Tomorrow, after chow

on staying the course

After my defense in March, I couldn’t really summon the language to say anything meaningful about that experience. I’m going to try again here, a couple days before graduation, to offer some insight into what all of this has felt like.

In the days and weeks leading up to my defense, I kept thinking about one particular moment from WSP last summer. It was towards the end of the course, everyone was exhausted, and Emmanuel and I were waiting in the Landrum common room for Cassie and David to bring the students back from a meeting. Emmanuel was telling me about how he was finishing up his degree in Nebraska, a place he had stayed after getting out of the Air Force, even though it was difficult for a gay man to find community there. He told me he was studying for the MCAT and applying to med school in the fall, he wasn’t sure how it was going to go because he was first-gen and mostly estranged from his family. When I shared with him that I am also first-gen he asked me if getting a PhD was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And basically reflexively I said no. It was an interesting moment because if I had a nickel for the number of times I’ve been asked that question, I would have not an insignificant number of nickels. But every time I’ve been asked it, every time I’ve said no.

A non exhaustive list of things that I have found to be harder than graduate school: coming out, transitioning, folding a fitted sheet alone, sneezing while laying down after turning 27, leaving Philadelphia and my friends and my shitty shoebox apartment, my first semester in Williamsburg, the relentless loneliness that has accompanied this chapter of my life, staying on top of my laundry without an in-unit washer dryer, many people I love dying within the same half decade span, living without my grandma. Hard has been having three advisors in five years, writing a dissertation practically alone. It has been hard to hear the whispers - and, often, the direct statements - that all of my opportunities have been handed to me because I am the “golden boy of American Studies.” It has been hard to think about the future, what my life will look like when I am no longer chasing the goal I have pursued for the better part of a decade. So cavalierly and smugly have I been able to say no, actually, the doctorate has been the least of my worries, everything I have encountered while I’ve been in pursuit of the degree has always felt much harder.

But recently, especially in the weeks leading up to my defense and in the ones that have followed, I think I might have been wrong. To have encountered all of that and still done this has been hard. Very hard. It has been so hard. The other day, I found myself thinking about the early days of my time here, in that strange liminal stretch between finishing coursework and prepping for comps, when all I could really manage was driving to the Yorktown Beach and walking Hoka on the Tobacco Trail. There were entire days when I’d just drive the Colonial Parkway until I ended up somewhere else—Jamestown, Gloucester Point, GoKarts Plus, anywhere that felt even briefly like an escape. It wasn’t until last year or so that I realized those drives were how I learned about so many weird corners of Williamsburg. Even my body was in free fall that first semester—I lost forty pounds without even trying, just shrinking in parallel with everything else. When I look back at photos from the day I left Philadelphia through my first two years in Williamsburg, I barely recognize myself. The physical changes were just the most visible part of a larger unraveling, one that I didn’t yet have the language for.

But the hardest thing about this chapter is knowing that it has not made me a better person. It has been realizing that I am not kinder or gentler or less insecure having completed it. And sitting with that truth while also trying to summon a bit of pride for having accomplished something that should feel monumental has been brutal. I have struggled so much in my time at W&M, for reasons that have had nothing to do with the actual completion of the work itself, and while I’d like to feel proud for having made it through all of that, I wish I was emerging feeling less like a husk of the person I was when I moved here.

At the same time, I can recognize - and often do - that it isn’t all bad. I have been fortunate to have lucked into a pretty tight - knit cohort, I have ‘married into’ one that is also full of incredible people. I have served on a variety of committees, met hundreds of awesome students, put together two graduate research symposia, read a ton of my colleagues’ work, taught two great classes, TA’d another two. I gave 21 conference talks (I counted) since I’ve been in the program, I got to attend two fantastic summer institutes (and will attend a third in July). I got to work at the writing center, a place I missed sorely after being away from that work for so many years. I’ve run so many miles on some of the most beautiful trails I’ve ever seen, swum in so much open water, and ate so much Cookout. I read 232 books during comps, wrote a 542 page dissertation, won awards for my teaching and scholarship, and have been in a long standing battle with William & Mary parking for at least the last two years. I got a job, I’m graduating a year early, and I kept my promises to myself. I fell in love, made some good friends, and got to spend time reading and thinking and writing about things I think are interesting. Despite the difficulty, I have had an immensely privileged half decade. But sometimes I think about all it took to get here, and to be honest, I can’t really make sense of the tangle of emotions in which all of those experiences are contained.

