At a certain point in my PhD studies, I decided that this was not a degree. This was war.
In the early years of grad school, I lost myself in my work. I worked nights and weekends. I insisted on ambitious, risky projects, and I insisted on doing them myself. Learn to code? I’m on it. Become a data scientist despite having no training in statistics or data science? No problem. Design a comparative genomics study leveraging 7 terabases of DNA sequence data? How hard could it be? My mentors gave me advice about compromise and collaboration. I shrugged it off and told them to trust me. I’d work hard. I’d figure it out. And I’d deliver dazzling results.
However, the dazzling results did not materialize, and I was at a loss to explain it. I spent the middle years of my PhD in a rage, grasping for a throat to choke. I railed against the cruel power structures of academia. I lamented that science was an impotent appendage of capitalism. I pointed the finger at every person and institution around me, not quite able to articulate their sins but certain that they had failed me.
More challenges ensued. My marriage fell apart. I developed a drinking problem. My grandmother died. My project failed. And oh right, there was a pandemic. The little things I’d always told myself to get through the day no longer got me through the day. I felt that I was not Hope anymore, but some miserable impostor who had been transplanted into Hope’s body. Hope’s favorite things did not bring me joy. Nothing did. I tried to use “healthy tools” to climb out of the pit of despair yawning within me, but the shallow vapidity of my attempts at human connection were more tragic to me than the pit itself. There were days when I tried to drive to work, but instead I pulled over and sobbed by the side of the road before finally giving up and returning home. There were nights when I peered over the ledge of my apartment’s roof, when I swerved a little too freely on the freeway, when I walked into the street with my eyes closed, when I drank and drugged myself into oblivion. I felt so trapped in that marriage, in this career, in this body, and I felt ashamed for wanting out. I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to feel like there was a way out.
By the start of my fourth year, I couldn’t care less about being a scientist. Nevertheless, I was determined to finish what I’d started. This was partly out of stubborn vanity, a refusal to admit yet another mistake while the ink was still wet on the divorce papers. But there was something more in it, too. Grad school was no longer just a job or just a degree. It was a metaphor for the battle raging inside of me. And who won that battle mattered, more than any amount of research I might ever do.
Somebody once told me, “start where you are”, and that’s what I did. If I could only muster up an hour of work on a given day, then I mustered it. If it was all I could do to just be physically present at a meeting, then I showed up. I learned to ask for help, and my mentors were more than willing to give it. They listened to me, worked with me, showed me which corners I could cut and which ones I couldn’t. Slowly, I learned how to be an adult.
One pomodoro session at a time, one to-do list at a time, I made progress. I had to learn for myself what it means to work smarter, not harder. It means knowing when to call it a day, being willing to share the load, and remembering that perfect is the opposite of done. In the end, figuring out the answers was easy; the hard part had been figuring out what to ask. Brute force got me nowhere. Instead I had to think carefully about where to put my energies.
As I write this, theoretically one semester away from getting my PhD, it occurs to me that there is one person who will not be invited to the graduation, and who will not be on the acknowledgements page of my dissertation. She will not receive any thanks at all, yet she perhaps deserves as much thanks as my parents, my advisor, or anyone else. (No, it’s not my therapist. She’ll be in the acknowledgements.)
Her name is Flaed. I had to do some Googling to figure out where I got this name, as I remembered only that it came from a young adult novel that I read around age 11 or 12, and that Flaed was short for Aethelflaed. Luckily Aethelflaed is not a common name, so it was very easy to track down The Edge on the Sword by Rebecca Tingle, a fiction based on a real medieval ruler whom Tingle styles as a warrior princess. After I read that novel, I began to daydream up my own version of Flaed, essentially a more grown-up, fiesty, bad-ass, sword-wielding version of myself. She was a “girl power” character akin to Brave’s Merida or Avatar’s Katara or Disney’s Mulan—a remarkably skilled fighter, able to fend for herself, defiantly single, competent in just about every way except for a stubborn individualism that sometimes hinders her ability to work with others. I made her my main World of Warcraft character when I was 13 or 14 (again, the uniqueness of the name Flaed came in handy). I would have made a human character, but my brother played Horde characters and I wanted to play with my brother, so I made an undead version of Flaed. So Flaed became an undead, and daydream history was made.
It seems strange to me that dream interpretation in modern popular culture, and to some degree in psychology, is often about decoding universal symbols. That is, if a certain object or animal or character appears in your dreams, it means X. Psychologists have done the same thing with myths. They interpret a certain character or character archetype, such as the warrior princess I describe here, to represent a certain set of feelings. Saturn represents this, Mercury represents that. The young artist represents this, the old king represents that. This seems a little backward to me.
