Leaving Grad School, Redux

[osprey_archer]

A girl I knew slightly from grad school is in my town for the summer, so we've been meeting up for coffee once a week - I think at first mostly because neither of us have any social lives, but it's actually proven unexpectedly rewarding.

In particular, this week we were talking about how she's been thinking about either quitting grad school, or leaving academia after she gets her Ph.D. We both evidently went into grad school with the same mental reservation - "If grad school turns out not to be for me, I can just quit" - which is possibly a sign that this major life decision is one you should reconsider, honestly; clearly a part of me knew from the beginning that this wasn't a great idea, but I went ahead with it anyway because I didn't have any better ideas and, after all, I'd always been good at school.

I don't regret quitting. It was a good time to get out, and it would have just gotten harder to quit if I'd stayed longer. And I also felt, at the time, that if I hadn't quit when I did I might have flunked out, not because the coursework was too hard but because I would have lost the will and therefore ability to do it. I imagined spending the rest of my life, an eternity, reading boring monographs in order to spend years writing my own soul-deadening monographs that five people would briskly skim in order to write about why I was wrong, and it all seemed utterly paralyzingly pointless.

So I don't regret quitting. But I don't think I realized how much of my self-esteem I had built on the not-nearly-as-impregnable-as-I-assumed foundation of being good at school until I quit school long before acquiring my intended degree. It destroyed one of the pillars of my self-esteem, and I haven't found anything else to replace it with.

So I felt some chagrin when she asked if I thought leaving academia would make her feel like a failure, because what could I answer but "Yes, probably, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it"?

But I think it was a relief to her to have someone to talk about this who absolutely saw it as a momentous and difficult and potentially crushing decision; I think people who aren't in academia often find it hard to understand how absolutely it can entangle your sense of yourself and your intellect and your intellect as the best and most valuable part of yourself. It can be hard to explain why it's hard to even think about leaving grad school, when leaving grad school is leaving academia which is leaving the promised land and the chosen people.

***

The conversation also made me think about how when I was thinking of quitting grad school, I really didn't talk it over with any of my friends - either in real life or on LJ - and I think if anyone had asked me (although of course no one could have, because how could they have known I was holding back in the first place) I would have said that I was sparing them all the boring angst. And that they wouldn't have been interested anyway.

It occurs to me, now, that sharing the boring angst is how you make deeper connections with people. And in any case, how good a friend is someone who can't bothered to put with any boring angst at all? Or, indeed, someone who thinks that all of your angst is boring?

(I think almost all of us have moments when our angst becomes so repetitively navel-gazy that it is boring - I know sometimes mine bores even me - so being occasionally bored by someone else's angst isn't necessarily a sign of being a bad friend. The problem is so-called friends who want nothing but good times, and no angst at all.)

Last time I was overly forthcoming to one of my friends about my angst, the friendship ended up imploding in lengthy and dire slow-motion. It took years. It was much more complicated than that and I actually have no idea whether or to what extent the forthcomingness was the problem. I'm still not sure what the fuck happened.

That whole drama wrapped up four years ago, so it's really time to move on. I think perhaps I learn a little too well from experience.

Comments

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

I think your observations on friends and the boring shit are dead-on. So much seems to lie in the boring little interactions that aren't momentous in themselves, but establish a pattern of closeness and rapport.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think people often tell themselves that they would be there if something big happened to their friends, and therefore it's okay if they let the little things slide... and yet letting the little things slide often means that the whole friendship ends up sliding away. Does it matter that someone cares deeply if they never do anything to show it?

[ladyherenya]

This resonated with me. Thank you for sharing.

Lately, I've been thinking about how being good at school can limit opportunities for learning to cope with failure, or perceived failure. Not that I think struggling with school necessarily teaches one those things either - just that it provides more opportunities to practice being resilient in the face of them.

I didn't realise until I finished uni how dependant I was on the process of doing work and getting (generally) positive feedback.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yes. And I think that until we do leave school, it's very hard to see the ways in which we have become dependent on it: school is so omnipresent in our lives as children and adults that it's just the air we breathe, and it's hard to have any perspective on it.

I've read that the students who go on to do best in life are often the B students: they have more experience with failure than the A students, so they don't fall apart when they fail outside of school, but they also have enough experience of success that they keep trying even when they hit difficulties.

