Graduation Remorse? On Regret and Moving On

I am quickly approaching the last graduation of my lifetime (please God. Do NOT let me get any more degrees), and, as with everything about my experience in a PhD program, it has caused a lot of navel gazing. While most people, myself included, usually approach graduations with a sense of celebration and pride (and maybe a bit of dread because those ceremonies are so fricking boring), I'll admit that I haven't been able to find the joy.

The last time I was in Arizona, I was talking to my mom about my upcoming graduation, and she asked me, "So, knowing what you know now, if you could go back in time would you do it all over again?"

The fact is that I regret getting a PhD, deeply. It makes other people uncomfortable when I say that, but it is what it is. If I could go back in time, I absolutely would have walked away from academia after my master's.And I would have got my master's in education, not literature. I have spent a lot of the last five years beating myself up for that. Idiot, you did this to yourself. If you HAD to do a PhD, why did you not accept U of A's offer? Why didn't you leave after your exams? Why didn't you get a more practical degree? Why? Why? Why? 

But, here's the thing: I couldn't have known that I would feel this way when I made my decisions about grad school. 

It's not like I wasn't forewarned. I had professors tell me that the jobs just weren't there. I even had a professor tell me that I should think about taking time off before the PhD because it would mean a lot of sacrifice. She said, it means living in poverty into your thirties. You are going to watch your friends buy houses, have kids if they want them, and build lives that you cannot afford. She said, you will have to commit to live anywhere to get that first job and work several temporary positions before you land the one that sticks. But twenty-three year old me thought that all sounded fine. I don't care about houses or savings or kids, I thought. Matt and I can live anywhere! 

And then I moved to Gainesville for five years. Here's the thing, I shit on Gainesville a lot, but Gainesville is not a bad place to live. I could do a lot worse. And that's the problem. I quickly learned (surprise!) that I cannot live just anywhere and be happy. 

And then I started to notice the logistical difficulties of the whole moving around with no money thing. Moving is expensive. We had to load up our credit cards to finance the move out here, and we were never able to get them back down, with Matt's student loan payments and me making 15k a year. When it became time to think about those temporary college teaching positions, I knew that we cannot afford it. I can't just keep moving around, building up debt, pursuing a dream job that I will likely never land. 

There's also the added shittiness of living across the country from every one you know and love AND being too poor to afford to visit for the holidays, or when your loved ones fall ill or get in a serious car accident or have babies or get married. It began to feel like a sort of exile from everyone I cared about. 

And then there's the whole issue of my decisions affecting another person. Matt very graciously moved out to Gainesville with me so we could do this thing, even though it meant working a retail job he didn't want to keep for years while he tried to find something, anything, that would use his education. If I decided to hop around the country pursuing the job I used to think I wanted, it would mean uprooting Matt every year or two to move to a new location. 

And so, as graduation approaches, I now know that I am not equipped, mainly psychologically, to do the thing I thought I wanted to do with this degree because I just am not willing to continue to make these sacrifices. I spent the last five years being less happy than I could have been, and now I do not know what I will do next, and that kind of sucks. But, at least I know what I am not willing to sacrifice now, so that's one upside. If nothing else, I am leaving my PhD program really knowing myself. I've done so much self-reflection and reevaluation it's frankly ridiculous. 

So, yes, I regret this degree, though I've loved the students and classes I have taught here. And, yes, I feel like a freak because I can't find the joy in completing the degree. But, I can realize that there was no way for me to know all of this five years ago, and I can try to have some grace for myself and forgive myself for choosing wrongly. I came here thinking I was Cristina Yang, someone who would pursue my dream job regardless of the personal sacrifices, but I'm not. I'm someone a little sappier, who misses my AZ friends and family too much to plan my next steps far away from them. I'm someone who wants a house, damn it, with a yard. I'm someone who wants work to be a much smaller part of my identity. And I am learning to be okay with that. I still, however, am someone who wants Sandra Oh's hair, because, come on. 

P.S. Everyone should be watching Killing Eve 

The Strange Side Effects of Getting a PhD

The PhD experience has been, for me, basically a series of existential crises. The problem with getting a PhD in the humanities is that you go all in on a very insecure future. You leave your friends, your family, your beloved town in the mountains, and you arrive in a swampy new city, missing everything you left behind. Professors warned you that the job market was terrible, that the jobs themselves were scarce, and that, even if you got the job, the workload was intense and poorly compensated, but you were too used to being the exception, the exceptional one who got the awards, the scholarships, the teaching positions, the acceptances to PhD programs, so you block it out. But then, each month that you spend in this new swampy town that you just can't quite love or feel at home in, reality sets in just a little bit more. As you see classes of PhDs graduate and only one might get "the job," or you watch people walk away from the program entirely and you're just a little envious, or you notice that the people who are getting "the jobs" are going up on the job market for 3-5 years before they get a position, you start to question and doubt everything. I mean, you've put ALL of your eggs in this basket, and its a shoddy basket. Meanwhile, while your future looks bleaker and more insecure, you watch your friends buy houses, travel, start families, etc. and you are plagued by FOMO. Again, professors warned me of this, but I just wasn't mentally prepared for it. Few people know this, but when I passed my exams, I reacted by hysterical sobbing. It all seemed so meaningless. I put so much stress and work into getting to this moment and it seemed like such a waste of time. Needless to say, I was not in a good or healthy place then. I wasn't in a good or healthy place for much of the last few years.

