Grad School and Loss

I lost a friend from grad school this week. It’s been hard seeing the posts from people I used to see every day around a seminar table talk about our friend who is not around anymore. Someone I hadn’t seen in a few years because we get busy, because we try to find time between teaching or working at several different institutions, and grading, and every other responsibility one may have. But there are two really real things that have come out of losing him.

One, we need to start having real discussions about mental health and COVID. I have been at home since March 13^th and I have not left my house at all except to wander in my backyard that I know I am super privileged to have. Not once. No walks around the block, no trips to the store (I have things delivered). I am trying to be responsible and heed warnings and instructions. I am also the only child my mother has left so I have to be careful and take care of myself and not put myself in danger because well who would take care of my parents? Is being at home for 58 days (8 weeks) healthy? Nope, it sure isn’t. Is it what we have to deal with right now? Yup, it sure is. Am I feeling okay? Yes in general, not bad, except for the tired I feel because I am always thinking about my work and research to-do list and next steps and the sad of losing a friend.

Are others feeling okay? Probably not. Are people seeing the walls close on them because of this, especially if they already had depression or any other mental illness before this? Yes, definitely. Is anybody really talking about this in a substantial way? Nope. So can we please talk about it? Having links to yoga or wellness meditations are not going to make this go away. It is a step in a good direction but it’s not the end. The amount of frightening text messages I receive from folk every week is just, well frightening. I can do nothing but listen and help support, but this quarantine is making it so much worse. There are a few people that I want nothing more but to go their house and cook them a meal and help them with whatever needs doing, child care, house tidy, whatever. But I can’t. So we need a strategy, a real one.

Two, and connected, can we talk about how grad school is really horrible for mental health? I have things I do on the daily that I know I do because it is a habit I acquired in grad school. Some are good habits, others are very not good habits. Good habit- putting things down in calendars to block time. Bad habit- work so much you forget to eat, even though you are in your own house with food literally 12 steps away, and then it’s 6pm and you are starving. We all have our different motivations for going to grad school, some want to be a college professor (like that horrible XtraNormal YouTube video I reference often), some want to conduct research.  One thing is clear, we all start graduate school with the intention of finishing because why would put yourself in a financially and emotionally precarious situation if you didn’t want to complete what you started. But not everyone does finish, because the system is not set up to support those who don’t already come from money or don’t already have an excellent support system. I was very much stuck in the adjunct/sessional loop for about a year when a series of events made me realize, I either had to make some real ridiculous sacrifices or I was never going to finish my dissertation. And note I don’t come from money and my support system at the time was questionable. You need to teach to pay rent (often many courses because the pay isn’t great), but you can’t write a dissertation if you are teaching 100-200 students. Something has to give. And usually the thing that gives is mental health, and usually the thing that gives is self-worth, and usually the thing that gives is proper diet, or in some cases shelter.

I was in a doctoral program that had 4 years of guaranteed funding, after that good luck. I know that is probably better than some and I am grateful for that (how horrible is it to be grateful for something that isn’t enough- wow grad school you really did do a number).  Which is why I started working as a sessional. Some institutions give 6 or 7 years of funding (which is becoming more and more rare but still pretty great). Some institutions don’t implement a hard and fast if you are not done in a certain amount of time you have to leave the program rule, and some institutions do. There are benefits to both of these models and I have been thinking about this so much this week. Because both of these models can either support or completely destroy mental wellness. As someone at a “if you are not done, you are done” school I hustled hard to get it done in 5.5 years. Did I emerge from defending too burnt out to do any research for a good year? Ohhh yup I did, but I bounced back eventually. Not everyone’s situation is like this. And we need to recognize that. And we need to talk about what grad school does and how we can better support people through it. Grad school so often in my experience is about loss when it should be about acquiring something- a community, applicable knowledge and skills, even some sort of capital (cultural, academic, literary) though icky as a concept.

So can we talk about how we make grad school about acquisition and not loss please, because I don’t want to lose another friend.