The light blogging, reader, can be laid at the feet of any of several causes — frenetic/ecstatic work-madness; a real, honest-to-god social life (girl scout’s honor, it’s true); the charms of a certain beguiling Victorianist; laziness; the usual sense a graduate student gets of having nothing to say because her entire life can be summed up in one sentence: “I, uh, read a lot.”

Beyond the ecstatic bounds of everyday existence (happiness, reader: it’s possible), life lately has been mostly ruminating. Fantasies about my future life as a Ph.D. student in American City* occupy a large slice of my time, to be honest. It is a tremendous relief even to be able to entertain such fantasies, let alone to have in my grasp the promise of their realization — or of the realization of something like them.

What they do for me, these fantasies, is to put my life here at Brit Uni into context. Only when I got my first offer did I realize that part of the anxiety that was turning me into a giant ball of goo for so many months was the sense that, without the opportunity to take the next step in my academic career, my work here would have no purpose. This work delights me, inspires me, frustrates me, yes — this work is a total experience, and would be worthwhile for its own sake. Yet I had always, I now realize, the constant nagging fear that this M.A. might turn out to be just one more in a series of detours I’ve been making since I finished undergrad. What if I found myself, come March, applying for teaching jobs? Or, come September, (o horror) temping and scrambling anew to discover some direction for my life?

I’ve felt much the way I did my final year in undergrad — what is this for? Where am I going? When can I start something big, something ambitious, something serious? I wasn’t ready, then, for that something — and was mature enough at least to know that. Just two years later, I am ready — I am sure of it.

This is big, reader. This Ph.D. Combined with the idea of what comes after it, it’s bloody huge. That alone thrills me — the joy of embarcation. Or rather, the joy of having already embarked, and now at last setting a firm course. I discover, suddenly, how far I have already come — how much I’ve learned already, how much this study has shaped my thoughts, my habits, my intellectual and professional desires. How swiftly I have begun to hone myself. How dear to me are the relationships that I am forging. So swiftly! I’ve been here only five months, and already, so much has changed, or grown, or come out of absolutely bloody nowhere and knocked me flat with shock. And think! Think what six more years of this will do. A whole new person — a scholar, a professional — will come out of this. She is, indeed, already beginning to emerge.

I have a purpose, suddenly. It seems insane, I know, to pin such a grand thing as “purpose” on such a trivial thing as admittance to a graduate program. But that trivial thing gives shape to my current universe — what I am doing is not just a lark, after all, but a substantial project, a job, a professional endeavor.

One great constant in the life of a student is her sense of the insignificance, the insufficiency, of her own work — she has wild ambitions, and never the time, the energy, the resources, nor simply the intellectual wherewithal to realize them. Nothing, nothing is ever enough. The compensation for that frustration has just been delivered to me: this insufficiency becomes acceptable when it becomes part of a process, an apprenticeship, this continual building and rebuilding of self or selves.

Most importantly, this sense of purpose has cleared away the dross of uncertainty so that I can get down to the essence of my life here: the immediacy of present work. I love it, reader. I love this work intensely. And now, even now, I get to experience the extraordinary joy of beginning, slowly, to transform that love into a viable career.

What luck I have, reader. What tremendous fucking luck.

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*When everyone’s contractually agreed to be everyone else’s partner of whatever sort, the pseudonyms will become more descriptive, in keeping with my overall unstated blogging ethic of transparent pseudonymity.