So perhaps schools ought to work at optimizing the success:failure ratio for their students? Clearly a 100% rate of either is bad.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I think a really painful experience (like your friendship imploding) can do exactly that--teach a lesson too well. And sometimes maybe we even learn the wrong things--not saying you did (at all: honestly), but just that it strikes me as like PTSD. You could say that being out at the market when the IED went off taught you to not be out in open spaces ever again. That would be an understandable, but not useful-for-life, response.

I agree with what you say about sharing the "boring" angst being a way of deepening friendships. It's great that you were honest with your friend about how it'll make her feel to leave grad school--it's **good** to go in forewarned, and I completely agree that that doesn't make it a bad decision.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Sometimes when I read about PTSD I feel great trepidation; I am 100% the kind of person who would learn all the wrong lessons from a traumatic experience, because I already learn all the wrong lessons from merely painful experiences. A friendship ends, and I conclude bitterly that I SHOULD NEVER OPEN UP TO ANY OF MY FRIENDS AND THEN THEY CAN NEVER HURT ME LIKE THIS.

I mean, I'm getting over it. Sort of. But it was weird hearing my grad school buddy talk about all this and realize that when I was in her position, I couldn't bring myself to do that with any of my friends, and I knew them much better than she knows me.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I'm really chagrinned to admit that it was only *very recently* (months, not years) that I realized how decades of my life I've avoided getting close to people because the lesson I took from some horrible friendship traumas was... don't ever get close enough to people to have a serious falling out. Belatedly I'm trying to change this to, Learn a way to recover from serious fallings out. ... Not that I think all things are repairable, but that just seems better than thinking (a) that any big falling out is The End and that therefore (b) I must never have a falling out, which means (c) I mustn't ever get too close to anyone.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

This is pretty much exactly the lesson I took from my own big falling-out, unfortunately, and it seems so hard to unlearn it - or I suppose learn around it is probably a more accurate term.

The thing about fallings out (fallings outs? How to pluralize...) is that so much depends on whether the other person has any interest in rebuilding the friendship. It's so scary to find yourself in someone else's hands like that.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is. Hard to decide whether any given case is a, I need to keep reaching out or a, This will be better for both of us [or, sometimes, This will be better for me] if I let it drop.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Friendship definitely includes sometimes being bored by your friend's angst. We all have periods of our life where we're wrapped up in the same angst that goes on and on and ON. You can limit talk about it for their (and your) sanity, but you can't not talk about it or you feel fake. I'm mostly, for instance, ranting about my health problems and our sucky medical system for half an hour, and then my friend rants about her evil ex-husband for half an hour, and then we talk about something else.

I think you were absolutely right to be honest about grad school. Sometimes we're faced with a choice of regrets, rather than one decision that you'll always feel good about. That's life.

Finally, yeah, if you live long enough and have deep friendships, you will also have horrific friendship breakups. I have never been hurt in a romantic relationship as much as I've been hurt by the end of a friendship. And in some cases I look back and I still don't really understand what happened.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I have discovered that some people just don't seem to understand about friendship breakups. If someone goes through a romantic breakup, then everyone gets it if they want to eat ice cream and cry about it for a while, but the end of a friendship - a lot of people don't seem to see why that would be upsetting.

It always makes me wonder if there's actually any substance to my friendships with these people - if they can't imagine being upset if a friendship ended, then how deep are their feelings for any of their friends?

[artemis_wandering]

Well, let's just say you are far smarter than me. I keep pushing myself through because of many of the concerns echoed here. And it does indeed become harder to quit the longer you're there. Psychologists would probably love to study my incorrect evaluation of sunk costs. I am glad you were able to talk to your friend about it.

Huh, wow, honestly this post resonates so much for me.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Aw, don't be too hard on yourself. I don't think it's a matter of smarts but of circumstances: my circumstances made it easier to quit than it is for you, not least because moving back in with my parents meant moving back to my hometown with plenty of job opportunities, not to the middle of nowhere.

[artemis_wandering]

Yeah, but also, I've been considering this a lot and while academics will say "they couldn't hack" I'm realizing that those who quit (versus the few who flunk out) are very brave. Because those who do might have to face some derision about quitting (whether from family or friends or whomever), and face a new unknown after they thought they had set plans. I tell myself I'm not a quitter and that's why I don't, but I also think its because I'm so scared of the the unknown, the sunk costs, and the "I told you so's" I'd get if I did quit. So yeah, some circumstances aren't great for quitting, but they're also not great for continuing (no funding, etc). I'm just too stubborn which in this case is probably bad, to quit, even if I should.

So I also admire you for making the choice.