It caught me by surprise, like a word...

I have a bit of a fraught relationship with academe. I question my motives in toeing its edges; from the time I was quite young (even, perhaps, as young as six) I understood - not in these terms, but I understood nonetheless - that being a member of academe, being part of an intellectual elite, can in effect make ones class status secondary to the work one produces. The idea was intoxicating to me.

I finished my masters degree in the midst of a very deep depression. I was questioning my identity, reevaluating the extent to which I took my identity for granted. I was overextending myself - taking a double course load (four courses to the standard two), working a double assistantship load (teaching a course to freshmen that was part of a human rights pilot program, while also being a research assistant to a scholar and artist I admire more than I can adequately express), directing a poetry and graphic design project on a volunteer basis, studying for my exams, applying to PhD programs, and doing extensive departmental committee work. I realize that this is, in many ways, a typical academic workload, but it was a lot for me to take on in the context of having just ended the most significant relationship of my life (a relationship that, for many, many years I believed would be the one that would carry me to old age).

I left for Europe as soon as I had submitted my grades for that final semester. I left with the intention of giving a conference paper in Galway, spending a two week retreat in Co. Donegal during which I would complete a draft of my manuscript (historically-informed poems on Charcot's hysterics), and from there traveling to England with no fixed plans to return. I wanted, desperately, to find some anonymity, to have the space with myself I saw as necessary to figure out what would come next, to re-situate myself to my own positionality. It was from the Holburn branch of the London Public Library that I wrote to my would-be PhD advisor at UCLA, declining his offer of admission. Writing that letter was difficult. Very difficult. It meant, at least temporarily, surrendering an idea and a hope and a plan I had had for myself since I was a very little girl.



Today - sun shining across my floors, cat basking in the window, coffee in hand - I finished reading Colum McCann's Zoli. And, in what seems almost momentous to me, when I sat down to write about it, what followed was the most scholarly thing I've written since May 2006. Admittedly, it is half-raw and only the very beginnings of an idea that would be properly researched in an academic context, but it kind of thrilled me. I miss it so much. I miss it. I miss it at my very finger tips and in my mind's heart.