2011: What a ridiculous year

The past year is like a bad country song. A dozen people I care about died within the first few months of the year. Many of my friends have lost someone in the war this year. A few have experienced loss or injury in their immediate family. I lost Sasha in July, right before my anniversary. I've endured the betrayal of false friends. Oh, and let us not forget the home repair nightmares that have resulted in the interior of my home looking like a construction zone for 2 months now...more on that later...I am still too angry and too stressed to articulate what the situation is right now.

Senior Jefe had his ass handed to him by the Navy, again. He's been depressed most of the past few years, which has only been offset by his determination to soldier on come what may. We've talked about what to do about the Navy. I personally think he would be happier to be out and be free of them, but leaving is scary for him. And there is really no one to talk about it. He can't confess how he feels to people at work for fear that he will be treated differently, likely worse than he is now. It's like when someone leaves academia, people treat them like lepers. The one common bond is broken and so there's nothing left to bind the relationship together. Not speaking about it, or being able to get good answers to questions while not attracting attention to himself has left him feeling pretty isolated and me pretty helpless to do anything.

On some level it's easy for me to say "walk away," because I have never wholly accepted the military as part of my identity, but it's different for him. This is all he's known and done since he was 18. That's a long time to be in the thick of it and it's the only way he's experienced adulthood. To an extent the Navy IS part of his identity. But I think he's coming close to making, or at least accepting, a decision. I think the remaining indecision is largely a question of timing things to create the least upheaval, but I could be wrong and find at the end of 2012 that we are back knee deep in it.

Either way, it's scary to me in a different way. I feel there is a lot of pressure placed on me to finish and get a job in order to ease whatever transition comes, whenever it comes. I feel like I can never move fast enough to keep up. It's exhausting.

But despite all of the loss and heartache 2011 has brought me and my friends and family, I am still grateful for this year. There are still good things that happened. This time a year ago, I was a freshly minted PhD candidate. I felt that I should feel different or in some way transition as a result of this change in status. I was really disappointed that I had worked so hard and overcome so much only to feel like nothing had changed and perhaps none of it had mattered. I am grateful to find that I was wrong.

It's a year later and as I have been reflecting on the year over the past few days, I am struck by how much I have changed. I have gained a lot of confidence in myself overt the past year. I won second place in an oral presentation competition in our department. This is up from my all time low of crying through a presentation when I first started here. I feel more confident that I have good ideas about science, because my adviser's relationship with me has changed. We are no longer focused on how much I suck as a human being and so we are beginning to speak as sort-of equals about science. This excites me and makes me feel like a lot of the sacrifice I have put forth was worth it.

Being the first person to fail my comps under the new leadership in the department was horrible. I was treated like a leper by everyone in the department for the 6 months between when it happened and when I passed, but many people have followed in my footsteps since. Many of those have not come back from it. I did. This has given me a strange attraction to people in my department and so I am popular for the first time in my life. Am I a nerd heroine? I don't know. This has really changed things and given me an opportunity to explore all sorts of social aspects of graduate school that I probably wouldn't have otherwise accessed. All of this socialization has been good for me, because it has really helped me better define what I want in a friend, as well as helped me access a better understanding of how this acquaintance idea operates.

As a result, I have recognized that some of the "friends" I thought I had, weren't really ever my friends at all. Some of them harmlessly exist out in acquaintance land. Some are users and will need to be removed from my life. Then there are people who were true friends who I simply didn't recognize until now and I treasure them. This is much of what is driving me to cement what friendships I intend to take with me when the Navy let's us off the ride. I realize that I will go through some similar losses as Senior Jefe, although in a different way. I want to start preparing for that transition now and determine which relationships are ones I will take with me throughout my life and which were relationships on convenience. But this is all hard work and it has left me really sad in some ways. Part of the problem is that when I decide someone is a friend, I trust them completely and when that trust is broken, it tears me apart.

My family has still decided to employ their year end craziness. My mother hit me up for cash on my birthday without wishing me happy birthday. My father didn't call until my sister reminded him. Joy. My Dad and sister are living together now to save money, but they are fighting about money. My Dad continues to apply for manual labor jobs with a J.D. rather than embracing a real career. This leaves him continually cash strapped and now with some of the other stuff going on in the household, he is talking about going to a food bank to get food, while refusing help from Senior Jefe and I. This greatly distresses me, but at the same time, he has his other two daughters galavanting about the globe without providing any help or support to him. They are oblivious to the situation and love to pretend we are just another middle class family. Someone needs to explain to me why the one needs to pay to go to India to take care of lepers for 2 weeks on some sort of charitable tourism, when her father is talking about going hungry. The plane ticket alone would feed the entire family and pay a good chunk of the household utilities for a year. WTF? Meanwhile, because I showed some kindness and sent my mother $100 for Christmas this year, she thinks this cash cow is back in business to be tapped and is hitting me up for cash again. I don't have any extra cash. It took me 5 months to save that money to give to her out of my shitty grad school salary that basically pays for my food, car, dog, and utilities every month. Senior Jefe is responsible for all my other bills and his. Grrr.... she is a user. As angry as I am about these "developments," I can say I am doing much better with them this year than last. It appears that in one small measure, I was right. Passing my comps and knowing that if I just hang on I will get a PhD, has allowed me to be more zen about their behavior because it makes me feel more and more like I am not them and I won't just simply sink back into the cesspool from which I originated. Of course finishing and getting a good job would cement this for me.

I believe that 2012 is probably going to be a rough year for Senior Jefe and I, even though I really think we need to catch a breather. But the truth is that these rough patches have really made us grow. Seeing him finally embrace getting help through this transitional discussion warms me. Knowing that my life is transitioning soon, has really buoyed my spirits. I feel like I have spent my whole life trying to escape poverty, and even after I married Senior Jefe I didn't really feel like I had accomplished that, because on some level I was dependent upon him for my escape and for the sense of security I experienced. But now, I can see that he and I have worked together to overcome these last few hurdles. Soon I will be able to look back and know that for all the hardship, suffering and pain I have experienced throughout my life, I really am living the American dream of pulling myself up by my bootstraps (with a lot of help along the way) and making a new life for myself and my family, full of all sorts of new possibilities.

I am ready for that journey and I will embrace whatever I have to endure to get there, because the positive changes I have experienced already have made my life so much better, even in a year where so much has seemingly gone wrong. Here's to 2012 and new possibilities.