#7 Should I drop out of grad school?
CW: existential dread, body horror, HR
I started planning my therapy career path in an entirely different world.
This time in 2019, I was unhappy in my software development career and wanted to find a way to do work that felt meaningful that would also enable me to be self-employed. Therapy checked all my boxes.
But, because nothing goes the way you plan it, three months after I left my career in software to focus on starting this new career...the world ended. Or started to end. Or started to feel like it might end.
When we went into quarantine, my most immediate fear wasn’t actually coronavirus. I had a painful red spot on my left breast that I had first attributed to my cat jumping on me, then to my period. After a month went by and the spot, which could only be described as a lump, did not go away, I was really scared. This was late March.
I spoke with the plastic surgeon who had performed my breast reduction in New Jersey 9 months prior, but I was too far along in my healing process to assume that the lump had anything to do with my surgery. I had been cleared for normal activity long ago.
I got my grad school application together on autopilot, just following through on the plan I had set in motion in 2019. In the before times, when “pandemic” was nothing more than a board game.
At the same time that I worked on my personal statement and requested transcripts, I went in for ultrasounds, consulted with another breast surgeon, and visited a massive glass building referred to as “the cancer pavilion”.
These were the early days of coronavirus: the first time I went for an ultrasound, the nurses were frightened that I was wearing a mask. “Do you have coronavirus,” they asked. “Why are you wearing that?”
The next time I went to get an ultrasound, masks were mandatory to enter the building.
In mid-April, I was prescribed two weeks of antibiotics. The inflammation went down, but the lump remained. It still hurt. My old plastic surgeon told me to wait two weeks before getting another ultrasound. I enrolled in a psychology 101 course that was a prerequisite for the program I had applied to.
May 18th, my new breast surgeon touched the lump with a serious expression and scheduled a biopsy. I went home and looked at my pink folder full of pamphlets about what would happen if your results came back positive for cancer. The models in the pamphlets were all older, with greying hair. I cried like there was no tomorrow.
My boyfriend wasn’t allowed to accompany me to any of these appointments, so on the day of my biopsy, he sat in the hospital parking lot texting me while I sat alone in the waiting room. On the TV, reporters spoke endlessly about the coronavirus death toll rising.
The biopsy was a fever dream of alien abduction. Three strangers in doctor costumes surrounded me in a small room. Of everything going on--my breast being positioned and drawn on like it wasn’t a part of my body; the giant needle that was going to go into my breast; the vials on a tray that would be filled with fluid from my insides--the weirdest thing was having three strangers be in such close proximity to me, like it was normal. “You can't practice social distancing while performing a biopsy,” I thought, while taking deep calming breaths through my mask.
I received my results a few days later: not cancer. Before I really absorbed this news, my city erupted in protest of George Floyd’s murder. I rode my bike downtown to march with my friends, the bandage over my biopsy incision absorbing my sweat. I got my acceptance letter to my grad program, but it felt inappropriate to be celebratory. I barely acknowledged it, instead obsessing over livestreams of protests all over the country.
By July, I was dissociating constantly. Something had gone wrong with my biopsy: the spot where the lump had been was now concave. I didn’t have cancer, but I had a ditch in my breast. My perfect plastic surgery Mercedes Benz breast had a dent in it.
I had finished my prerequisite course and was a little under 2 months from starting my program, but nothing seemed to matter. All the protesting was steadily being subsumed by liberal identity politics and people were going to restaurants even though coronavirus was very much still “a thing”, and I might not be dying of cancer but my breast wasn’t perfect anymore and even thinking about how stupid of a problem that was in comparison to everything else going on made me hate myself.
I let myself tune out and rely on passionless autopilot to get me through work and class and...life.
Fast forward to now.
Last weekend I discovered that HR had given me incorrect information about my employee benefits. I thought that as an employee at the school I’m enrolled in as a student, I had 100% tuition remission. Turns out, I actually get 100%....of 16 credits per academic year. That only covers one out of three semesters of classes.
This sent me into a tailspin. My program costs around $3000/class, $60k in total.
