Looking back at a fork in the road

Karen, Patrick, and Bitta came over yesterday. We had planned to go hiking, but with my ankle that wasn’t a good idea, so we just hung out and ate brownies and talked instead. Patrick and Karen are both in my UCLA cohort, so with the two of them over, that was two more academics than have sat around our kitchen table ever before! Even when I was a grad student I never liked to talk shop at social gatherings — which is more rare than you’d imagine — and neither did Jason, so I’d kind of forgotten in the past couple of years what it’s like to hang out with multiple academics at once (especially those in the same discipline). I saw Karen on Tuesday and had seen Patrick a couple of months ago, but they hadn’t seen each other in a long time, so they wanted to catch each other up on their work. First Patrick explained his dissertation, and then Karen explained hers.

Listening to the two of them tell what they are working on was really something. When I left the program, we were all basically starting out at the same place. No one’s dissertation was more than a couple of nascent ideas strung together; everyone sounded kind of unsure and untested. But what I heard yesterday was two fully-formed research projects, backed up with evidence and educated guesses of the sort that only come from immersion into the bygone worlds of artifacts and documents — and a healthy understanding of the secondary literature. Erik found it all fascinating, and we agreed it was more like sitting down with a couple of professors than anything else. It was very impressive and satisfying to see our friends sounding like such mature scholars, taking their place among the world’s experts in their fields.

It was great seeing them doing so well, but it also gave me a curious feeling. I always felt like an outsider in the UCLA history department because I hated my work so much, but when I left the program I was — at least on paper — at the same level as my peers. I’d taken the same number of classes, done the same number of research papers, passed the same exams, and was — on paper — ready to start preparing for oral exams, just like everyone else. In reality, my state of mind left me far behind my classmates in terms of preparedness, but as I say, on paper at least I looked no worse off than anyone. We were all just still figuring things out. But I chose a different path instead of accepting the academic route with all its institutional support and assistance, and that’s changed things considerably. My friends have been proceeding up a road that was laid out in advance of their coming by generations of scholars, paved with traditions, lined with familiar old way stations, planted with the fruits and flowers of all their predecessors’ diligent work. While they climbed steadily up this well-lit trail, I made my way to a different mountain, and there I have been hacking away brush and carting away the stones to make an entirely new path. Now, two or three years later, I find myself standing exactly where I was two or three years earlier: at the bottom of a mountain, looking up. I don’t have the bridges and gardens and encouragement of longstanding institutions (however destitute), though other explorers call to me from other mountains: “It can be done!” “That distant peak can be reached!” And now I have my cohort friends moving far up their own mountain, showing me by their progress how much distance can be covered in a few years of hard work. But I’m not there yet.

It sounds a little bleak, but I don’t take it that way. I’m not depressed about it — two or three years just to get to the same position on a different mountain! — because I know it was worth it. I have never had any regrets, and when I listened to Patrick and Karen talk about their dissertations, I felt no desire to be doing what they’re doing. But hearing them discuss their work so expertly really cast up to me the solitude and vastness of the path I’ve chosen. Oh, when I turn out novels and graphic novels and portraits and braided rugs and decoupaged boxes in plenty, no one will be able to say I’ve wasted my time. And it did strike me yesterday that I should be working harder on my projects, the way I used to work on research papers (especially my much-beloved senior thesis) — and that’s a useful thing to realize. But it did give me a curious feeling to be able to see before me so clearly the difference between the path I’ve chosen and the path I’ve left. People write books and make movies about this kind of moment — it’s not a gift we’re often given — and it’s given me plenty to think about!