26.

Fits of Disappointment

I didn’t get the summer fellowship that I really wanted and really thought I deserved. It’s that last part that’s the hardest. I honestly thought that I deserved it. If I had just thrown the application together at the last minute, I would have something to blame and I wouldn’t have to feel so bad. There would be the “if only I had tried harder…” escape route. Now there’s just the knowledge that I threw myself into it and there were at least five people who were better. I’m taking it incredibly personally and for that I blame the dissertation.

For me, writing a dissertation has made my world increasingly small. The process demands isolation, but it also insists upon a constant narrowing of focus that systematically shuts doors to people and possibilities that were once available. The more embroiled I become in ancient Greece, the more I feel the parameters of both my academic and social worlds drawing in. Within such a space, with academics making up so much of my world, of course the fellowship news is personal. I haven’t insolated myself with enough distraction, so any sort of rejection goes straight for my guts.

In the moment of reading the rejection email, instead of having the wind immediately knocked out of me, I decided to fight it, to push back. I had been trying to fix my bike tire for days, so when I got the email, I went straight over and poured all of my energy into that tire. I didn’t want to be idle or passive or defeated—I needed to be doing something productive that had a clear and satisfying end in sight. After about an hour I had tried everything I could think of, used every tool I own, was covered in grease and dirt, and still couldn’t fix it. Finally, in a dramatic fit of disappointment and anger and helplessness, I collapsed on the ground—forehead against the wood—sobbing.

It lasted about fifteen minutes. A complete, though compact, meltdown that lasted fifteen minutes start to finish. I got up, wiped off my eyes with a wad of toilet paper, grabbed my books, and went to Bentley’s. Within about a half hour I found an Erasmus piece, two Renaissance emblems/epigrams, and a picture of a sculpture, all of which I had spent months searching for. In fact, over the weekend I spent an entire day searching for the Erasmus adage (there are 4,251 of them)—and then suddenly I understood what 1.7.70 meant and there it was. Within an hour I went from dramatic academic defeat to heart-pounding discovery and break through.

That’s just the way this process is working for me. And, if I’m being totally honest, I love the drama of it all. There’s a part of me that loved writing that sentence about how my “dissertation has made my world increasingly small.” It’s so completely melodramatic, and it’s sort of crap. My world isn’t really small. I tend to make it small, walling myself into routines that limit my movement to comfortable, worn spaces. Or I romanticize it as small because there is something really appealing (to me) about the image of the scholar tucked away behind walls of books, lost for hours in that state of fluctuating frustration and discovery. I’m exactly where I want to be—and that’s the real reason why I took the fellowship news is so hard. I want this so badly; I want to be good at this work, and I want it down to my core. The thought, the very suggestion, that I might not be good at it makes my legs buckle.