Prof. Zero: The great thing about academic scholarship in my view is that just getting it published is a victory to your credit. It doesn’t have to even be all that good, but so long as it’s published it “counts.” (And most of your tormentors I’m sure don’t bother to read your work–that would take effort, when it sounds like they just liked to tear you down.)

I also liked New Kid’s concept of the bad boyfriend you’ve outgrown and who drives you crazy–and who’s much better as a story about how your life used to be. Bittersweet Girl, thanks for stopping by, and good luck!

Abusive relationship with scholarship, virtually all the time! That is: abuse around it that I finally quailed, internalized, projected.

1. Family: you will never be able to take a PhD exam, do a dissertation, etc., etc.

1a. More family: it is hurtful to us that you are doing well in school, because we are not / did not and we feel we should. Why are you always finding new ways to hurt us?

2. Dissertation director: you will never finish if you also spend an hour swimming every day.

3. Dissertation director and family: if you choose your own topic it will be wrong.

4. Job 1: if you keep publishing so much we will not like you.

5. Job 2: we know you cannot keep publishing so much.

6. Therapist: you and your university are both deluded to imagine you should publish.

7. Chorus: you had better take that book contract even though you don’t agree with the revisions or like the terms, because you are lucky to have any contract offer at all, and it is a fluke, and this is probably your only chance, so do as you are told or you will be on the streets without tenure.

SO NOW: In my memory I hear people saying these things to me every time I sit down to work. Sometimes they drown out my thoughts. Sometimes it takes all my work energy just to fight them back. When these things happen I am ashamed that they are happening. This only compounds the problem.

I have been known to do things like work between 1:30 and 4 AM solely because that was when I was sure that all the people listed above were asleep and would not know I was working. That is because my feeling was that if any of them realized I was working they would come out to interrupt and taunt me, and perhaps club me to death. (Not that I literally thought this – but it was my animal reaction, and I still concentrate much better if I am on a different continent from all these people.)

I guess this means or can be summed up by saying that I abuse myself and my scholarship because of other abusive relationships … which is I guess different from having an abusive relationship with scholarship, although I don’t know. I *really* envy people who have never gotten beaten up as much as I have about having scholarly interests, or been as intimidated around their book as I have (and as BG apparently has).

The abusive relationship with a book project is an interesting personification. May I suggest that someone who calls herself Bittersweet Girl is a target for abusive books. Take back the night, girl, and kick the shit out of him.

I think the abusive relationship is really with the tenure clock, which makes you stick with the half-baked relationship you never intended to be in for that long. It’s like going out with the nice football player in high school, and waking up ten years later to find that he’s welded to your couch with a beer in one hand, and how the HELL are you going to get rid of him? You know every story and every joke he’s ever told and he has nothing to say that could ever possibly interest you any more but YOU CAN’T GET RID OF HIM.

And, yes, I recognize the absurdity and insensitivity of the metaphor, even as it rings true.

Now, with my dissertation adviser? Well, that was a crazy oedipal sort of thing in which I tried to please please please him, and felt like I was never good enough, wash, rinse, repeat. So while my relationship with my *scholarship* has always been good, have I felt like abusive relationships were connected to scholarship? Kind of. Sometimes. BUT – and this is important – I think I needed to construct it that way in order to love the scholarship and to get the work done, at that time in my life. I don’t think that my diss adviser was doing this. He’s a lovely man. I think I needed him to be the dominant, mean partner who treated me badly. My scholarship then became the way for me on the one hand to escape him but on the other hand to show him that I was “worthy” of him. Which was much more about my crazy state at the time than it was about him, if that makes sense.

But no, scholarship is the best boyfriend ever, in my world.