I've spent a lot of time in my PhD program looking back over my shoulder, turning into a pillar of salt, as I berated myself: I should have gone to U of A, because then I would have been close to my family and friends while I had these existential crises. I should have gone to Illinois State, because their program prioritizes teaching more and I now know I prefer teaching to research. I should have never gotten the damn PhD. I should have looked for jobs after the masters. I should have become a high school teacher. I should have become a lawyer. You name a past decision I pondered, and I thought I should have done the other thing. The thing that did not put me where I am.

I thought about leaving, but my ego didn't want to have this move, all of these crises, be "for nothing." I needed the degree to justify all of those choices I now regretted. And so, I then responded by shutting down any of my hopes in this career plan. I am not going to apply for anything in academia, I said. I want job security! I want work/life balance! I'll become a librarian, a HS teacher, anything that will hire me. All of these things are true. I do value work/life balance. I do want job security, but it is not necessarily true that you can't have these things in any job in academia. I was being hyperbolic out of self-defense because I did not want to put myself up for something with such a high rate of rejection.

In the mean time, I responded to my constant crises with some soul-searching. In my first year here, I had a crisis of faith, and left the type of churches I grew up attending. Now, I am perfectly at peace in a new church home, one that is progressive, that welcomes doubts and intellectual challenges to dogmatic beliefs, and allows for mystery. I am now a person that does yoga almost daily and believes in the power of reciting mantras and setting positive affirmations. I meditate. In other words, it is well with my soul. I also started making an effort to stay in touch with those back home, sending notes and little cards, letting them know that I think of them often even though I am not with them often. And that helped. I adopted two more animals. I'm not saying that it was done for healthy reasons, but my pets also bring me a lot of joy. And I started to realize that all of these things matter to me much more than any career. Finally, finally, I was able to come to a healthier place of peace and self-forgiveness this past Spring semester. The constant meltdowns of being in a PhD program pushed me to do so much work on my self and find ways in which I am in control of my own happiness and not relying on outside markers of status and success that I was finally able to stop berating myself for pursuing the PhD in the first place.

Once I reached a better place, where I am at peace with my faith and spirituality, with my family and home life, with my dreams of the future, etc, my productivity returned. I'm back on a regular pace of writing. I presented at a conference. I'm back into the groove of things, and, with that, my ego returned. Last week after the conference, I got a follow-up email from a professor I've never met but have a lot of respect for about the research I presented. It was one of the moments when I think, okay, sometimes I am good at this academia thing. I love teaching, and I think I am good at it. I hate the constant rejection and revision of the research side, but sometimes, like when I submit a dissertation chapter that I feel pretty good about, and I've sent off the final proofs on a chapter in an edited collection, and I receive positive affirmation about a conference presentation, I think I can do this. So, of course, because I am me, this resurgence of my confidence caused me to panic. I had already decided tor reject this! I don't want to want this. I don't want the rejection of the academic job market. And so, I vision boarded, like the true introspective hippie I've become.

When I reflected on what components I need to be happy in the future, to be secure, the answers came easily. I need a steady spiritual practice and I want to grow in my convictions and right actions in that arena. I want to live in a landscape I love. I need to see the sky. I need elevation changes on the horizon. I need to see mountains, and I'd love to be in the mountains, because I want to spend more time outdoors, but I am a picky bitch about which outdoors landscapes I enjoy. I don't like flat land and I do not care about beaches. I want a home. A place that is our own, with a small yard for the dogs, and space to host visitors. And I need to be closer to my friends and family. Matt and I have set a goal of no more than 15 hours of driving time away from Gilbert, so that we can put all the animals in the car and get home in one day of driving. And as far as the job goes? I'd like to still teach or work directly with students. The only thing that I need out of a job is the feeling that I am impacting someone or something. That my skills are helping someone directly. That's why I like teaching. So, I'll apply for some college teaching jobs, some secondary teaching jobs, and some college advising positions, and I want to learn more about Children's Librarian programming positions. If I don't get the fanciest jobs, that is totally FINE because what I've realized is that what I do to pay the rent and get health insurance matters so little to me in the scope of things.

These are not things I knew or thought I needed when I chose to leave Arizona for a PhD program in Florida. I was going to be the career woman who didn't marry until my late 30s, if at all, who moved across the country in pursuit of ambitious career goals. Of course, Matt came along way too early for my plans, so I accepted that I would be a young married person, but I still thought career goals topped everything else for me. And now, thanks to four years of breakdowns, and yoga, and meditation, and general navel gazing, I know that what I need is to just live somewhere I love, somewhere I can go outside and enjoy nature, somewhere with good local food and closer to our friends and family. I am motivated to finish the degree, not for the career opportunities it will bring, but because it means we are free to move on and find the right place for us.

Being in a PhD program was so much harder and stranger than I ever could have imagined, but it turned out to be the perfect reason to sort out my priorities, and for that I am grateful.