Many moons ago, in my late twenties, I found myself feeling
isolated and deeply unhappy. I had graduated from college a few years earlier
and had married my college boyfriend, but I found myself frustrated and
depressed most of the time. I turned to
my diary as a sort of confessional, because I felt nobody else could really
help me. Part of my problem was that I thought the misfortunes I suffered were
completely out of my control, that life was meant to be “against me,” thus
nobody else could truly understand my situation. I had no awareness that my ability to control
my feelings and choices could be the key to a happier life. In other words, my
lack of self-awareness, my ignorance of where my own powers lay, left me
feeling like a boat at the mercy of inhospitable seas. It got so bad that I actually ran away from
home. The first time, I took all the
money from the joint savings account my husband and I had, and I drove out west
for 100 days, hiking in the mountains and sleeping in motels and campgrounds. The
second time, I was divorced and living on my own, and I decided I’d had enough
of my life again, and headed out west again for the summer. Why I ever returned to Chicago is something
of a mystery, but it probably had to do with the fact that I’d run out of money and ideas. Once I learned that I had the power
to navigate my little boat, my life began to become less of a struggle and more
of an adventure.
Without these skills of navigation I doubt I would ever have
landed in Alaska to study the Arctic. Sometimes I feel like pinching myself at
how lucky I am.
Even so, every autumn in Fairbanks I feel myself internally
bracing for an invisible storm. Not necessarily the coming of winter (although
that’s surely part of it), but certainly the combination of the stress of the
fall semester, the demands of my graduate program and all its attendant
commitments and meetings and obligations.
Grad students at UAF who are awarded a TA assignment are expected to run
two labs per week, attend all the lectures, and do all the assignments to keep
up with student questions. I confess I have never looked forward to it. The
only thing that gives me a sense of excitement is the idea that my data will
show me something unexpected and wonderful, that it will one day be published,
and that I will go on to other as-yet unknown adventures, hopefully having
something to do with the Arctic.
Even so, after three years in this program, all the steps still
required to earn my PhD seem as remote and untested as the steps to the summit
of Everest. And some days I’m just not up for the challenge.
It’s helped tremendously to have good neighbors, people to
hang out with and share a meal and some laughs and forget the frustrations of
academia. But nothing lasts forever. Recently,
some my Alaskan friends have decided to leave Fairbanks to pursue other
adventures.
I know that life goes on, but it is sad to see them go.
Gareth and Ryanne left last month to seek their fortune in
the Lower 48. And tomorrow, Joanne is heading down to the lower 48 to work for
the next eight months in Idaho and Washington. She’s sublet her cabin to yet
another new face who comes and goes about her own business, and it isn’t clear
if Joanne will be back in the spring to stay or to wrap things up and take off
for good.
The undergraduates I’m TAing this semester will graduate and
move on in a few short years, and who knows, I may even be done before they
are. Right now it seems hard to imagine. There’s so much to juggle with my
dissertation and the demands of the TA assignment, and I know my fellow grad
students bear the same weight of their own tasks.
The worse thing about
graduate school is—hands down--the utterly disheartening look on the unsmiling
faces of graduate students; these are people you pass everyday on campus who
don’t look at you or speak to you. If you should dare to say “Good morning” or
even just “Hi” they look as though you threw cold water on them. These days I think about what it would feel
like to drive out of Fairbanks to Delta Junction and then east into Canada,
cutting south to cross over into Montana or North Dakota, or continue further
on to Minnesota or Wisconsin, never looking back. I have no idea what I’d do once I got to
wherever I think I would go, but that isn’t the point. These are the days I
just want to run away from the pileup of darkness and cold and grad school duties
in this pressure cooker world of academia. Sometimes I worry that I am sacrificing
my health and happiness for the right to be called a doctor of philosophy. But then
I tell myself: if you walk away from all this work, you will have nothing to
feel good about--so you might as well get those three letters after your name to
compensate for all this suffering.
And then I go outside and I’m startled by the sight of a
squirrel that has landed somehow in my rain barrel and drowned. I mean, it’s
not like Alaska is in a drought. It’s been cloudy and rainy for the past ten
days. Why did he end up in here? Squirrels are not what comes to mind when you
think of accident-prone klutzbags. So
what happened here, little buddy? Did you just decide to take the plunge like your
lemming cousins? Was it just all too much to bear? Or did you see a tasty-looking giant spruce
cone, magnified in the lens of the water?
