When I was in my second year of graduate school, a time where I was extremely stressed, exercising manically, and involved in more projects than the fingers on my hands, I remember wishing that there were a set of rules I could just follow to be successful and get things done. “Can’t someone just tell me what to do?” I asked myself why didn’t I go into a field like medicine, where the curriculum was already outlined and planned in advance. I had no energy for creativity, let alone figure out what my dissertation was going to be for the rest of my graduate program.
James Baldwin once wrote, “Nothing is more desirable than to be released from affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.”
In a time like that, rules can be great – they just require effort, and often (though not always) they exist because they work. They can coincide with conventions, which, again, makes it easy to coast through life with few questions asked. But equally often, when one is asking for rules, it is because one is scared without them. James Baldwin once wrote, “Nothing is more desirable than to be released from affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.” The crutch? A vetted script to live my life, especially as a new American who wants to be seen as successful and accepted. How radical it might be to realize that those rules were once made up by someone somewhere. Growing up dependent on and obedient within institutions, a doctorate program was exactly what I was not ready for: not only do you have to come up with viable new ideas, you also have distinguish your voice from others.
The ideal of what a doctorate program means, and how it actually fosters doctorates are two different things, however. A part of the success that both Mags and I have secured thus far – getting our PhDs in a field and institution with little support for who we are, and subsequently getting an institutional position that gives us more time to expand our work and grow – comes with following a certain kind of prescriptive behavior. We have followed the rules that are given and followed them well. But the birth and evolution of IvoryClass is an example in itself of the changes we are going through personally and professionally, and it is palpable the extent to which we are pushing those boundaries, to the point of breaking them. So what happens then, when there are no more rules left? When you’ve exceeded the expectation of how far you’ve come, and go beyond the script written for you? How good are you at improvising?
If I was listening to myself at the time, I might have already sensed that spreading myself so thinly during that year of graduate school pointed to a deep dissatisfaction somewhere. And the more I was told I should say no to projects, the more I wanted to keep accepting them, almost to prove that I would be fine. I was already wanting to defy expectations and break rules, even at the same time that I was asking for them. The nuance here is that I wanted a different set of them, not knowing that I could write my own.
This is what happens when you are forced to sink or swim, and end up not only swimming well, but swimming away. Being in a PhD program was, for me, a good example of that, where you have to make certain decisions and deal with the consequences, often on your own. For a while I was wondering if this consciousness to rules and change was a symptom of entering my third decade. And while this is possibly very true, I think there’s something that runs deeper than just feeling a sense of security because of age and lived experience. I think about how often I went with the flow of things, not simply because I was scared, but also because I didn’t know there were alternatives. With the courage to break rules is also the trust that you could write your own, meaning you have access to enough tools, experience, and language, in order to do that. How fixed is one’s sexuality what does a good relationship consist of, what does it mean to be a mother without a partner, these are all hard questions that we don’t let ourselves dwell on because we are busy, we are unaware, and we are fundamentally scared.
Let us just sit with the hard questions for a little bit, because even if we don't have an answer, we are scratching at a deeper issue: how much do the current rules serve you?
I’m not sure what it is yet, but I know and can say confidently that there is a major change coming our way that requires stepping on the other side of the boundary. I’ll let you know when I figure it out.
What about you? What is a rule that you love to break?
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