– Housework beyond basic cleaning
– Yard maintenance
– Painting
– Doing own nails
– Dyeing own hair
– Grocery shopping in the car
– Anything involving large shopping centers, parking lots, or big box stores
A large, modern or modernized urban studio or loft is the place for me to live, seriously. It could have a roof garden or something, some way to be outdoors. If we get any of these here in Maringouin and I can trade the house for one, perhaps I should. I could join a community garden. I would be able to afford a good stereo system and I would have a lot more free time. I could go camping on the weekends instead of mix chemicals and pound nails.
*
My attempt to become less research oriented and more teaching and service oriented, and to accept country living as punishment for having done the Ph.D has not worked out well. I remained research oriented and could not help it, yet did not produce enough, and still failed to eradicate the fundamental aspects of myself which I am convinced hurt people.
Perhaps intervention should have happened earlier. Perhaps if I really had gone to a SLAC, established a GPA ceiling and stuck to it, made sure to engage in certain kinds of activities and not others … but no, my student actually tried to do something like this, become the person others desired she be, and she did not do well at that or at anything.
It has occurred to me that perhaps what I did is not the issue. Perhaps people would have been hurt by what I did with my life no matter what it was. Perhaps if I had turned down my aunt’s inheritance and found a scholarship that paid for every cent of college I would feel less guilty about my interests, but these might still be hurtful to others.
It is possible that there is no way out of the conundrum. And I want to make more money, and it is not true that if I made more I would want still more, and academics making twice as much and whose campuses have books on them call me materialistic and naïve for coming out and saying this. Me cago en la leche.
Most of all, though, I want not to feel guilty about being a person and having interests and views, and about being capable of independence.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Viewing this from my perspective: you have all the time in the world to do what you want.
But not the means. I am basically just irritated because I not only wasted 20 important years, I also felt miserable doing it, and was doing it against my own will and better judgment. I ought to make a list of the things I accomplished in this time — whether they were goals or not, they are still accomplishments.
The other thing to remember is to write it off the way people do having been in wars. It is something that happened, not something one is so mega responsible for. I have all this sadness about what I did to myself and allowed to be done but I also torture myself over it, which is not a good idea.
Me too, all of the above (list of things you don’t like) though I don’t have to paint my nails or dye my hair. If I did, I’m sure I’d be bad at it. Luckily I don’t have a yard right now. I don’t dislike painting, but am not a pro at it either.
The authentic life should never feel guilty. In other words, if you someone tries to make you feel guilty about that, they are wrong, even when they are right. Like my ex-spouse telling me I only care about my research. It is a kind of brainwashing, because it’s supposed to be bad to care about that, and wasn’t true (because I cared about other things too).
It is my mother’s mental health and my parents’ marriage I feel so bad about. Had I been a different person, she could have been happier, so they could have been and would be. Had my father’s aunt not paid for us to go to college, such that they felt they had no control over where we went, they could have controlled us more and been happier, and thus would not have been so hurtful. Had we realized how TRULY awful it was for them to have her pay for us to go to college, we also could have turned it down, so they would have been happier and we could have been happier. Etc.
I cannot believe I am still concerned about these things, but I am. I may have a magic spell or something cast on me to remove them.
I just realized who has the same obsession — keeps talking about how she let the generation above her down, and tries to explain to herself how she got to this life where she is unhappy but which she cannot figure out how to escape: my mother! The one I feel so guilty about!
If I gave up this worry it would be a true achievement and a more genuine new year’s resolution than any of those I have invented so far.
I sincerely doubt you are responsible for your mother’s mental health or the state of your parents’ marriage. I don’t know them, or you, but it’s easier for someone else to see than the people involved. Think about how ridiculous it would be for me to lay that on my own daughter. “If you live your own life, as authentically as you know how, that would ruin my own life because I have other plans for you.” If you had done everything they wanted, they would still find some other alibi for their own unhappiness. That’s just the way people like that operate. So I think your last paragraph is right on the mark: “If I gave up this worry it would be a true achievement and a more genuine new year’s resolution than any of those I have invented so far.”
Yes, I know it is completely irrational. It is a piece of verbal violence that Reeducation really nailed in. I don’t think this way during the day but it permeates dreams sometimes, or lies in the penumbra. Then during the day, it takes a while to shake, or (de)motivates what I do without my knowing what it it is. Up until today I thought I had to unwind it somehow, work it out somehow, but my thought now is that perhaps I can just label this line of (poor) reasoning as the enemy and shoo it away when it arises.
There are various versions of it but they all come down to: any problem now is a direct result of having gotten to go to a large research university and having liked it and having done well, all of which are sins I am now expiating. It is so irrational it is insane, but on the other hand, look at the prissy columns in the CHE about how (essentially) the wages of sin are overwork and underemployment, and we should be grateful to be surviving, and so on.
I can easily label that logic as the enemy, and I hereby label the guilt over having gone to a university, not a college – technical school – art school as the enemy, too.
