How Grad School Prepared Me for the Pandemic
A grueling marathon with one surprising gift
A Match.com ad shows Satan on a date with “two-zero-two-zero.” “Call me 2020,” she says with a crooked smile, followed by clips of the two watching a movie in an empty theater and absconding with toilet paper. As the ad closes, Satan says, “I just don’t want this year to end,” and she responds, “Who would?”
The idea that 2020 is the worst year of our lifetimes, and that the new year offers a fresh start and a return to normalcy is a common one in the popular imagination. But 2020 wasn’t the worst year of my life. That distinction belongs to my time in a prestigious Ph.D. program for English literature. And if I could travel back in time, I would absolutely choose graduate school again. That’s because it gave me an extraordinary gift: it taught me to love writing. Loving writing isn’t natural, but neither is a croissant. Yet both are excellent parts of being human.
I should add the caveat that my pandemic experience has been a relatively fortunate one: I’m employed, and no one in my close circle of family and friends has had a serious case of the virus. The pandemic bummer I’m referring to here is lockdown, the contraction of activity, mobility, and social life that afflicts so many of us. I’m suggesting that we not bemoan lockdown but understand it as a part of a cycle of expansion and contraction that characterizes every human existence. Every part of this cycle can offer opportunities, especially for writers.
Graduate school in the humanities involves a certain kind of contraction that’s very similar to lockdown. You’re impoverished trying to live on a stipend, often in one of the expensive cities that host top graduate programs. You live without any certainty of the outcome most people in humanities Ph.D. programs are hoping for, a tenure-track academic job. Like lockdown, in graduate school you don’t know how long the contraction of your life is going to last, or what, exactly, life will look like when it ends.
But greater than the financial strain are the intellectual and emotional ones. Writing a dissertation means working daily, for years, on something whose outcome is unknown, and enduring constant critique — a necessary and generous act from advisors and peers, but often a discouraging experience. “I don’t have it, I don’t have it,” was the constant refrain running through my head during my graduate school years. “It” was the big idea, the central argument that would distinguish my work from what was already published by professional scholars, the insight that would capture the attention of those who’d been doing this far longer than I had.
Still, sometimes the most difficult and discouraging parts of our lives lay a new foundation for us, reshaping our sense of self and allowing us to find a new purpose, a new center to our existence. I’m no masochist; self-care is my spirit animal and I wholly reject the “no pain no gain” philosophy. So, how did I get through? What I learned was that when your life contracts, to survive you must fall back on your deepest convictions and sense of purpose. I knew I was a good reader of literature, with a different perspective from most people. I knew that writing about literature was my vocation — I’d had another career, as a computer programmer, before deciding to go to grad school, that gave me a comfortable life in a place I loved. But comfort wasn’t enough for me; I needed to aim higher, to find out if I could succeed in the world of ideas.
And so every day of graduate school, I went to the library and I wrote. Some days were terrible and I was disconsolate. Some days I was elated with my progress — often only to return to my writing the next day and realize it was deeply flawed. I didn’t know when it would end, or how it would end. But I knew that every day I did something that used my deepest talents and felt like my life’s purpose. I couldn’t control the responses of my advisors, journal editors or hiring committees, but I could, every day, follow and concentrate the motions of my mind onto the page.
Being able to return to the page when my world is shaken by global catastrophe or personal sadness (divorce, death of a loved one, stinging professional rejection) has offered me relief. I didn’t always feel this way about writing. It required the marathon of graduate school (and later, the tenure-track — I’m one of the lucky ones) to shape my habits and train my mind to love writing.
Because when the outside world grows smaller, the inner world has space to expand. And at the end of the day, our contemplative resources remain when external pleasures abandon us. There’s a medieval play called “Everyman” that depicts the allegorical title figure as he approaches death. Characters such as “Fellowship” and “Strength” at first vow to accompany him to the grave, then fall away one by one until only “Good Deeds” remains. If the details of the play track with pre-Reformation Christian orthodoxy — good works will get you into heaven — the message, interpreted more broadly, is a powerful one for our time. Sometimes what we imagine to be the most essential parts of our daily lives vanish, and what’s left can surprise us. Learning to love writing has been the greatest gift of my life, one that I don’t believe I could have received without the particular limitations that graduate school imposed. Pandemic lockdowns can give us the same gift, if we let them.
