magical realism blog

Anyway, these thoughts don’t bother me – they’re not upsetting, and I don’t take them to be indicative of my actual desires.  They seem more like an autonomic response, or a reflex or something; just something that my body naturally does in response to a certain stimulus, and not something to be concerned about in the slightest.  I probably wouldn’t even notice these thoughts at all, if I weren’t so introspective and didn’t pay so much attention to the contents of my mind.

But anyway, something interesting happened this morning.  I was sitting in my therapist’s waiting room, eating breakfast while I waited for our meeting.  And for some reason I was thinking of something embarrassing I did in undergrad – every time I read a paper, if it was well-written and technically interesting, I would wonder whether the authors were single and attractive, and I would probably fantasize about them, without realizing that (as an undergrad) all these impressive professors were totally out of my league.  Anyway, that was mildly embarrassing, but not embarrassing enough to provoke the violent thoughts immediately.  And then, a minute later, I was thinking about the time I asked a fellow grad student (who is now a professor) on a date, and how he declined because he already had a girlfriend.  And that was unfortunate and slightly awkward, but it wasn’t embarrassing in the way having crushes on professors was while I was in undergrad, because… it wasn’t presumptuous; it wasn’t stepping out of my place or assuming I could attain someone way out of my league.  I was a grad student, and he was also a grad student.  It was socially appropriate (if potentially awkward) for me to ask him on a date.

Anyway, after I had that thought and decided it wasn’t embarrassing, the following sentence popped into my mind very clearly: “But I don’t exist.”  And this was really startling, because usually the thought is “I wish I didn’t exist; I wish I didn’t exist”.  But now I just thought to myself “But I don’t exist”, and the thought was extremely calming.

And I thought about it some more, and realized that, in a sense, I don’t exist anymore.  I don’t really know how to explain it; it’s a very intuitive thing.  But somehow, as a result of dropping out of grad school, I no longer exist.  I mean, obviously I continue to exist as a flesh-and-blood living entity.  But there is some metaphorical sense in which my existence has ended.

But, well, I made my final decision on the evening of Tuesday, December 1st.  And this is my last week on campus, and my advisor is only here on Wednesdays, so… I just had to suck it up and drop out of grad school on the unluckiest day of the year.

I was expecting catastrophe, but nothing bad has happened so far.  And as far as I can tell, dropping out was a good decision.  So maybe the curse has been broken. 

But anyway, the entire thing makes me want to tell the story of December 2nd.

It started in 9th grade, at lunch period, when I was having a conversation with my school’s philosophy teacher.  I always talked to him at lunch in 9th and 10th grades instead of eating with the other students, because for some reason my friends are always middle-aged men he was more interesting than 9th graders and he knew a lot of philosophy.  Anyway, on the day of December 2nd, we were having a conversation, and he raised some philosophical point that I found particularly depressing.  I don’t even remember now what it was.  But I, being even more dramatic in 9th grade than I am now, declared that this would be the beginning of a long depression, and that December 2nd would go down in my memory as the worst day of the year.  And indeed, I think I did get depressed around that time.

Anyway, the next year, I was dating a guy named Lucien, and I told him about the curse of December 2nd and how it was a very depressing day.  Well, in order to make that year’s December 2nd better, he surprised me with tickets to see Avenue Q on Broadway.  I remember that evening: we took the train to NYC, and it was dark when we arrived, and it was snowing.  It was actually quite lovely, and I remember thinking that NYC seemed much less awful than usual.  We had a very nice time, and I really enjoyed the play.  But the fact that we had gone out of our way to celebrate December 2nd only made the curse more memorable.

Fast forward a number of years with uneventful December 2nds.  The next incident happened in my junior year of college.  I was living in my own apartment for the very first time, and I had decided to get a kitten; the vet’s office told me I could adopt her up on December 2nd.  Because of the curse, I was terrified of picking her up that day.  I was worried she was going to escape from the car and run out onto Route 15 or something like that.

But we brought the kitten home, and everything went fine, and I was wondering if the curse of December 2nd had gone away.  Except that night, as I was watching the kitten, I got a message from my ex-boyfriend.  I had broken up with him a few months ago, I regretted it, and I was hoping he and I could get back together.  Things had been looking really good for our relationship, but that night he told me he had found a new girlfriend.  So the curse of December 2nd was sneaky!  It spared my cat (she’s still alive and well), but it found a way to hurt me anyway.

A few years later, on December 1st (which was their actual anniversary), my ex proposed to his girlfriend (who is now his wife).  I think I heard about this on the following day, December 2nd, and any hope that their relationship would end and I could get back together with him vanished.  Thus the curse continued.  (For the record, I’m over my ex now, and I really like his wife and I consider her a friend.  But at the time, I was pretty upset.)

Anyway, that’s the curse of December 2nd, which I seem to have mysteriously escaped this year.  Unless dropping out of grad school was secretly a terrible decision.  Or unless my house got broken into or something, and I just don’t know about it yet since I’ve been on campus all week.  *crosses fingers*

Alright, it’s done.  I dropped out of grad school.  I will no longer be a student here, after the end of this semester.

I’ve been increasingly sure of this decision over the last two or three days.  I mean, there’s definitely a part of me that wants to stay, and I’m a little sad right now, thinking of all the mentors I’ve had over the years, and how much they believed in me, and how disappointed they’ll be to hear I dropped out.  (My undergrad advisor, all my undergrad professors, the leader of the summer research workshop I attended in undergrad…  they always email me at conferences to ask why I’m not there.)

But, well… if I want to come back to academia, I can always return later.  There’s nothing to stop me from applying to grad programs anew.  And… if I want to do research, there’s nothing stopping me from just… sitting down and doing research.  I can publish papers.  I can attend conferences.  Anyone can do these things.

I’ve been putting this decision off for long enough.  It’s time for me to leave.  It’s time for me to try something new.  And if this was a mistake, and I’m meant to be in grad school after all, then I’ll figure it out soon enough, and I’ll return.