This year is the last in my PhD studies. It’s too early to be ‘summing it up’, and I’m probably not ready to write this post, but I’m not sure I ever will be. Because this post is about love. How can one ever be ready to write about that?
My five years of academic apprenticeship were meditations on love. They started in India, where I travel every year for the winter holidays to stay with my husband’s family. It was there that it first struck me: the realisation that these years would be dedicated to learning some hard lessons about love, and that it would be heartbreaking.
And so it ended up being. But heartbreak is not a bad thing, and there were some insights along the way that made it worthwhile. The lessons are three. First, ‘We love the ones we can’, to quote a poet. Second, love is a gift and never reciprocal. Third, love is an essence, not a thing. These simple lessons – however hard-earned – shaped the way I perceived academic work – and personal life. But let me first take you through the basic premises. Why is the discussion on love relevant to the discussion on academia or PhD studies in particular?
Five years ago, in Delhi, I sat reading: paper by paper, monograph by monograph. I was overwhelmed. I remember the sound Adobe made every time I closed a file in which I’d made highlights, and it asked me if I wanted to save it – I still wince at that little ‘ding’. I was at the very beginning of the journey, and I did not think I could produce anything like what I was reading. That this project was doomed to failure, and someone had made an expensive mistake by hiring me to the PhD programme.
Now, this is probably how most PhD stories start – or other stories of apprenticeship. Maybe this is how your own journey started in whatever it is you are doing. But bear with me for a minute. We all have different versions of this story – let’s see if you can, beyond the tired cliché of ‘impostor syndrome’, recognise yourself in mine.
As I was reading all those pieces of scholarship, it wasn’t about the fear of not mastering the genre. It was something else entirely. My throat contracted at the thought that I wouldn’t be able to LOVE – and therefore would fail. The papers, monographs, and book chapters I read all pointed to one thing: those who wrote them were guided by something that I didn’t think I possessed. Some kind of inner light that filled these texts with a golden glow. I decided, for lack of better insight, that it was love.
The people who wrote these texts loved the people they wrote about, I decided. Or they loved the places they went to. Or they loved each other – as many of these were collaborations. Or they loved the process: their questions, their theories, their materials. Or they were deeply concerned about the issues they wrote about, because the writing came from some profound life experiences they’d had.
None of this was true for me. When I applied for the PhD position, I just put together some ideas – et voilà. I wasn’t doing an autoethnographic study after having worked for many years in an extractive industry, showing how it destroyed people’s lives in a ‘distant’ place. I wasn’t planning to go to some ‘impossibly exotic’ island to carefully observe the struggles and hardships of the marginalised, to understand the subtleties of their predicaments and report on them back ‘home’. I wasn’t doing anything heroic. I was just sitting on a sofa in Delhi, with all windows shut against the smog, and reading dozens of academic papers, with no idea of how on earth I was going to do anything at all that can approximate them – not in technique (as this I knew I would learn from my mentors), but in the golden glow that I perceived radiating from my computer screen.
It was the glow of love, I thought. And because I couldn’t love, I would inevitably fail.
That first winter was dark for many reasons. On dark evenings of Delhi, and then Stockholm, I threw myself into the work. I had been taught that love is as love does, that love is not a feeling but an act. And so I was acting in the only way I could think of: I was reading everything I could lay my hands on. In the following years, I went to every conference I could go to, wrote every paper I could write, met every person I could meet, taught every class I could teach.
The results were ambivalent. I was accused of not engaging enough – or too much. I was accused of being arrogant and indifferent – or too involved and ‘enthusiastic’. I learnt to write my emails outside office hours – but only send them between 8 and 5. I learnt to hide the amount of hours I spent working, to pretend as if the results were coming effortlessly – as this is the ‘good form’. But all of this was offset thousandfold by the joy of intellectual life. The five years of PhD studies were the years of continuous, unbridled excitement of discovery. I travelled, met truly wonderful people and ideas, swallowed dozens of books. I experienced the elation of an uplifting conversation, the thrill of deliberating on the ideas for a paper, of how the text unfolds on screen with three people typing at the same time, building on each other’s unfinished sentences. I enjoyed the physical pleasure of considering a completely new idea for the first time, connecting two dots I could never have thought of bringing together – a deeply satisfying moment re-cognition, an epiphany. The contentment of a well-engaged class or session. The kindness of favours: colleagues returning my books to the library or watering my plants when I was away, the little gifts I found on my desk, the afterwork chats. All of this fell into the churning pool of ideas, books, continuous conversations. Academic life was a chorus of conversations that never end but are always interrupted in the most interesting places. It was not a nine-to-five job. There was something very personal, transformational, and deeply intimate in creative intellectual work, whether I did it alone or with others. It engaged the entirety of me. Nothing was outside it, it was total. It was and remains a conversation that never ends, only gets interrupted to be picked up again, another time, elsewhere, with the same or another person. I fell in love with this ever-incomplete conversation.
