blac(k)academic writes here about her loneliness in graduate school, and she gets a lot of great feedback. Over at Blogora, Jenny writes about being lonely and the use of blogging to make community and connections. I’d say that blogging has helped me feel slightly less lonely, though I have a pretty good support network of friends both in graduate school (who get some parts of me) and in the queer community (who get other parts of me). I think, though, that it would be nice to have a larger queer/subaltern radical feminist/marxist graduate student group here. Now that I reflect a bit, there is a bit of a bifurcation of my self…
Well, I’ll quote from blac(k)academic from one of her comments:
sitting in a library doing research is lonely. reading books is lonely. trying to think outside of the box while others remain inside of it, is lonely. writing seminar papers at 4 a.m. in the morning is lonely. grad school is just damn lonely!
plus, i think academia breeds isolation. seems like people are afraid to reach out to others–i’m not immune from this. i mean, i have friends–that’s not what i’m getting at. it’s the work itself that makes me lonely.
Agreed. Luckily, I have a few friends who we can sit around and do research together, and while we might disract each other as we read and write, we energize each other, giving each other feedback and support and enthusiasm. It’s enriching.
But I definitely empathise with her worry about working to get outside of the box while so many others are inside it. It’s like all this marxist and feminist critiques of society have alienated me from a lot of people. I can’t hang out with the same groups of people because my social justice radar goes crazy and I can’t stand to hear some of the ignorant and bigoted things people can say and do, despite the fact that I used to do them. I’m trying, though, and it’s largely about compassion and not being a jerk when it comes to social justice and issues of queerness, gender, race, and class. Eh, I’m learning. It also depends on my role: as a teacher, I can hear ignorant and bigotted things, but as a friend, as someone hanging out with adults, I’m not as tolerant. What makes it especially hard is when I hear those things from faculty members, but that’s a whole other post that I shouldn’t, as of yet, write.
