My Head is a War Zone and Other Lessons from Applying to Graduate School
I registered for the GRE today. This simple task of hitting submit was weeks, months in the making, spurred on by a passionate belief in hope for the future. After it was all settled, I looked out the window at the miniature pine tree that I love so much about my backyard, and I realized that I have so little time to piece together a winning application.
I have already gone through the motions of crisis, texting my mother and Kelly, “But I don’t speak Italian or Classical Nahuatl. How can I hope to get into graduate school if I don’t speak Italian or Classical Nahuatl?” I have woken up to dreary inner weather and bright sunshine of optimism in commensurate levels. I have packed my Arabic and French textbooks, my guide to the GRE, and I have settled into the coffee shop for prime studying. It all feels good when I am learning a language. Sometimes I think that I am meant to spend my days sifting through one of the many Arabic plurals.
I suppose I am foolish for trying to balance all of this with my thesis for my MA program. I have had the great fortune of studying with phenomenal professors and peers at the Johns Hopkins University for two years. I cannot believe my time with this program is coming to an end. A part of me may always ache for the times that I had with some of the finest writers in the world, like a pit has been dug into my chest. I never knew what I was capable of until I went to school, and now I have never known my limitations until I applied for school.
It is a humbling experience.
There are a lot of parts to the application process. Because I am aspiring to a degree in Comparative Literature, I have to brush up and improve myself in all these languages that I have had on the go for years, adding up to Arabic, Persian, French, Portuguese, Icelandic, and Spanish. I have to draft a winning and winsome essay. I had a great idea for my statement of purpose in my dream, but then I woke up.
And applying to graduate school is like excavating one’s own head. Mine is a place strewn with the rubble of years of hallucinations and tussles with myself. In fact, one might judge it a war zone where trenches have been prodded into the earth, little lines scarring the center of my being. From an aerie, it is hard to have hope that I can do it all, that I can finish a degree, reestablish some sort of fluency in Arabic, write a grant proposal, write a killer essay and a statement of purpose, prepare for the GRE, and finish a novel. But it is almost as though there is a superior perch above even that that says, “It will all be alright.”
When I was a teenager, I took a lifechanging class in American history that focused on the development of American ideologies. This was the first time that I learned of history as a system of blood vessels connecting the tissue of our national actions, rather than simply a coterie of bald facts and dates. I learned about how the South became the South, how the North became the North, and I learned how to ask myself the same question the professor asked of me: Are you in better shape than the people on board the Titanic?
The answer is yes.
I think to myself, I can get rejected by every graduate school in America. And sometimes, I can even echo, Big deal.
Here are the things I have learned from stretching myself to my limit:
Having Arcane going in the background as I revise my novel for my thesis is inspiring, and I get lofty ambitions that perhaps, if my wee project is ever published, it would make a better cartoon than live action film.
When my cat, Bijou, insists on attention by squatting on my GRE flashcards, I must understand that the prerogative is to love all animals and people first.
I must bounce up to the limits of my logic to decipher the mathematics section of the GRE because all that I need I have in the submerged depths of my person…if only I knew how to dive in within thirty-five minutes.
Story is our most beautiful faculty.
It is necessary sometimes to light some incense and come to weeping.
I have a peculiar habit of folding myself like a pretzel when I go to bed at night because I still have my satchel and all my textbooks splayed around me when it is time to turn off for the day.
My substance is both more vibrant and more gossamer than I ever believed.
I have one month until the GRE. I take it on November 9. I have memorized hundreds of tedious, recondite words at this point (including recondite). Though the deadline for Columbia’s application is still two months away, I have already planned my trip to the library, where I will get some celebratory books to read after. I intend to down a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and sit with some good essays and try and gain ground on my Goodreads goal. In other words: I will be okay.