Americans believe we are only (or mainly) responsible downward: parents look after children, but children are not responsible for their parents, or only when the parents are old and ill. As a society, we “pay it forward.” But if people are from or exposed to cultures that believe in upward responsibility, and yet live in the US with this culture of downward responsibility, you wind up with dreadful cognitive dissonance and a struggle to reconcile two fundamentally irreconcilable views of family. But if you can say, and believe, that you only have to pay forward, not backward, that this is the cultural norm and you want to conform to it, that can be a powerful tool. The personal is anthropological!
I may not be able to get over the idea that my interests are some major sin. What I may be able to do is set that aside, stop letting it stop me.
It occurs to me there may be a classic “double bind.” Your parents are academics, yet they tell you not to be, or to be that in a way impossible to do. They have disappointed the generation behind them, but they tell you you cannot do this. For them to tell you not to be what they are, not to do what they have done, is deeply unfair, since they have also established the pattern which you have followed. It is a double bind because you would have lost either way you played the game.
You have not wasted a moment of your life. I’m not saying this out of any fatuous sentimentality but because I know how hard it is to get through certain times. You will reap the harvest some day.
Hattie – Yes, I trust you on this. What is difficult here is a combination of certain aspects of local culture plus funding issues plus the instition’s war on my field (which, given the attitude they express via their actions, I have never understood why they do not just cut … although my student says it is all because of the outgoing dean and things will change now). With relief on any one of these fronts I would not feel so constrained or frustrated.
JM – Classic double bind, yes, but it is tighter than that. It was more like, I am supposed to be an artist or a musician or a poet, and be married to one with an inheritance. We were not to be in: science, social science, medicine, business, or law; these were enemy fields and were scorned. I do not have what it takes in terms of talent to support myself as a musician or an artist. I can see being in ethnomusicology, I suppose. But that is sort of like being what I am in and I studied every arts and humanities degree program closely before choosing the one I did, and I stand by the choice.
Academia was the only acceptable way to make a living, and yet going into academia was this horrible sin in itself. Musicology, they would have approved of and it would have set me apart as correctly similar yet correctly different. Perhaps that would have freed me officially, but it would not be very different from what I actually did and it would have been very impractical; there has never been any job market to speak of in it. I was being logical going into Latin American literature because if I was not going to follow my social science style passions, fields where I could excel out of love and brilliance but which it would have been utter treason to enter, I had to go into a field where there was work.
My mind is very abstract: language, math, system, design, poetry, theory, and I can also work with actual material — so if I were in science, I could handle organic chemistry and would not have to limit myself to subjects based on pure deduction. I do not have all the manual dexterity and patience one needs for some forms of laboratory science, music and art. I can do ceramics and sculpture and design as hobbies or possibly as a professional sideline, but at music I do not even have enough talent to have it be a pleasant hobby — at least, not when I am interested enough in it to want to listen to people who are really good, and not when I have other talents that so eclipse whatever performance ability I might have that I really prefer to develop those.
I am not nearly as schocked at the idea of being in business / the liberal professions as the generation up; I may not have the bourgeois aspiration but I can handle it and I do not have aristocratic or Bohemian fantasies. This, combined with my lack of disdain for applied subjects makes me more crass than is quite acceptable.
*
In order to prove to our mother and thus ourselves that we deserved to be recognized as human, I felt we had to become tenured professors in humanities at Ivy League institutions. Then we would be considered valid beings and also people, and we could make our own choices and go on with our lives. But it happened for me too soon, as soon as I got a tenure track job I was comfortable in and started to do well and enjoy life. It was: “OK! I am 18 now and in college! Now all I need to do is choose my major and start studying!” But really, I was over 30 and had this fancy Ph.D already, and a profession to which I was not uncommitted. So this is my own double bind: I got what I had come for too soon, was ready to go from this field or change directions radically in it, but got bound in by others’ expectations. I should think about what “going” or “leaving” could mean — it could have been as simple as handling things as I saw fit at a certain point instead of following rules that are standard but did not apply.
*
My father didn’t disappoint the generation behind but my mother feels she did. She would have liked me to validate her choices in life but I resembled the generation of bluestockings she felt oppressed by. The root thing, though, seems to be that college money — my aunt, who did not get to go to college, made money and left it in trust for the interest to go to our education, so my parents, who expected to receive the principal in the 70s, did not actually receive it until the 80s. And to boot, this meant we could choose our own UCs and not be told we had to stay home or had to go to private schools where we could get scholarships. So we went to big urban public schools in state but away from home and this choice apparently messed with the image our parents had of us and really hurt them therefore. They retaliated by refusing to discuss college, careers, etc. with us and criticizing every choice we made very bitterly … and then my liking graduate school was such an affront to my mother. And we already felt so responsible for her. One was so helpless: one had to keep oneself alive, but every gesture one made toward this felt like a knife-blow to her, to judge by their reactions.
All of this is really unfortunate but it kept being thrown up to us, and then Reeducation seemed to think it was valid in some way, seemed to think I should give it some credence which I had not done before.