I fantasized aggressively about dropping out and moving to the woods. I never, ever wanted to move out of the city before coronavirus, but this fantasy has become increasingly intoxicating the longer we remain in quarantine in our dark Philadelphia rowhome with no backyard. God, to be able to sit outside to drink my coffee in the morning.
As coronavirus quarantimes drag on, it’s harder and harder to imagine ‘returning to normal’ and enjoying the city again. Going out to eat downtown, meeting a friend at a bar, getting on public transit, exploring tiny shops, packing into a house for a New Years party. Mirages vanishing on a fast approaching horizon.
My boyfriend and I find each other in the kitchen at night, me eating dairy-free icecream out of the carton and him heating up a frozen burrito, and we end up talking about how this is just the beginning. The West Coast seems to burn every summer, now. Fish are dying in the oceans, birds are falling out of the sky. In Philadelphia, lanternflies swarm trees and sidewalks. Human-created ‘natural’ disasters are already here. If it’s not the new plague, it’s whatever the next climate-related catastrophe will be.
What’s the point in pretending otherwise?
My new financial dilemma brought existential questions to the forefront: Will there even be a society left to care about being a certified therapist, by the time I finish my degree? Will the country explode into civil war by November? Would the smart thing to do be to move out of the city and enjoy the last days of our lives someplace calm and green?
I’ve found myself returning to the dull terror of non-control that I experienced with the lump. I had my last visit with the breast surgeon in June, after the biopsy. I wanted to know whether the dent in my breast that was the size of two of my fingers would ever go away.
She explained that the lump was caused because part of my breast had necrotized, died inside of me. The fat that liquified had no place to go and became infected, this was what caused the pain and exhaustion I had felt in March and April. She said the dent might not go away, that I might need fat grafts to fill it in.
Pain, disappointment, and body horror weren’t what made this lump experience so uniquely horrible: after all, I’ve experienced worse pain, I can acclimate to the way my body looks, and fuck, IUD insertion remains the most horrific thing I have ever voluntarily done to my body.
What made the lump so unremittingly awful was that it made me confront my mortality.
Every day that I woke up and it still hurt, I was reminded that I will die. I find that now, when I think about not having control, when I think about dying, my breast aches in the spot that was biopsied.
My time in quarantine has been shaped by fear of death by disease and fear of mass violence. The impulse to run away and just feel as much good as possible while I still can...is strong.
I believe this is called hedonism, though, and it poses long-term fulfillment issues.
As I shuffled my options for financing my education around in my head, I realized that I’ve started treating my life like it’s all things just happening to me, like things just happen and happen and happen. It’s hard not to feel that way, after the lump and living through the pandemic and bearing witness to the State’s violence.
But I do have a choice in some things, even if I can’t prevent humanity’s slow slide towards armageddon.
Life isn’t something that’s just happening to me. Even if I hate school and lament the pedagogical failings of the program I’m in, I take joy in saying: I chose this. I chose this particular struggle, of becoming a therapist, because it’s intellectually challenging and emotionally rewarding. And I continue to choose this, even as the future becomes a pinprick, because without struggle, life loses its meaning.
You can’t just bow out of struggle, it will find you wherever you go. You may as well take ownership of the struggles you enjoy, because, for the most part, you don’t get to choose your struggles.
This--my chosen education--isn’t just a thing that’s happening to me. My grief at the state of the world, my grief that I, and all my loved ones, will die...doesn’t need to alter my path. Not if I’m happy with it. Not if it’s helping me find meaning.
In all this chaos, it’s a surprise to me that I’m happy with this thing I’ve chosen to do. But damn it, at least this one thing fits. So I’m going to find a way to stick with it.
Oh, and one more thing? The breast dent is filling in on its own. You probably wouldn’t even notice it was there unless I pointed it out.
Some things that I consumed this week:
A personal narrative about miscarrying at home
How coronavirus is bringing about some necessary family restructuring
Thanks for reading—I know this one was a long one, I had to make up for missing the past two weeks!
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