Insert Montage Here
These days, I don’t rest much. I have populated my time with draft five of the novel, thesis thoughts, conference abstracts, journal articles, poetry, short stories, essays, Spanish, daydreams, hustling. Were life a grand musical, this would be the phase where the upbeate montage plays, and Van is reading textbooks, studying statistics, type-type-typing away on Fable’s chapters. And though I don’t get sleep, I feel like a flower growing through the broken flesh of my previous life: I am becoming someone I want to be. I am rising.
It feels surreal to call this my career. For so long, I was stuck in a box that coming out, stretching my joints, seems odd still, as though my body has to continually unfold and the bones have to regrow. And it is ugly to admit it, but I think through my illness, I allowed myself to drift downwards. Yet, even before the illness, I think that I was still bopping around through life. But now I am preparing to transition to research assistant — something I had prayed and hoped would happen — and I can’t in any capacity think of my job as just a run-of-the-mill activity to take up space in my days and give me some money to buy books. No, the work that I do matters because the place where I work matters, and it is my career.
This summer, I’ve presented at two conferences in California. In the latter, in Davis, I printed out a poster, stuffed it in a carrier, and carted it around with me to talk about Austronesian alignment in situations of high contact. When I unfurled the poster to stick it to the walls of the conference space, my colleauge, Nick, sat with me, prompting me to answer questions about the results of my typological study. My palms were clammy. Would I be bombarded with difficult questions that would expose me as a mere worm, a wannabe linguist? Nick asked about the charts, what they meant, and what the future of the study would look like. I babbled a bit, but Nick kindly said, “You’re ready.” I do think in retrospect that he was right. There were no hecklers saying, “Why didn’t you include Papapana by name? Boo.”
Davis was also where I received the email that has changed the trajectory of my writing life. As I sift through the notes that I was given — brilliant ideas — I found myself falling in love with my wee book over and over again. Characters are getting aged up. Such characters have more quirks and moods and consequences. Settings are being repainted with blood and ground marrow. The truth is, I love what I do, and I cannot believe that this is what I get to do.
I work at linguistics in the mornings and literature in the afternoons. In the evenings, I try to read or study Spanish and Icelandic. I cannot even recall how many work-related emails I’ve shyly sent out to other researchers, asking for connection. In this time, I’ve submitted an abstract to the Linguistic Society of America, which is the largest conference in my field. Though it may not be accepted, I felt a certain love for life when I poked that submit button.
My thesis is about tonal polarity in Athabaskan languages. A few days ago, I sat in Satellite with a cup of English breakfast rapidly cooling in my hands as I waited to meet with Joan Bybee, a very prominent linguist. To my great delight and relief, she was endlessly kind and presented meaningful directions for my research. Leaving the coffee shop as the rain whispered through my hair and threatened to flood the copy of my book that I’ve printed out, I almost skipped as I walked.
I know that this blog has not been the most poetic, but it has been the most gleeful. Sometimes, I get walloping anxiety. Were my statistics that I used in one chapter of my thesis the best option? Should someone rip off this gleeful mask, unpeel if from my skin in the summer heat, would they find a wobbly child playing at being a meaningful person? I am probably making mistakes left and right. Maybe I am leaving terrible plot holes littered throughout the book.
But the point is that this life is mine to make mistakes and learn from. For the first time, mine. That is something I could never have dreamt of, and as I sat with my mug of morning tea today staring at the bookshelves that I built myself in the apartment that I pay for, I almost cried. Look what I’ve done. Look what I have built. I still have miles to traverse to become a published author and researcher — a Ghost Trail, if you would. I think I can handle the scenery now.
