Tag: growing up

Light is the left hand of darkness.

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I finished my first book of the year last night, a reread of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. I read it again because a) I love it, b) I want to start working on the paper I wrote about it as a grad school writing sample, and c) I needed it. I won’t say too much here about how much I love Le Guin. (I do. A lot. More than I can describe actually.) Somehow I always find the wisdom that I need nestled in her words. So, on the first morning of the new year, I sat in the armchair in front of the window plagued by uncertainty and read the line, “But alas we must walk forward troubling the new snow, proving and disproving, asking and answering.” It grabbed me and didn’t let go.

On this rereading, the theme of wholeness stuck out to me more than anything else. I’ve been thinking about how important wholeness is to a life.

I’ve been in despair lately, existential and personal, overwhelmed by the seemingly systematic and insidious isolation of the parts of my self. Continue reading “Light is the left hand of darkness.” →

Here I am.

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Here I am again.

It’s 2017. Its predecessor was not easy, and especially not lately. I’ve felt exhausted and distracted and more unsure of myself than ever before. I should have turned in my grad school applications by December, but I never even started the process, and now the timer is reset for next year.

I’ve been considering the new year with all the changes it might bring, and the changes I’m more certain it will bring. I’ve been thinking about how I will be 25 on my next birthday and still not in grad school. I’ve been worrying about losing myself to the mundanity of housework and an office job.

So, on Monday I pulled out an old notebook and plotted my course to grad school admissions. I’m reading something every day. I’m reading 45 books this year. I’m writing something every day.

I’m helping my dad work on a professional portfolio, carting around a notebook and pen with my laptop and a manila folder, and feeling more like myself. Right now, I’m snacking on a whole bag of popcorn and a can of Pamplemousse La Croix while the X-Files plays and I’m remembering that I am always myself.

What if I’m a Bad Academic?

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I suppose the thing about plans is that they change. My plan for the last several years has been “go straight to grad school to be an English professor.” Then I wasn’t sure what to study, so I decided to take a year or two off to do some independent study and find an academic passion that wasn’t simply knowledge. But always, I knew I was going to be an English professor.

965878-_uy200_During the last semester of my undergraduate degree, however, I started to feel a little bit like I was living and working inside a vacuum. I was writing my Capstone paper, “Science Fiction Sleeper Agent: Narrative Subversion in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lefthand of Darkness” and loving it. I was having a great time immersing myself in great writing and in the thoughtful, though at times disappointing, scholarship of others in my field. I was having a blast but I couldn’t shake a certain feeling of futility.

To understand this feeling, we might have to delve a little bit into my life and educational philosophies. In life, I value learning. As an existentialist, I believe that what I choose to value has global and societal ramifications; In light of this fact, I must value the act of learning over knowledge itself which can be understood to be finite. I can consider myself fully knowledgeable on a given subject but I can never consider myself to be finished learning about a given subject. It is that eternal questing which excites me and that gives us a tangible point of entry into the future. We can always learn more, we can always seek more knowledge, more understanding. The act of learning, of seeking knowledge, is endless and open and freeing. Continue reading “What if I’m a Bad Academic?” →

Seasons of Change

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This week follows the conclusion of my penultimate undergraduate semester. This week I have no more assignments due or meetings to go to or classes to attend. And this time, the break will be more substantial than just winter break.

According to my plans, I was supposed to have graduated yesterday. Things don’t often go according to plan, however, so I still have one more semester and just a handful of classes. I have run out of English classes to take at my university so I’ll be taking a women’s lit course online at a community college. I’m taking ASL. I have online history. That’s it. Continue reading “Seasons of Change” →

A Reflection on Personal Branding

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The creation of this website came out of a class. Professional Writing in English Studies. Up until this class, I thought that my branch of professional writing would mean academic writing; literary analysis, book reviews, things like that. As it turns out, it does mean those things but it also means a lot more.

We started with CVs and resumes, cover letters, grant proposals, transcriptions, and ended with a professional website. Personally, that progression meant a destruction of my self-confidence followed by a mandate to confidently market my personal academic brand on the Internet for everyone to see! Needless to say, I found this quite troubling. Continue reading “A Reflection on Personal Branding” →