On grad school and grief

As pretty much anyone on the planet can attest, grief is a mire of muck, sucking at your shoes, your limbs, your hope. It attacks your central systems: your relationships, your routines, your ambitions. Incorporating and weaving this into my first year of a doc program already feels overwhelming, and I have only been grieving for a little over a week.

I'm fairly well acquainted with both school and grief. And quite frankly, I'm exhausted looking forward to all of the ways both will be sapping my physical, mental and emotional strength. They both force us into questioning our worth through feelings of guilt, anger, failure. The difference, it seems to me, is grief's ability to completely sap hope. Grad school embodied my hope for a beautiful future chock full of challenges to be met, victories to celebrate. Grief, at this moment, sucks that all away.

As if I did not have enough reading to do, I purchased When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, a Bhuddist nun, lecturer, teacher and writer. This summer, in the midst of my hopeful stage, I had purchased her book How to Meditate. I have yet to finish it, so I guess I still don't know how to meditate. Anyway, I've just started the book and, so far at least, I'm finding it helpful. In particular, I continue to find some connections to grad school. She writes of a saying she used to have pinned on her wall:

Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.

Grad school, of course is a choice. I have chosen to expose myself to an onslaught of new ideas and concepts which will challenge me and complicate my relationship with knowledge and the known world. In so doing, I am exposing myself to annihilation in a sense. Annihilation of assumptions and knowledge built over a long, and already rigorous, education. We all know that going in to a doctorate, don't we? That we should anticipate being decimated by what we don't know. That in fact, this is where we want to start from. We know very little: please teach us more. Teach us what is innate in our beliefs about knowledge. Teach us how to "be" within a new sphere of learning. Teach us how to extend that sphere.

And of course, grief annihilates. Grief annihilates who you thought you were and who you thought you were becoming. The known is decimated in a way that is inconceivable for a very long time. At the moment, quite frankly, it is impossible for me to remember who I was. So, I guess the only bit of me I have to focus on is that which is indestructible. The pieces that are left over. My cockroach bits. But, the thing is, in both situations, in the brutal aftermath of such destruction, its hard to tell those cockroaches from the debris. Right now I can't see who I am in terms of a learner, researcher and educator, nor who I am as a sister-in-law, a wife, a sibling, a daughter. I guess that takes time, and perhaps even continued annihilation according to Ms. Chodron.

On a final note, I also did not choose to expose myself to this type of annihilation as I did to grad school. I could have done without this exposure.