Your dreams and fantasies are your soul’s attempt to capture your experiences. Yes, we are bound to absorb certain cultural tropes and stereotypes and those will make their way into our dreams. But dreams and fantasies are intimately yours, and they cannot be divided from the context your life without stripping away most of what makes them beautiful and informative.
Flaed remained my main daydream character throughout my teens. Then in my first year of grad school, my imagination had a field day with Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff. It was a great book, and I couldn’t help seeing a little of Flaed in Cleopatra. Suddenly, one day, an idea hit me like a ton of bricks: Flaed was Cleopatra, two thousand years old but still kicking ass and taking names. For the next couple months I was overwhelmed with daydreams, like my imagination had had too much coffee. The change stuck.
Over the next few years, this new Cleopatrified version of Flaed gradually became more complex and mature. She was now also older, both in terms of her actual age (two thousand years old instead of several hundred) and her apparent age (forty, instead of a young adult). She became more wise, fighting with her mind as well as her sword. She also became more feminine; at times she used her feminine wiles to solve problems, and she developed a softer, more maternal side through which she could be vulnerable with others. She learned to negotiate, to compromise, and to collaborate. Cleopatra-Flaed was still a fighter, but she fought less like Ares and more like Athena. Her moves were about strategy and acquisition of power, not just trying harder.
At the beginning of grad school I was a lone wolf, like the early version of Flaed. I wanted to do things myself, defying tradition and my elders’ expectations. I felt sure that I didn’t need anybody’s help. As time went on, it gradually became obvious that I needed all the help I could get. Would Cleopatra have been a compelling heroine to me if I had not, even from that first year of grad school, seen a glimmer of my own fatal pride in her? Cleopatra made her way into my daydreams because I was, like Cleopatra, a naturally stubborn, independent person who was discovering that I would need to make compromises and form alliances to survive. As my perception of reality changed, I needed a hero who continued to feel realistic.
The symbolism of the tomb is obvious, in this context. It has other meanings when held up against other life experiences, and also when held up against other daydreams. For now, we may take it to symbolize Cleopatra-Flaed’s great failure, the disaster that drove her into the darkest despair she has ever known, the despair that lasted forever, but that helped make her who she is. Basically, the tomb is my worst moment of grad school. Interestingly, this daydream pre-dates that moment, and in a more rudimentary form it even pre-dates Cleopatra-Flaed. I suppose you don’t necessarily have to go through your own disaster to understand that disaster shapes our character (and our characters).
Fantasies cannot be reduced to cookie-cutter symbols with static meanings. Our favorite characters, symbols, and fetishes evolve as we grow up as individuals. There is constant feedback between our fantasies and the world. The world changes how our fantasies develop, and our fantasies in turn shape how we perceive the world and how we act in it. This dynamic relationship between fantasy and world is at least as important as a simplistic outline of the archetype that perhaps captures the character’s kernel but loses its story. It is a little unclear whether I created this new version of Flaed or whether she created this new version of me. The way I see it, we continue to co-create each other.
As we get to know our fantasies as intimately as we can, in as many ways as we can, we see that they ultimately defy rational explanation. Fantasies are irreducible images evoked by incredibly complex experiences. You cannot really explain an image, you can only connect it to other images. And this is what we do, over and over again. We explore our fantasies without any hope of getting to the ‘meaning’ of them; we merely look again from different angles, and we see something new each time.
Of course, you don’t have to be a daydreamer to try this. If you’ve ever been a fan of a book or a movie, you can better understand yourself by interrogating the elements of that work that you find, or once found, compelling. Do you still like the same bands or books that you liked when you were a kid? How has your relationship to certain characters, moments, or genres changed over the course of your life? Perhaps there is a character from some series who you feel “grew up with you”? We can approach fiction, nightdreams and daydreams with more or less the same attitude; as far as I can tell, the three modes of visualization are more similar than they are different.
The soul is like a sculptor. The model posing for her is your life, and her material is mixed media: whatever bits and pieces of your experience she can grasp and glue together. A cultural trope here, a scary memory there. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to try and interpret the isolated bits and pieces on their own. In a way, it doesn’t even make sense to try and interpret the final sculpture. The dream is already an interpretation. The thing that is truly mysterious, the things that truly demands interpretation, is your life. Your soul is making a valiant effort to interpret your life. Are you?