It’s like, I finally get it now.
All that time I was cribbing about intellectual hurdles, I wasn’t cribbing about that at all. It was just this lack of.. support. Some form of comfort or anything. I had nothing.
The moment I get through it, I realize I have no one to go joyously screaming to. I have nothing.
Fish.
I can relate to what you are saying. Its just a randon existence here in the US without anything to call family with whom you can shed tears or roll out laughing. But no pain, no gain and no PhD in Mechanical Engineering and Scientific Computing….whew, that was long !!
yeah, lack of support really got to me a few times when i was in grad school. and yes, i could call people at home more often than you probably can, and i could fly home more often than you can, but still…it wasn’t enough sometimes. i needed someone there, and i didn’t have anyone. it was unbelievably hard sometimes and resulted in many tears and breakdowns.
Ananth: Yes, exactly. I’m not even going to claim I miss all of that all the time, because for the most part, I don’t. I am kept quite occupied with whatever it is I do. If I don’t think about it, I can con myself into forgetting it doesn’t exist and that I need it there.
It is just, sometimes, you probably need to know you’ve got someone who “just gets” what you’re going through and will help you feel better by being your side. And the times you need this is when you’re… either insanely scared/sad/tense… or the opposite end of the spectrum.. joyous/euphoric etc.
That’s when ‘no pain, no gain’ stops making sense. You’re like, for an instant, what is all this for? Who is all this for? At those moments it definitely won’t seem like it’s for you, because it isn’t making you happy. The pain won’t seem worth it.
But then you just grin and bear it, and in a little while things are back to square one.
anita: I can imagine. I’ve come to the conclusion grad school and higher (and higher and higher) degrees in general have nothing to do with the intelligence of a person. After a point anyway. It just becomes this huge endurance test.
I think I’m luckier than most (at least amongst the folk I came with) in that I have an aunt 20 minutes away from here. I do run there often. I think I have to, for sanity retention.
All my life I’ve been babied, and like everyone else, I’ve pseudo-resented the smothering and the protective fence parents and so on put on my life.
Now I know I need it, very much. Not like I am going to openly tell them that, but I’m pretty sure they don’t need my telling them to know.