Yet, all that I treasured was the source of enormous frustration and pain. Frustration with myself, because this ‘love’ I fell into was evasive and inconsistent. It was picky, selective, and unfair. It was at times vain and frantic. I honed and polished a text; I went into great pains to answer a student’s message; I spent hours talking to a colleague. But not every text; not every student every time; not every colleague. Worse still, work consumed me in the first few years in such a way that my family life suffered. Keeping it together at work resulted in showing frustration at home. Engaging with unfamiliar people and places resulted in withdrawing myself from the intimately known. The burden of parental and familial guilt was enormous. I was unfair, and whatever fire was burning in me, it did not warm anybody and only burned me to ashes. I questioned myself. Why couldn’t the fire in which I was burning illuminate and warm up everything I touched?
When I first heard the line ‘We love the ones we can’, I was relieved. It took me some time to give myself the permission to focus, cultivate, nourish those elements that I COULD love in my work and personal relationships, no matter how unfair and incomplete (and often guilty) it made me feel. But it took another year or two to understand the other side of the equation – I will also be loved in the same imperfect ways. I needed to let go of the teenage fantasy of unconditional support that I had somehow gotten entitled to.
And it was liberating – not to expect the generous gifts I received. I saw love as a gift that is never reciprocal at the individual level. Not a gift from the loving to the loved, but from life itself – to the loving. Whenever I invested time and effort into a project or a relationship, I wouldn’t know if it would live or die – but I gave it all I could. All the reading, thinking, talking, organising, attending, engaging with other people’s work and ideas paid off, none of it was in vain, as it would come to use in other ways than I had expected. Over the years, I received much more than I invested or deserved.
Love is as love does, but the investment of keen attention at certain moment resurfaces as an intense feeling. I remember opening students’ exam papers, my hands sweating slightly. I really liked those students, I wanted to give them the best grades possible – and I was afraid that their answers would disappoint me. It felt like love, but WAS it love? Did I genuinely care about the students’ learning – or my own expectations of them? And this brought me to the third realisation: that love is not a thing, but an essence. There is no thing or relationship that IS love – love is an essence, an idea. I stopped asking: Is this friendship love – or habit? Is this marriage love – or project? Is my love for my child love – or narcissism? Is my attention to this group of students or colleagues love – or vanity? It is liberating to think that none of them IS love. I learnt to distinguish traces of love in many of my relationships. Sometimes less, sometimes more. Love went around, from me to others, from others to me – not as a two-way street, but as a circle. I got it all back with interest, one way or another, not always the way I expected. I got it back thousandfold. There is nothing more to wish for.
***
Applied to academia, these lessons of love led me to understand the double-sided nature of academic – and, I suspect, much intellectual and creative – work. Like two sides of one coin, impossible without each other, they are precarity and freedom.
No matter how much you invest of your time and mental and emotional energy, you will, at early stages, eventually be ‘fired’. We think of PhD studies and postdocs and research projects as ‘projects’. But ‘project’ is a euphemism for an arrangement at the end of which you will be fired. I have always known this. At first, it gave me enormous anxiety. In the first two years of my PhD studies, I couldn’t sleep or eat for months in a row. Worn out, dazed, constantly exhausted, I could not tell my bank card from my key card when I was trying to pay for my lunch or open the university door. I was terrified, knowing that after throwing five years of my entire self into this work, all I get at the end is precarity of short-term part-time contracts (at best, if anything at all) for a couple of decades. The anxiety slowly abated as I was coming into my own and saw accomplishment of any kind more of a byproduct of the process than its goal. But the full realisation that I will be ‘fired’ came to me not from my ‘individual study plan’ with dates and percentages. One day I was closing my eyes, picturing a class I was teaching and trying to remember the students’ names. Suddenly, with a sensation I couldn’t name, I realised: I don’t need to. I will most probably never see them again, because I will be ‘fired’. The courses I have co-developed, the lectures I wrote – someone else might be teaching and reading them next term. I couldn’t put my finger on what I was feeling, and I let it rest for a while.
