Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

Running late, as usual, so just a few quick notes to try to capture a moment of grace I experienced this morning.

I'd gone to sleep last night and woken up this morning with a song from the musical version of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" echoing in my head (Petula Clark's voice singing, "Today is mine -- what shall I do with it? Throw it away, that's what I do with it, nine times out of ten."), as it has been rather too frequently of late (feeling that I've squandered another day, let another one slip by without even making a start on cleaning up the piles of garbage and chaos in my life, and that I'm probably going to do the same with the new day in front of me).

However, I got out of bed, picked up most of the books that were forming the top layer of the pile next to my bed and carried them to the bookshelves (wondering why I hadn't thought to do that before, since I'd finished reading the last one a week ago).

That was my major accomplishment until 9:30 AM, when I managed to get myself to the meeting of my "Artist's Way" group at our usual coffee house. While the three other women in the group talked about the progress they'd made since last time with their fiction writing or their painting, I sat silent, thinking that coming there had been a big mistake. It was just serving to raise my anxiety level about my total inaction over the past two months, dissertation-wise, and my anxiety level had been plenty high already.

Then, the moment came when they asked me how I'd been doing and sat looking at me all glowy and ready to praise me and be supportive of my efforts. And with a voice that started out fast and steadily increased in speed as I went along (couldn't have stopped if I'd tried), my tale of woe and self-loathing poured out. I didn't expect them to be able to help me -- I think I just wanted to get them to confirm that I'm a hopeless case, or something.

But then my oldest friend in the group (a woman I'd known since the first seminar of my first semester of Ph.D. studies) offered me something to chew on. Picking up on something I'd portrayed as a negative -- my having taken on a teaching assistant position again for the Anthropology department (for a course and a professor that I'd T.A.'d with before), in order to supplement my income, and discovering that after two years of teaching my OWN courses as an adjunct professor exclusively, I'm having a hard time switching back to T.A. mode on Tuesdays and Thursdays and want to argue with the prof., this time around, and suggest doing things MY way instead of his -- she turned it into a positive.

She mentioned having read something in a painters' magazine suggesting that it's not helpful in the arts to regard some people as above you and some as below you, and feel like you have to surpass this person or catch up with that person. The article suggested regarding all your fellow artists as on the same level as yourself, but just doing different things. Could I not take the sense of EQUALITY with other professors that my solo teaching experience had taught me, and apply that to my relationships with the professors on my committee and to my dissertation-writing in general?

I was much struck by this, and left the coffee house at the end of our hour together with a renewed sense of hope and confidence. It's true that I regard the professor I'm assisting in a much different light than I did three years ago, when last we'd worked together. Then, I'd seen him as one of these exalted beings, qualitatively different than myself. Now, I see him as a colleague, doing a job I do myself on Mondays and Wednesdays, and doing some things better, perhaps, and some things not so well as I might, perhaps. It's time to take that new insight into the nature of my professors and use it to overcome my fear and shame and feeling that I need to hide out from them, to keep them from telling me I'm no good, etc..

After all, my professors are NOT my parents, however much I try to confuse the two. And even my parents are not so different (I had a long conversation with Mom on Sunday afternoon, in which I apparently gave her many helpful insights into the Bible study she was preparing to lead for today, since I've preached and taught and led devotions on the book of Ruth more times than I can count, off-hand -- I didn't put that together until now, but it felt strange but sort of nice to realize that my mother was taking notes while I'd just been talking off the top of my head).

Gotta run or I'll be late for my OWN class, now.