education

My brother, in the car once, musing over my eating disorder and the accompanying diagnosis of desperation to please: "But my sister shaved her head! She doesn't care what people think of her!"

Well, yes. But I shaved my head only after trying to kill myself. I shaved my head, really, while I was actively starving myself out of one life and into a bizarre kind of purgatory. There's not caring what other people think because you have an intrinsic sense of your own worth, and there is not caring what people think because you hate yourself more violently than they ever would, than they had the capacity to. The incredibly cathartic thing about hating yourself in this way is that, for once, you are undeniably visible, at least to yourself. To everyone else I was so small, but to me I was titanic.

Or you can say: I jumped out of the frying pan of your local suburban high school, out of the 1990s and the backlash and an environment in which, being female, you were expected to appreciate all the power you almost had, that you would have if you'd just stop being so fat and loud and embarrassing.

So most of the time the fact that I emerged from my adolescence and young adulthood without much of a sense of who I am and what I want really seems inconsequential, like someone who comes back from a war with a couple of cavities. Except for those moments when I realize that I have started so many degrees but finished only one -- that  while my friends get their PhDs and MAs and JDs, I'm just working, writing papers, getting accepted and getting As but never really directing enough energy in a single direction to "get anywhere". Cs get degrees, right; As get... letters from Columbia Law School, but no actual status as a lawyer.

And if I'm really honest, yes. There is a huge part of me that wants to be a lawyer --

-- is there a huge part of me that wants to be a lawyer? Is there any part of me, anywhere, that knows what I want?

I want to feel like I've Done Something. And going to Columbia Law School -- even going to NYU -- is Doing Something. I don't want to feel, ten years from now, that I sold myself short because I thought God didn't want me to be a lawyer. I don't want to devote myself to something because the stereotype is that it is less self-serving and then find that I don't feel satisfied. God, I don't want to find in three months that I'm a really shitty nurse, that I'm just not the kind of person who can suck it up and deal with blood and poop and pain and death, that I really am only good for writing papers.

But here's the thing I am scared of, in a nutshell: going to Columbia won't make me worth more, but it may make me feel that I am worth more, and I've been down that road before, and it's a bumpy, lousy ride. And being a nurse won't make me dumber, but it may remind me that I am something, someone, apart from my intelligence.

Apparently, it's time for another iteration of pro-cons lists. But the part of me that is defensive, that is, honestly, kind of a cracker, that couldn't deal with being paid to write papers about language and power and economic injustice, is there too, saying I shouldn't borrow money to become Big and Important; that changing someone's bedpan or starting an IV or hanging chemo is work and drafting legal opinions is not; that my child can have more of me if I am a nurse and that nothing I do, professionally, is as important as being a mother.

It's saying my decision about all this was made before I thought about how all my classmates in high school seem to have advanced degrees and I'm as smart as them.

It's saying that really, this is about entitlement, my thinking that someone who tests at the 99th percentile on the LSAT, minutes after staging a third-trimester meltdown on the streets of Queens, someone who applies to Columbia as a bet and then gets in, should go to law school, is meant to be a lawyer. And it's calling bullshit on that sense of entitlement, of preciousness, and pointing out that I am deeply, deeply conflicted about that way of thinking and that as much as I like to bitch about leaving my PhD program, basically every good thing in my life at the moment stems from that decision, and that the regret I'd feel at "turning down this opportunity" would likely be trumped by the regret I'd feel at making the same mistake again, and spending two hundred grand to do it this time.

It's easy to be a PhD candidate and talk about how the standards by which we measure accomplishment are fucked; easy, but not comfortable. It's a lot harder to have the opportunity to indulge in serious intellectual diva-tude and hover around it, half-thinking you're just afraid and half thinking that, to the degree you know yourself, your identity depends on not borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to an Ivy League law school.