As I was reading Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s account of ‘life in the capitalist ruins’ of the matsutake mushroom pickers – the ‘bible’ of environmental social scientists – it struck me: that feeling I had was a sense of freedom. I am not trying to romanticise it – neither does Tsing. Just like her mushroom pickers, we in academia exist in the peri-capitalist space, to which we (or at least some of us, I venture) were driven by our desire for freedom. This beautiful freedom – to write lectures, to remember names, to collaborate, to create – is what academics do, the labour of love. It is preyed upon – as Tsing puts it, ‘salvaged’ – by the Habermasian ‘system’, exploiting our communal efforts, our never-ending processes of peer-review, extreme working hours, extreme overheads on the documented labour – perhaps reflecting the fact that the actual living undocumented labour going into the work is triple. And yet, here we are, because we chose it.
This freedom creates the rhizomatic mycelium networks across the world. We, people of the world, the ‘quasi-elite’ (having the elite’s mobility and entrance into the world, but not its wealth), dwell horizontally, defying (never fully, but to a great extent, still) vertical hierarchies. We collaborate across many borders, and the intellectual relationships that we develop are our real currency – and a source of accomplishment and joy.
Or are they? Or shall I fall into the cynicism some of my colleagues like to wear on their sleeves when uncertain?
***
As I was writing this, I was sitting at the vast glass dining table of my husband’s uncle in Bangalore, and the setting sun was caressing the walls and the acrylic paintings streaked with gold. As I was typing, my son was constructing some intimidatingly complicated Lego world next to me. He said: Mum, you type so much that sometimes I hear tap-tap-tap of your fingers in my sleep. He stated it as a matter of fact, with no particular emotion. Basking in amber light, I felt more in love than I had ever been in my life. It was trickling through me slowly, glowed dimly. I had failed yesterday and the day before, I would fail again the next day. At everything – loving, writing, parenting. But through this journey, I got to know my limitations – a precious gift. My mind was full of ideas to pursue, my inbox full of emails to answer, my shelves and suitcases full of exciting books to read. But I wasn’t in a rush. I’d attend to them in due course. Maybe after a few rounds of Lego-building, which is such a soothingly – and disturbingly – Scandinavian form.
An intercontinental flight and a ton of greenhouse gas emissions later, a message from a senior colleague saying ‘I’ve got a pressing schedule’ triggers a new a wave of anxiety in me. I don’t know what ‘schedule’ means. It may not have anything to do with work. For all I know, they might be having a pressing surfing schedule! Or barbeque schedule! But I assume the worst – that a colleague senior to me is working as I am on a holiday (horror!). It makes me think of everything I should be doing but am not. My stomach contracts. In the morning, getting ready for a walk in a new city, I am rehearsing a spiel justifying (to myself) why I didn’t manage to cancel the room booking for a class I will do online, why I didn’t write a postdoc application on my holiday, why I took a six-week holiday in my last PhD year to begin with, and so on. All this anxiety is living there, just underneath the surface. But I walk on the surface, like on thin ice. Through the unfamiliar city’s streets slowly becoming familiar, its galleries, its glorious gardens. I sit on the rims of its fountains. Considering if I should – or can – fall in love with its steady, unrushed pace, its limestone and sandstone and basalt, glass and steel aesthetics. Having conversations that have to be interrupted, because someone needs to be dropped to the station.
Maybe that’s all we are – a series of interruptions?
***
I don’t know what awaits me after my PhD journey ends. I don’t even know if this post is me shooting myself in the foot and ‘oversharing’, being ‘unprofessional’. I am definitely adding to the litany of similar stories. But I hope that those who have had similar experiences – of precarity and freedom of practicing their craft – will resonate with this.
I return to my old self in Delhi in my first year, overwhelmed by the reading. My ability to succeed at what I am doing is, indeed, proportionate to my ability to love – but my understanding of love has changed. It doesn’t mean doing something heroic. It means simply accepting the gift – the ability to love when I CAN – which will always be given. There is a little bit of love in whatever I am doing, be it reading a book, reviewing a paper, or answering a student’s email. Sometimes there is a bit more love, sometimes less. Sometimes it seems there isn’t any at all – I cannot feel it. But I know it is right there – idiotic, incorrigible, unwavering, unrequited, and quiet. Not like the fire I burnt in – but like the amber sunset light on the walls. Not like the tsunami that overwhelmed me – but like the whispering fountains next to an art gallery on the summer side of the world.
Fathom 