But I Always Stand Up

I drink an ungodly amount of tea and browse ScienceDirect for fun. I keep a fake CV with journal article ideas that I would love to bring to fruition. I love Icelandic phonology, rooting around in Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, and reading about a surfeit of topics, from kabuki theater to Ebola. I have ever been wide-eyed in the rain of knowledge that soaks us all through.

My education has been like a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, a paradoxical being, a serpent resting coiled at the feet of some great and fervent hopes. But I am also well acquainted with failure in my educational journey — I have failed classes, failed to organize myself into a coherent student sometimes. To quote Sigur Ros, I got a nosebleed, but I am tussling with myself to always stand up.

I have often felt over the last year that my thirties will be the decade where I can bring myself to hope, to pursue an education, to run away with the ideas, the research, the writing, the poetry with which I yearn to elope. I lost my teenage years and twenties to health problems, and I finally feel like I have clawed my way to the other side, and I am gazing around at the bright light that surrounds my little tunnel. My mother taught me that an education is the most important thing you can do for yourself, to question, to ask, to think, think, think.

My mom was also the only mom in the world who encouraged her children to go into the arts instead of sciences or engineering or law or medicine. My original major when an undergraduate was physics, but my mother sighed and said, “Why do that when you can be a poet?” What I have come to realize is that language is the career I want for myself, not merely a research job, but also a love of writing that seeks to transform that love into something I can one day do full-time.

Yesterday, I met with Melissa Axelrod, an incomparable human being and singular linguist. Melissa has been a mentor and friend for years now, and I hesitantly pitched to her the idea of applying to a graduate program in linguistics. Given that my first attempt at graduate work in this field was not a rousing success — I ended up leaving the program for health reasons — I was hesitant, spent the hours leading up to the meeting fidgeting with my fountain pen and getting its blue ink all over my fingers and my journal. But Melissa was kind and encouraging, a force for that elusive hope that I am always chasing.

Every morning with my tea (or, at least the first of many cups), I read a journal article. Right now, I am reading everything Karin Kukkonen and Luc Steels have published. I was bobbing in the waters that surround comparative literature, language, and computer science. I think linguistics, which is what I majored in as an undergraduate, represents everything I love about cognitive science and the reckless pursuit of knowledge. Cognitive science is wonderful because it is a model that we have for how the mind works.

I stumbled on cognitive science quite by accident. I have always loved studying foreign languages and took a linguistics course because language itself has always been the great love of my life, the way its machine is oiled by gears and the diaphanous, ethereal thing called the soul. I love grammar. I love seeing the internal cogs and gears. A love of foreign languages led to a love of linguistics, led to a love of cognitive science more broadly. Suddenly, I found myself visiting Zimmerman Library daily to peruse the stacks, hunting for books on Gilles Fauconnier and Adele Goldberg and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

But what pulled everything together were the people like Melissa. There is a certain level of fear in engaging in science, or academia, or pushing the limits of one’s expertise in any subject. Knowledge is a big jar that expands with the pace of one’s education, be it autodidact or through a university, but it pumps with power like a heart, opens and closes with awe like a pair of lungs.

So this is what I am trying to do: To correct my failures. To become a linguist and writer who works at the intersection of literature and cognitive linguistics. The University of New Mexico and Johns Hopkins were like magical lands filled with excitement and a sense of humbleness to be in the presence of such great minds. And then to sort of peter out, but try to come back stronger….it is a lot to aspire to. I am very fortunate.

I wanted to be a medical doctor as a toddler. I think that this is a common dream. However, once I was introduced to language, I knew that that was the only thing I ever wanted to devote myself to. Language is wind through the branches of trees, a mountain decorated with gray penumbras. As I got older, I had the idea that Dr. Savannah Rivas would be conferred through a PhD instead. There is no easy path to those three letters behind your name, just as there is no easy path to publication (querying a novel is hard).

But I always stand up.