In the Army there is a saying that goes: tell yourself you’ll quit after chow. It’s probably a pretty self explanatory aphorism but the idea is to keep going while knowing you want to quit, to continue making decisions that will keep you from quitting due to circumstance rather than reality. Plus, once you make it through breakfast, you can probably convince yourself to get to lunch. In some ways, finishing this degree has felt like that. I reasoned that if I could make it to the end of coursework, I should probably just do my comps colloquium. And then once I made it through my colloquium, I figured I should probably just read for comps. In truth, reading for comps and then taking them was the best part of graduate school for me. I always joked that if I had the opportunity to take comps once a year every year instead of writing a dissertation, I would have willingly signed up to do graduate school all over again. Once I made it through comps I convinced myself to write the prospectus. And well, once that was done, all that was left to do was write the book. The two and half years between my prospectus defense in December of 2022 and my dissertation defense in March of 2025 hade me considering dropping out or transferring or starting all over again pretty much every eight weeks.

It’s funny because my first year was a breeze — COVID afforded me the opportunity to stay in Philadelphia, I took an overload because all of my classes were online and I wasn’t doing anything else anyway, and I got to be unbelievably productive. I felt challenged and excited. But then I moved - I left the city and my friends and my shitty hallway apartment and my hikes in Wissahickon and chicken salad sandwiches at Top of the Hill. And things got quieter. And harder. There were so many nights that first fall in Williamsburg that I slept in my office on a twin bed on the floor because having more than 250 square feet felt so overwhelmingly lonely. The momentum I had built gave way to stillness, and the silence was deafening. I went from waking up with a list of things I was excited to read and do to waking up wondering why I was still doing any of this at all.

There is something that has felt uniquely cruel about being in a program and living in a place that tries to promise community but often delivers isolation. While graduate school often tries to sell you on the idea of collective intellectual growth, mutual investment, and shared struggle, so much of my experience here has felt like shouting into a void. There have been so many stretches where I have felt like I was living in a vacuum: writing without feedback, asking questions that went unanswered for months, existing in a program where half the faculty are ghosts you might never actually meet, where you can graduate with four other people you’ve literally never met in person.

Add to that the strange, slow social metabolism of a small program in a small town. The drama is petty - truly, it is - but because our world is so small, the stakes have felt weirdly high. Everyone talks about everybody else, even the people who care about each other, even the people you’re close to. Gossip is ambient and abundant to the extent that you begin to second guess basically all of your relationships. It encourages you to stop being generous, to retreat, and then suddenly the isolation isn’t just structural, it’s self-imposed.

AND.

All of this is happening in Colonial Williamsburg. I truly cannot articulate how deeply, unsettling bizarre it is to be having the worst day of your life and then realize that Martha Washington is tailgating you in an avocado colored Kia Soul. Or to be walking your dog and see three people in breeches listening to Nicki Minaj on an iPhone speaker. The whole thing has so often felt like a fever dream. It’s hard to take yourself seriously - but you are surrounded by people who takes themselves so seriously.

But anyway, I stayed. I listened to “it’s time to go” by Taylor Swift no less than 300 times in the November of 2021, but I just kept doing the next thing. Out of habit, maybe. Or pride, possibly. Or fear, definitely. But I also think I had a quiet belief that something might change. I stayed because I had already invested so much time. I stayed because I have no other marketable skills. I stayed because I felt like I owed it to myself to be able to say something about this experience that was more significant than “that was the worst five years of my life” (it wasn’t, actually.) Some might call that resilience. Some might call that inertia.

Slowly, quietly, basically imperceptibly, things did start to shift. Not in any dramatic way, not enough to cancel out the hardship, but enough to justify continuing.

