It’s Time to Say Goodbye to My Younger Self
And revel in the life path I chose, not pine for the ones I didn’t
It was time to kill her off, my 25-year-old self. All I needed to do was throw the one-pound, 220-page PhD thesis into the yellow recycling dumpster in the parking lot of my apartment. Simple!
Ha.
I’ve held onto that comb-bound dissertation across four decades and more addresses than I can quickly count. Although to be fair, I think some of those years it was sitting in a drawer in my parents’ house, as if Mom, bless her heart, was going to read it.
I retrieved it before the For Sale sign went up, and stuck it in a box of other stuff gleaned from cleaning out the basement.
The thesis poltergeist
About four years ago, as I was picking up speed on the retirement runway while the world was coming to a shuddering halt, I started culling. I managed to toss most of my old graphic design work, and almost all the clippings from my years as a reporter. I scanned design and writing awards for the digital archive. It very much felt like shedding skin. A little painful, a little humbling, a little illuminating, and an emotional boulder off my shoulders.
Yes, I thanked them for bringing me joy.
Off to the trash now.
Yet, the academic tome still had a home, albeit under a bookshelf and out of sight — until last month — when I pulled it out and plopped it down next to my armchair. And there it sat, silently accosting me.
Why am I keeping this thing? Maybe because once it goes into the recycling bin, 25-year-old me literally will cease to exist. Or so it felt to me. No one will be able to go to Cornell’s research library and pull out a dusty copy. Once I part with this copy, it’s as if I never existed as a scholar. So I’d pick it up and thumb through it. Debate scanning some of it, a digital version of sticking it in a box in the back of my closet — again.
Tomorrow. I’ll decide tomorrow, I waffled, as if some lightbulb was going to go off and make things suddenly clear.
Then it did. I found out that if anyone was so inclined, they could order a print of the thesis. You can still find citations to it via a Google search. So the stage was set for the metaphorical kill.
An ode to a life I might have had
I commuted to the local state college in Buffalo, played on the tennis team and covered women’s sports for the college paper. Without any viable plan for life after my degree, I did what so many do, applied to graduate schools — in sociology and journalism. I got accepted to all five programs I applied to.
The National Science Foundation granted me a full-ride scholarship for sociology, so sociology it was. Cornell offered me an additional year of support as a teaching assistant. I moved to Ithaca.
Grad students occupied an ambiguous place on campus, a kind of purgatory while awaiting entrance to academic heaven, aka tenure. We weren’t really a part of campus life, like the undergrads. We didn’t go to tailgate parties or rush fraternities or sororities. We might have seemed by age to be full-fledged adults, but we were more like a genteel form of indentured servant, beholden to our thesis committees for passage.
Outside of the semester writing my dissertation, life was remarkably stress-free. I fell into a comfortable routine: a 25¢ bagel on the way to a morning seminar, swinging by the hotel school for a peanut butter-banana milkshake, grabbing a once-a-week meal at a Greek pizza place, sharing pitchers of beer on Friday afternoon or kibbitzing at sherry hour. If this is academia, this isn’t so bad.
Once I got up the nerve both to change thesis advisors, and then to tell the new one that, no, she shouldn’t call my dorm room at 7am, academic life ran smoothly.
By the end of my third year, flailing as a teaching assistant who couldn’t handle a particularly annoying undergrad, I knew I had no interest in pursuing an academic career. Not after I’d had a glimpse of daily journalism on a fellowship to the San Francisco Chronicle one summer, thrilled seeing people reading my stories standing on the BART platform. I couldn’t envision being happy toiling away for years doing research that maybe a few hundred fellow scholars might see.
The final lap
When I started skimming through my thesis recently, I felt as if my 25-year-old self was uncannily prescient. And that I was lucky to have chosen a thesis advisor who came to her academic post from a non-traditional path. Who else would have let me mention my near birth in the produce aisle in my biographical sketch?
I still recall the neat piles of notes arrayed on the floor of my bedroom. Once I cleared the hurdle of not writing the introduction first, I wrote the entire eight chapters in eight weeks. Time was of the essence, as I had to make the filing deadline in time to graduate in May, alongside my best friend.
I scheduled my thesis defense for Friday at 3 p.m. This was unwittingly a brilliant ploy. Everyone on my committee wanted to get the hell out of there. I was so anxious, that my thesis chair’s slightly off-color joke to loosen me up went right over my head. My defense went by so quickly my friends hadn’t yet gotten the champagne and munchies.
Mission accomplished?
My parents drove in from western New York to attend the graduation ceremony, where we were welcomed “to the community of scholars” with a handshake from the university’s president. Then they threw me a party. While all the friends in attendance were headed off to one academic post or another — or at least actively interviewing for one — I was veering off the path into the unknown: a job as an exhibit researcher and writer at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, an 18-month gig I got thanks to my thesis advisor’s connections.
Only once did I present my academic research at an academic conference — one my best friend and I both had papers accepted at. Nervous as hell, I nonetheless stayed away from a slide presentation or spouting jargon. I told a story, the same story I opened my thesis with. My friend told me after the talk that shortly after I started speaking, someone next to her said, “Oh, she’s very good.” That was the highlight of my life as a scholar.
When I chose my path, I knew there would be no more conferences, no more churning out papers to build a C.V., no moving to some obscure small town to take an assistant professorship and start the climb up the academic ladder.
My Midnight Library moment
For most of my working life, I never really looked back on that decision. After all, I ended up working at nationally known institutions and companies, from the science museum to JAMA, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and PBS. I got journalism awards, and then, design awards. I even got a private tour inside the White House thanks to the design studio I worked for having a White House agency as a client.
And yet. Did I really make the right choices? Wouldn’t it have been cool to continue my research on mass media bias, but now with the digital tools that would make it so much easier? To have the job security of tenure, rather than have been fired or laid off multiple times?
The friend who graduated with me went on to a successful academic career, doing the teaching she loves and the research she’s interested in. I, on the other hand, have spent most of my working life writing about what editors wanted me to write about or designing for clients’ needs and goals.
In the book The Midnight Library, protagonist Nora Seed has attempted suicide, convinced that her life has been a series of bad choices. She’s presented the chance to “try out” different life paths to decide if she wants to keep on living. Ultimately, she chooses to return to her “root” life, coming to see that a good life isn’t so much about magnificent events as it is about enjoying the journey.
I’ve come to accept that about my artistic work: process and progress, not perfection.
Now it’s time to bury the younger academic me and believe that the life I’ve lived is the one I was meant to have.
R.I.P.
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