A slight but important difference between a blog and a memoir is that the blog captures events as they are happening. That’s not to make a value judgment; hindsight and perspective lend value to memoirs. Immediacy, however, is also very valuable.
My graduate school story is a memoir, albeit one written fairly closely after the fact. Wolfangel’s is a blog. I don’t know if the two stories, read in parallel by a third party, feel as close in spirit as I happen to think they are. Close or not, I regularly wince in recognition at moments like this:
It’s hard to hear; I feel somewhat stupid, or — no, stupid works here. As does failure, or worthless, or any of the worse terms I use against myself, on bad days.
Yes, sure, it was the right decision for me. But part of me whispers that I did it because I was scared of failing because I’m just no good. Failing because you quit is different, after all. Part of me says that.
Mm. Yes. Part of me said that too, quite insistently. Curiously, though, my memory places this particular train of thought before I actually left. Afterwards, I was just too busy.
That preoccupation saved me a lot of angst, I think. I had to figure out how to earn my living. Sure, I was a failure, but even failures have to eat. By the time I had that one more or less figured out — I wasn’t a failure any more. I was keeping myself and my husband going, paying my taxes, keeping up with the mortgage. And by the time those small successes palled, I was doing well at my job… and by the time that was old hat, I was making a small name for myself in ebookdom.
Grad school had beaten me down, no question about it. I had failed. But I had survived, and I was even starting to prosper a little. Resilience is a sort of success, not unworthily exemplified by what my husband calls “Myrmekopolis” — an anthill in the back yard that’s been repeatedly, brutally pounded to nonexistence in the last week’s rainstorms, but is being rebuilt nonetheless.
Since that first big failure? I’ve succeeded at some things, failed at others, made mistakes aplenty and recovered from them. Lived, in other words, and done so reasonably well, if far from ideally.
People who have survived the absolute worst that life offers without being destroyed by it have a — I don’t know, a dignity, a larger-than-life distinction — about them. It’s unmistakable, at least to me, and I’ll lay odds most of my readers know what I’m talking about and can think of examples despite my inarticulacy. I’ll never match that singular calm, and I’m coward enough to hope I never have reason to, though I’ve tried to give it to one or two of my RPG characters. Just to be clear, though, what they have is akin to how I’m about to characterize the resilient people I know, but far more intense, far graver, rather less joyous.
Most of the people I know who have stumbled over something big and still managed to get up again are ex-academics, which I’m sure surprises no one. (Not that all of them stayed out of academia forever. Several went back. Some are still there, chasing tenure or whathaveyou.) Academia isn’t the only institution that lays people waste, of course; humanity seems to be damnably good at coming up with such institutions. But we’ll take resilient ex-academics as reasonably typical of the lot, in the absence of more comprehensive evidence, shall we?
They laugh, especially at themselves. They forgive themselves and others, perhaps their most salient good quality. They do not blindly accept authority; likewise, credentials or high position in a social hierarchy impress them less than skill, hard work, and potential. They don’t ruminate endlessly over their own or others’ errors; when they do recount them, it tends to be with compassion and humor.
And they lack, utterly, the fear that Wolfangel feels right now. They failed, and they survived. They know right down to their toes that failure is survivable. Not that they court it; it’s not fun. But they’ll take risks, fully aware that some won’t pan out.
I know a fair few people who haven’t ever failed at anything serious, too. Again, a lot of them are academics, just because of the social circles I’ve spent too much of my life in. There’s a strain of them that I alternate between pitying and finding utterly insufferable. Self-righteous, ruthless, blinkered men and women who brand every failure as a permanent and usually fatal flaw of character. Failure, like success, is always earned; no such thing as luck or inequality of circumstance. They’re Manichaeans or Calvinists, generally. The Good succeeds and the Bad fails, QED. Any outcry from the Bad is nothing more than contemptible bitterness from the irretrievably damned.
Why pity these people? Because they’re so terribly afraid. Oh, yes. They live on an inescapable precipice, just one misstep away from a profound abyss. If once they fall, they know they will shatter irreparably. They have abjured failure so forcefully and so long that their own minds transform it into a looming, inexorable enemy.
Anecdotes I’ve witnessed suggest that these people have a tendency to get stuck in ruts, too. An ordinary rock in the road becomes an impassable obstacle; every hint of opposition or difference of opinion they magnify into a targeted, intentional attack on them. Whenever someone else does well, it’s an affront to them, an affront and a worry, because it feels like a diminishment of the self. All of this, I believe, is intimately linked with fear of failure. Whatever goes wrong, it can’t possibly be me, because that would mean I was failing, and failing is unthinkable. Whatever goes wrong, it must be Them (whoever They happen to be).
I honestly don’t know what touched off my father’s career-long squabble with his department; I can’t have been older than eight or nine when it started. But after that, there was no resolution, ever, because my father wouldn’t let anything resolve. Anything that happened fed back into his unshakable belief that his department was starving and ignoring him, and he took any opportunity he could find to hit back (which, of course, cannot have endeared him). Take a look at his old vita and see if you can’t see a little of what I’m talking about.
Eh, well. An unpleasant subject, these people, a subject better let go. I could have been one of them; I’m glad I’m not. I’d rather go back to talking about the resilient.
As I’ve set up the category, you will notice, nobody can be born resilient, because nobody can be born failing. This constellation of character traits, given the initial impetus of a significant personal failure, develops over time, can even be cultivated. Insofar as I belong to this category — and I’m still working on it, heaven knows — it took me quite some time to get here.
I fear someone will think I am advocating hard knocks for everyone. Let’s recreate the learned helplessness experiments, whee! Well, I’m not. I don’t think we can engineer the kind of experience that kicks someone into a resilient mode of functioning, because I suspect the necessary experience differs rather widely. Not the kind of thing you want to get wrong, if you’re going to inflict it on someone. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t value the phenomenon when it happens of itself.
This is the best answer I have for Wolfangel at present. I see her walking in my old footprints. I’m happy with where I ended up, and I see signs (little though Wolfangel may care to believe me) that Wolfangel will find her own peace, her own accommodation with her past.
Regret? Yes, happens; possibly always will. But my regret is such a little, little thing next to my newfound resilience.