There were a handful of things - long morning walks in Waller Mill, sugar free shaved ice from Shoofly after runs in the summer time, an excellent snag at Goodwill, open water swims in the James - that kept me tethered when I felt like I was drifting. There were also a handful of people who made the hard days survivable. People who maybe couldn’t always say the right thing but who made space for me. Who checked in. Who remembered the little things.

And when I couldn’t find community in the places I was supposed to, I worked. A lot. I said yes to every job and opportunity I could. Some of it was about filling time, but a way to distract myself eventually became the very thing that grounded me and gave me purpose. Through coaching, mentoring, consulting, teaching, and TA-ing, I met students who reminded me why I started this journey in the first place. I got see students grow in real time, had conversations that re-energized me (and frustrated me), we laughed about Taylor Swift and TikTok and we commiserated about politics and having only three bars. Those relationships gave me a sense of purpose when everything else felt pretty useless. And if I’ve managed to build a reputation along the way, I believe firmly that it’s because I’ve said yes to every opportunity that has come my way, not because I was chasing some image of success, but because I didn’t always feel like I had the option to say no. I’ve absolutely gotten unbelievably lucky; right place, right time and all that. But mostly I’ve just done the work. That is something I’m pretty proud of.

When I moved here, I was really preoccupied with change - specifically, with the idea that it was something I could participate in willingly. The messaging is everywhere: just by making your bed, you can change your life! If you don’t like your life - choose to change it! Etc. I kept coming back to this belief that, when harnessed properly, change is always framed as this excellent and productive force, a way to reorient your life so aligns more fully with the person you want to become. I thought that if I worked hard enough, or made the right decisions, I could steer things in the direction I wanted. After having spent ten years in Philadelphia, I was ready for a little change.

But what I quickly learned is that change does not always work that way. Sometimes, change happens to you — unexpected, uninvited, non-consensual. I learned that change doesn’t necessarily care to ask if you’re ready, it doesn’t wait for the perfect moment or the perfect mindset. It comes and you get to decide how you’re going to survive it. In my first semester here I could feel it acting on me in ways I hadn’t anticipated, in ways that hurt — reshaping my relationships, my sense of home, my sense of self. It undid parts of me I thought were more or less fixed. It demanded I grieve things I hadn’t even realized I had lost.

My friend Helen used to say two things I have come to believe are true: you cannot arrive late to your own life, and what’s meant for you will not miss you (the bad shit, too). I return to those lines often, especially now, as I begin to understand what it truly means to reach the end of something that has defined my life for so long. For all the all the chaos, the heartbreak, the loneliness, the uncertainty and doubt, there is a quiet kind of pride in knowing that I didn’t just survive this chapter. I did in fact make something of it. I didn’t float through it, things didn’t just happen to me. I lived it, I shaped it, eventually it became something I began to recognize as my life.

I’m grateful to have a job I mostly feel good at, one that has allowed/will continue to allow me to teach and mentor students, to work alongside throughout colleagues, and imagine a future beyond the narrow confines of a PhD. I don’t think I’ll be a WPA forever - I don’t want to be - and I’ll try my hand at the tenure-track market in earnest soon enough. In the meantime, the book proposal is coming along. I’m reading a novel FOR FUN. I’m learning what it feels like to not open my laptop on evenings and weekends, to go for a walk and not think about how I’m missing out on writing time because I can’t write while I’m in motion. I’m excited to chase another big goal - more on that soon - because for a decade I have been oriented toward something that often felt unreachable, and I don’t yet know what it’s like to live without that weight. But I’m excited - I think - to find out.

And I wouldn’t have made it to this threshold without the people who kept me tethered when I felt my most unmoored. Carly, Bri, Nat, and Hoka saw how hard I fought to stay, how much energy it took sometimes to just exist here, how heavy it often became in ways that had literally nothing to do with the actual work. They reminded me that I wasn’t losing my mind and that I wasn’t alone. They gave me back to myself, over and over, especially when I didn’t think I could summon the strength to do it alone. This has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I don’t think it is the hardest thing I will ever do.