So I'm trying to decide, yet again, how I feel about going back to school. I'm taking this semester off, and actually I know exactly how I feel: I hate the idea of ever taking another class. I know grad school is supposed to be hell, and one is supposed to want to run away from it, and yet my hatred of it is so enormous. I can't quite imagine that anyone should spend even a month doing something they detest this much. Much less another year or so.
As a person who tries to do things which are good for me, or healthy, or whatever you want to call it, it seems weird to intentionally do something which is so clearly bad for me. Being free from classes this semester makes the contrasts really obvious: grad school makes me depressed and horribly anxious; it makes me sleep too little, eat too little, consume far too much caffeine and nicotine, and spend too much time indoors; grad school makes me a stranger to my friends, even the ones who live in my neighborhood; grad school makes me hate hearing and reading about topics I otherwise find fascinating; grad school causes my husband and dog to think I'm a lunatic (or more so than they did already).
Yet supposedly getting the damned piece of paper is a good thing. OK, so I know it would be a good thing. But it's just so hard to convince myself that the torture is worth it. Especially when, not being in school right now, I get to catch some music downtown with Frank on a random night, and we run into friends, and their jaws drop because they haven't seen me in over a year, especially anywhere away from a library or a coffee shop. Can anything really be worth behaving like a horribly dysfunctional and miserable pale-in-Florida hermit for several years?
If anyone has an answer, I'd love to hear it.
I know, I'm not the first or the last to say all this, but the whole grad school culture is the most obscenely strange thing.
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