Annandale-on-Hudson

you're so happy here

I haven’t written for a while because I was teaching, in person, in a campus-sized vaccinated pod, we’ll see how that works out, in the Language & Thinking Program at Bard College from August 6 to 26th. I got the job because I applied four years ago, and started doing the training, and then was still too sick from all my <gestures>, and had to drop out. I always wanted to come back; even those two days of training had shown me that there was a way to think and work with language that had always felt both solely intuitive and entirely solitary to me but, it turns out, wasn’t. So I wanted to come back but I never felt quite ready. Was I really good to go? Was I really out of the world of illness? And then this July, a Facebook message from the director, offering me a spot, and here I was. 

I was happier during those three weeks than I’ve been in a long time, and in trying to figure out why, I think a lot of it has to do with things to do with the pandemic that I hadn’t noticed, or hadn’t thought applied to me in some way. I am nothing if not intensely adaptable. When the pandemic started I was in the middle of a divorce, living alone in a huge apartment that was way too big for me but that I was sort of nominally attached to, recovering from a huge surgery, breaking up with my rebound boyfriend. I told myself that I wanted to be alone after so many years of feeling alone in my marriage, years which had sort of convinced me that I was the kind of person who actually preferred to be alone, and so when the pandemic started I convinced myself that maybe I’d been an introvert all along, that I found people exhausting, that I needed hours and hours of alone time to recharge. 

Midway through the pandemic, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve read about a lot of women being diagnosed later in life and never thought, of course, that I could have ADHD, because the one thing I’ve always been able to do is hyperfocus, get intensely wrapped up in something, lose all sight of the rest of the world, of the people I love, of the life I have outside of this one moment, essay, event, etc. I used to joke that I had the opposite of ADHD, but it turns out that actually hyperfocus is a symptom. So are so many other things that have been challenges for me: object permanence, impulsivity, addiction/alcoholism, having a job, sustaining a job. I was diagnosed with ADHD and suddenly a lot of my ambient suffering made sense. I decided, in collaboration w/ my psychiatrist, not to pursue medication because maybe the last thing a recovering cokehead needs is prescription meth, and so we went with lifestyle changes — trying to produce a routine, trying to create structure. It is almost impossible to create structure when you work for yourself and you’re in a pandemic, and so I wasn’t really able to, and so I mostly spent the last year feeling unfulfilled with my work and confused about whether I was an introvert or an extrovert and doing a lot of amazing and great things but also just always feeling a little bit like I wasn’t exactly where I was supposed to be. 

One of the friends that I made during L&T was like, you’re so happy here, and I kept trying to explain that this was a vacation for me. That having three seminars a day of ninety minutes each, followed by faculty meetings, followed by faculty readings, preceded by dinners at the dining hall where I got to talk to people who are driven and smart and want to write and think about authorial distance and narrative distance and why those are different, was a waterfall of everything my brain had been missing. The structure being given to me was also a vacation of sorts, a break from my constant need to give myself structure, to decide how to schedule my day, to try and force myself to pretend like I have real things I need to do instead of deadlines I can always push back. I slept six hours a night and was probably hypomanic the entire time, reveling in the presence of the classroom, of students, of having a purpose, of finally feeling like I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing.

I didn’t realize how much I’d missed being on campus, having the crushing busy-ness of academic life. I’ve been saying to my therapist recently that the times I was the happiest, that I didn’t fall into pits of self-loathing or fear or career worry, was when I was teaching and writing my dissertation and writing my book and just going to campus and meeting with people and sitting around my advisor’s table and talking about the letter as the document. At L&T I would spend all day in conversation with people, something that I convinced myself during the last year would be almost terminally exhausting, and come home full of book ideas, or essay ideas, or just wanting to write, to produce, to create.  Turns out I am not an introvert, not at all.