I had a terrible insight this evening as I was limping home from a ‘run.’ I had just read my mother’s letter and was considering the choices that I had made in my life. One in particular is how I blew my interview for the PhD program at UW. I could have had it. I was just finishing my master’s. I had a faculty sponsor who wanted me to attend. He gave me the interview questions before the interview. I had publications under my belt. It was within sight. Yet, I failed miserably in the interview. I sabotaged it by not preparing and simply winging it, which you cannot due with 6-8 faculty members. You could see my faculty sponsor’s face fall as I stumbled through my answers. And so, I didn’t continue with graduate school. Something that I had wanted for so very long. Something that I’d failed at the first time around when I was 23. The work on my master’s at UW was exhilarating. I felt alive again. Stressed? absolutely, but emboldened. My research for my thesis exhausting, but also re-awakening.
The other night as Sandy and I were in the hot tub, he asked me about teaching at AcademyX, if I was happy there, if I could go back to doing something like that at another school such as the Berkeley Adult School. I explained – and admittedly this is through the lenses of depression – that it was thrilling but not satisfying. Teaching like that is like smoking. You get a kick from it, a high from it immediately, but it isn’t particularly stimulating outside of the performance of it. You need another fix, another performance, more feedback from students who evaluate you highly. And it sustained me for years – not as a career or growth path – I felt no pride in my identity as a technical trainer – but I could sustain myself on the momentarily high. As I tried more and more, however, and I did for almost 10 years, the dread grew. My imposter syndrome grew more and more present.
And then, I started graduate school. Just a few classes in, I was hooked. Learning and coming up with new theories and insights – now that satisfied and electrified.
So, then why would I mangle my chances at continuing toward my PhD in a field that I loved, at a school that I adored, in a city that I still dreamed of residing in?
Because we were trying to make Auden. At the time of my interview I had just had several miscarriages, and we had started seeing the reproductive endocrinologist. The fervor to have another child – when I had so adamantly believed just a year before that we were having an only child – just overtook me.
What struck me this evening, what stunned me entirely, was that I steered way off trajectory to have a child with a donor egg.