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18.10.2003
On the inability to make
choices.
I am a person who spends her
entire time in torment over not being able to decide anything. When I
finally make a decision, I cling to it like a drowning muskrat clings to a
piece of wood. I remember the indescribable joy when I picked psychology as
my major in the university. I was not so much excited to study psychology,
but simply happy that I had made a definite decision to study something,
committed myself to some path.
I was on high throughout my
entire second year. It was all planned: spending long nights in the lab,
reading obscure articles, writing long verbose papers, finally earning my
Ph.D., getting a tenure and then proceeding on to write more long verbose
papers which will be published in obscure journals.
The newly-found shining
ambition started to grow dull in the beginning of the third year. I took a
seminar and a lab course. Both were moderately fun, except for the part
where I had to come up with actual research proposals and conduct real
experiments. I discovered I did not possess the éntheos for psychological research. It also
seemed that absolutely everything had been studied. All the major themes
had been explored by somebody else, and in order to propose anything new
one had to review a thousand articles to find some little bit that could be
examined. I had no problem with the reading and review, but I felt hopeless
when I had to come up with something to study in the lab.
I had much easier time when
choices were made for me. Simply working as a research assistant in
someone’s lab was not a bad job. It was even intellectually entertaining in
some way. Moreover, it better suited my personality,
-- I could sit in the lab for hours shut off from the world, entering data,
looking for materials, summarizing findings.
The structure of the fourth
year, on the other hand, did not suit my personality at all. The summer
between my third and fourth years was spent in dread over one major
responsibility that was about to fall on my shoulders – the Honours Thesis. The name was already too heavy to bear.
The steps required were: find a supervisor; write a proposal; develop the
experiments; recruit people; submit the results to the department. In
between these things, write literature reviews, make presentations, meet
with your supervisor weekly to discuss the progress (because, of course,
the progress is slow since you procrastinated all summer when you could have
done all that work).
Needless to say, by the time
the fourth year started, the ambition to get a Ph.D. in research psychology
disappeared completely. I hated research. I hated having no imagination for
it, having no ideas. All the theses that my classmates and I wrote seemed
silly and unimportant. Then I made my next definitive decision: I will get
a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. I will graduate and sit in a quiet little
office, listening to people complain about their lives. Or maybe I will
work in a hospital, actively running around and “helping people”.
I was thoroughly sick of
school, so I did not apply to graduate school that year, but, instead,
packed my bags and moved to Japan to work. I was cooped up for a year in a little
apartment in a little town on the smallest of the four Japanese islands. In
the end, I made another decision: no psychology, clinical or otherwise. I
will go back to what I have loved most all my life: books. In a very
literal sense, by applying to a library science program. I will graduate
and become a librarian in some academic library, or maybe an archivist, and
will probably die buried under some hefty tome that will slip off the
bookshelf and land on my head.
That decision is still with
me. I am still clinging to it. We’ll see what the next year will bring.
Sincerely,
The Drowning Muskrat
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