*
It is quite interesting to write this. One of the things I see is the degree to which I, the toddler, absorbed and identified with all the issues my parents were having then — tenure anxiety and so on, reinterpreted to toddler version — and it really formed me. What my parents did about that inheritance was really cruel and unfair but what can I say, they were in mega-pain or else were just under the influence of the demon drink, which does inflict a pain all its own. We got these ideas about not being lovable or employable, about being allowed to exist only as an undeserved favor, and so on; I am guessing some members of the generations up felt this way as well.
*
I think my mother felt as though she were fighting me for her life and I can see why. It also must have been very confusing since my official role was to justify her life, not challenge it. But it is like being in a Shakespeare history play or something, struggling for every inch of space with your blood rivals. It is because of this war that I froze my research identity to save it for later.
I’ll spare you any more of my amateur psychoanalysis. You obviously have great insight into this dynamic. I hope you find a way to make things work for you despite this inherent difficulty.
Haha! You can see why I am a frustrating therapy client, I am already bursting with insight and empathy and even happiness, the things one is supposed to learn (although I think psychoanalysis should be teaching freedom, which is what I lack, it teaches adjustment or something, which I have too much of).
I actually think the way out of this is to study it from a historical and sociological, not a psychoanalytic point of view. DEH thinks that in US you “pay forward” and not back but that is not the US I know. The questions are what is family and who has a right to property, and so on.
Apparently my parents wanted that money when they wanted it so they could live well in what they planned to be their last couple of decades, at which point they would pass it on. So it is as though we were to be tortured while young and disabled professionally, but it would be all right because we would inherit.
Then my aunt’s will put things out of order so we became the enemy.
All the historical and sociological forces that go into this fascinate me and the reason I like all authors born in the 1880s and 1890s is that they are the ages of my grandparents and my aunt. My parents felt constrained by the 50s but were also trying to negotiate with 19th century Kultur somehow and it is all quite interesting.
Also: I think they really did not consider us competent — that was why the concept was, suffer now but at something that can be a nice hobby, then marry and inherit. But I would prefer not to have been disabled over inheriting, and I wish my parents could now just spend their money and not worry about what they will have to leave us or not.
I don’t seem to have handed any of this complex down, come to think of it, don’t seem to use money as symbol or way of wielding power over other people at all. I should probably congratulate myself for this.
Aha, what a useful thread. It really shows how ridiculous all that really picky criticism of our tastes and interests was. And the famous time I said, “Who are you, really, what credentials do you have to be so hyper critical?” and was called “vicious,” I was actually being completely evenhanded.
What I thought of this morning: perhaps the problem really is not that I am the wrong person and should have been something else. Perhaps the problem really is them and all their demands about who one should be and what one should satisfy and make up for and what levels of poverty and suffering one should attain so as to be designated a person.
Anyway I think people really should not indulge in verbal abuse because it is not free. You may think you need it or deserve it or have the right but it does permanent damage and it will destroy people and relationships, there is no escaping it.
Also, addressing Christmas cards to certain relatives — I have no idea why I should feel apologetic, really. Abominable behavior and they want me to apologize for not accepting it. But this is the typical pattern: when I feel apologetic or fearful what it tends to mean is that someone *else* is behaving badly, whether I want to acknowledge this or not.
Also, about the money. I wonder how much scheming and manipulation about money they have actually engaged in — they have always been accusing me of this, sometimes in quite fanciful ways; perhaps it is they who have plotted so extensively.
And: these people are incapable of seeing us as we are, really, and one should not try to negotiate on this. There was that LeGuin story about the girl who disappeared to Yellowknife, just had to get far away to be herself; I relate.
And now I see more, only a few days later, it is shocking how fast things are moving.
It is: having always been so much under the power of people not entirely rational — and being considered the irrational one because of seeing that. You cannot have a rational conversation with irrationality and this is why I go around in circles.
It really is time for a full stop, time to lay that burden down. It is hard to imagine life without carrying that stone, although I have glimpsed the free, light feeling from time to time.
YES, it was this: always bargaining with irrationality, appeasing it, negotiating with it, trying to cure it.
CURE. Here, actually, one of the Al-anon formulae is useful: they say “you did not cause it, you cannot control it, and you cannot cure it.”
This really does go for dealing with people with mental illnesses just as well.
YES, always putting irrationality first. It really is amazing. The irrational person was in charge and had to be not just appeased and cared for but to have their convictions confirmed.
The thing is this: in that disease the person wants you to be them. Really wants it. Not to comply hurts them and they can become very dangerous. Yet to be them is to be dangerously unable to handle life, so both not to be them and to be them are terribly dangerous. This is the double bind.
AH, and OK — it is knowing I am in danger of being felled by their irrational behavior, trying to find ways to avoid it, that is so depressing. This month, for instance, they were going into anxiety/drunken mode at me on the phone so I did not listen to the phone for three days because I really needed to stay sane myself, so they sent the police to my house.