comedy that night, for the first time, and it was a colossal failure. One person in the audience laughed at it, and that’s because she was working through a doctoral program, too. Otherwise, the jokes were too niche and my despair too strong for any kind of humor to come through.

I drank too many IPAs, and was congratulated and celebrated, but I just felt so very hollow. What was supposed to be a celebration felt like a funeral, instead, and my emotions surrounding the experience are still, eight years later, tangled and complicated.

The pain of that time feels like it belongs to someone else, some version of myself I don’t fully recognize.

Yet, she still lives in me. She still is me. I feel her presence strongly, every time I want to numb out with alcohol or binge watch TV, or scroll on social media or the internet, losing myself in news and articles and animal videos to disconnect from the mental turmoil, the fear, the confusion, the loneliness, of daily life.

I feel her presence strongly when I long for validation from others, and when I hide from that same validation I crave.

I feel her presence strongly when I long for love and touch, and when, ashamed of wanting these things, I shove the desire away.

I feel her presence when I isolate because it’s the only thing that feels safe after a life where the presence of other people often meant the I would be hurt, and not just emotionally.

I feel her presence when I try to write my book, and when I realize that the woman I was in graduate school was just another version of the child I was, lonely and wishing for someone to hold her and comfort her when she couldn’t sleep.

The woman I was in graduate school, the woman I am now, in all my versions of walled-off or vulnerable, energetic and social or tired and isolated, friendly and warm or angry and cold… that woman is carrying around a child who longed to feel loved, and when she did feel loved, didn’t trust that she deserved it.

My dissertation defense happened two days before my birthday, a day I have always had complicated feelings about, and another day that people sometimes want to celebrate with me, when I have no desire to celebrate it.

As my birthday nears, again, and I come up on forty-one, I think of last year, when I traveled alone to the place of my birth, and to the place where my twin sister is buried. I came away from that experience with a new focus for my memoir – one that shifted away from the analytical lens I was placing on my childhood and grad school experience – and I felt so confident that I would finish that book.

Almost a year later, and the book isn’t done. Instead, the child in me has been awakened, again, by events in my community, by events in the world, and I find myself just wanting to hide, again. That child is afraid, and she feels unsafe and feels like the only way to be safe is to hide.

There’s a stubbornness in her, though, as she continues to reach out, anyway, as she continues to try to connect with others, as she still seeks that love and community she has always wanted, even though she feels she doesn’t deserve it, or can’t trust it.

That woman I was, the woman I am… she just keeps going. She keeps wanting. She keeps trying. Sometimes, she even gets to experience a bit of joy and excitement along the way.