Psychic Footbinding

In the previous post I tried to explain why explanations of why working outside of academe is not a waste of grad school time tend to rankle. Unfortunately, that is a small component of my overall reaction to the experience of being booted from the nest. Assertions like those strike me as annoying, or stupid, or well-meaning but not applicable to the real worries that are currently besetting me. If I get cranky about such assertions, it ultimately doesn't mean much, because whether or not those arguments prove true is a matter of opinion.

So, you may be asking, what are those "real worries"? This is a good question, because it sure isn't a worry that I can't handle a temp job that leads me to weep in the shower late at night. If I were feeling melodramatic, I would say it is because I am in fear of losing my soul.

In truth, though, I'm not that worried about my soul. I am worried about what my work does to my personality and sense of self. As I've suggested in earlier posts and comments, I have tendencies and experiences in my past that make me worry about losing myself in an effort to conform to group norms and the pain that this causes. Much of my childhood was spent being an outsider and I still carry the scars; not the big scars one gets from being a reject or an outcast, but the subtle scars that come from never quite fitting in and always having to hide or prune aspects of oneself in order to find some measure of acceptance. As a result, I'm very sensitive to social cues about acceptable behavior, beliefs, etc. and often unconsciously find myself adapting to the norms of the place I'm in and the people who surround me.

If the difference between me and the others is small, the distortion is minor and fits within the fluctuations of personality I experience on a regular basis anyway. If the difference is large, what I experience is the psychic equivalent of footbinding -- a cramming of myself into an ill-fitting space until I fit. So what, you say, everyone does this to some degree. You go home at the end of the day and stretch and return to yourself. Unfortunately, I've found, I don't. The echoes of the distortion persist, and the longer I am with a group of people the more like them I become and I begin to forget the parts of myself that don't fit into the group norm.

Again, you may say that I'm being melodramatic, but I've watched myself in action too many times to not believe that this can and will happen again. Like the frog being slowly boiled alive, I don't realize how hot the water is -- how far I have strayed from the person I am most comfortable being -- until something tips me out. I spent a month once living in a house of a British translator; by the end of the month I had developed a slight British accent and could complete her sentences. More tellingly, there was the month-long trip with people who teased me for always using "big" words (my ordinary working vocabulary); by the end of it I was no longer using those words, and no longer even having to think about it. I literally became a simpler thinker as a result; it took a return to grad school to remind myself that I did still have the capacity for more complex thought.

I think you can see where I'm going with this.

It was only in college, then grad school, and now in the presence of either family or academic friends, that I feel entirely myself. No distortions, no adaptations to the group, no foreign habits slowly adopted until they become my own -- THIS is why I am so afraid about leaving.