23 September, 1998

More Questions Than Answers

The university is a bustling core of energy. Students sit outside of the class-buildings smoking, talking, playing various sports and just "hanging out". They are generally full of the animated presence which characterizes, in my mind, the modern college student. Three weeks into classes, they still look young to me, despite the relatively small gap between our ages. I wonder if any of them feel the same way as I do, if the first-years are still overwhelmed by the newness of it, the change from high school thinking modes, as I am overwhelmed in the change from undergraduate to graduate thinking.

I've had more reading in these first three weeks, than I had in a semester of early undergraduate work at Smith, and Smith is not an "easy" college, by any stretch of the means. Las Thursday, I had a crisis of conscience of sorts. No, that's too "analytical" -- see the graduate high-mindedness is already beginning to be firmly entrenched -- what I had was a minor break-down. The sheer amount of work I'm facing, coupled with serious doubts about my ability to complete it and a re-evaluation of why I'm doing this at all reduced me to incoherent sobs and floods of tears until well into the early morning hours.

For some reason, I thought that going to grad school would help alleviate the mid-twenties "identity crisis" which I've been struggling with since the fall of two years ago. I believed that taking a step towards my long-term goal of becoming a teacher would give me a more defined sense of direction. I felt that getting back into an academic environment would bring back that sense of belonging and community which I'd found so important at Smith. While I am in fact, beginning to get back that communal feeling, if in a more harried and hectic way as we all try to juggle more balls than seems sanely feasible, that sense of resolution and definition remains elusive.

In fact, going to classes has opened up more questions and questioning of myself. I natter and worry about my abilites as a researcher and writer. Issues brought up in the course entitled The Historian's Craft make me doubt my very reasons for attending, make me re-examine my motives, only to find them narrow and selfish. The intensity of my self-scrutiny, in other words, has been in no way lessened by this experience and is in fact, rising as my mind shakes off the intellectual rust of two years of idleness and becomes sharply analytical and critical once more.

So ... I still don't really know where I'm going ... what I'm doing and where I fit in the greater scheme of things.

But at least my brain, is far from being asleep. This is such a relief and such a marvelous feeling, that it makes me want to cry ... with joy.