(Forced) Reckoning with my Mars in Leo
Vague-ish reflections post-first year in the PhD
Last time you heard from me I was joking about retrograde being to blame for the recent topsy-turvy-ness of my life and I said, “I’m sick of confusion, misunderstanding, and chaos! Can I have a break from reflecting, revising, and having lengthy come-to-Jesus moments with myself?”
Almost two months later, I’m back to report: the answer is a solid NO!
Throw your hands up in the air and proclaim it can’t get any worse than it already is, and sure enough the universe/god/spirit will answer with a fully belly laugh.
Back to the planets for a sec: Pluto has been in retrograde since May 2nd and will be until October— and in the meantime we’re going to experience 5 more planets (including the dreaded Mercury) going into retrograde too— and my life has been out of sorts literally since that day.
It has been my intention (and something I looked forward to) to write a nice little reflection on the end of my first year in the PhD as the summer catapults towards us—I always like how the summer is its own kind of exhalation, a bookmark after a long-winded chapter, a December in a way— but I’ve been putting it off because I’ve felt so complicated and sour about the ending of my year.
The reason for this orientation (the sourness) is another blog in and of itself— something that is still sorting itself out in a way, but I’m now home, many hours away from my life in St. Louis, where I have been feeling like a bug in a cup slowly asphyxiating. Despite what they say about grass everywhere besides where you’re standing, home actually is the lush green grass I’ve been unabashedly counting the days down to!
Anyway, I’ve spent the last few weeks with my family, hanging out with high school and college friends— doing a lot of remembering who I am, and finding lots of comfort in the familiarity of all of the people, places, and things that make me feel like me. After living abroad for a year where I knew absolutely no one and no one gave a shit about where I came from and who I was back there, then having to start from scratch AGAIN somewhere else the second I found my footing, I feel a significant and unavoidable chasm between who I have always conceptualized myself as and who I am in a place where I lack significant community and sense of belonging/purpose. So being back in community where I do feel a deep sense of belonging and purpose is like defrosting myself from being stuck in a deep freezer.
Of course, everyone wants to know how the PhD is going and how I find St. Louis and what I’m doing home and what my plans are, and the only answers I have is an empty wide-eyed look and a nervous laugh. Like, where do I even begin?
I tried writing a blog about this a month ago but couldn’t get to the meat. I’d gotten one of those “a year ago today” notifications from my photos app and it was my friends and I sitting in adirondack chairs on the roof of a house boat we’d rented at this man-made lake-of-sorts called “Let’s Go Hydro” a few miles south of Belfast, celebrating our friend group’s collective birthdays, the end of our yearlong MA courses, and the near end of our time in Belfast.
We still had dissertations to start and finish by the end of summer. Most of us were severely home sick. Some of us had plans (for me, starting the PhD before the technical end of my MA program) and some of us didn’t. We were anxious and itchy about a lot of things. We ached for different places, but knew we’d also ache for what we were leaving behind there. As I reflected in that initial stab at the blog, I did and still do ache for that time and those people. The conclusion I’d left off at: “I am consistently amazed by how much can change over the course of a year, even though I know that change is inevitable and whatever life force beyond me who is authoring the story of my life is really into blunt transitions between chapters.”
A month later, I still don’t know how to pull together my reflection on my first year. But here’s a few notes:
Community & complaining (the usual)
What I end up talking about most with my friends (as we’re reconnecting in coffee shops and community concerts and apartment living rooms) is the realization of the necessity of true community and the patience and intention required to build that.
I feel silly writing this— because it’s like *facepalm* every Asha newsletter-meets-blog has the same undercurrent, and it’s this. But really, even as I’ve struggled to feel a sense of community, belonging, and purpose as I build my life somewhere new, in looking back (or just at a distance), its obvious I’ve been lucky to have some really good friends throughout this year and they continue to be a reason why I have not shaved and bleached my hair.
And to this point, the best friends I made this year were made through holding space for complaints and problem-solving. Over lunch, on walks to/from school, through tears over stats homework, on the way to class off-campus, on bike 3 at CycleBar. I know complaining has a bad rap, but I’m southern and have witnessed time and time again how a lil’ fussin’ can relieve, remedy, and repair just about any situation. The trick is just knowing when and how to do it.
Which brings me to:
My best strengths are my worst weaknesses, but mostly my worst weaknesses are my best strengths
I’ve talked about Clifton Strengths somewhere in a blog here, and I’m sure its tired, but I do really thank my boutique liberal arts education for forcing me to learn and use my strengths! My top strengths (according to the assessment I took in 2018 as a freshman in college and in 2022 right after graduation) are communication (always number 1!), activator, and maximizer. And for those of you who, like me, subscribe to the church of astrology: my Mars is in Leo… in the 10th house.
But for those of you who don’t speak in gen-z-personality-quiz, all of this is to say: I’m a very direct communicator, I notice where things can/could improve, I like to problem solve, and I like to get the ball rolling on things. I have been known to rub people the wrong way because I accidentally step on people’s toes, I can take up a lot of space in a room, and my intentions may at first appear to be out of ego rather than an interest to build community, strengthen structures of support, and work towards better shared spaces.
It happens over and over again: I begin a new chapter and struggle to find my footing because I am misinterpreted. And I don’t blame anyone else— I can be overbearing, annoying, and at times a know-it-all. I am not always right. I expect a lot from others. Sometimes I overreact. Sometimes I am not always as kind or fair as I mean to be. Sometimes I intentionally step on toes.
As the gen-z girls and gays say, I’m just a girl! But mostly, I’m just a person finding my way. In every chapter, everything eventually simmers. I find my people, my passion projects, my “spot”, and it all works out. I trust that this chapter will be no different. I’m still learning all the ways in which my strengths can also be my weaknesses. It is a difficult balancing act, and I am already messing up a lot. But I remind myself that this is growing up— I’m still only twenty-three— my brain is a whole year and a half away from being fully developed, and that is not taking into account my un-formally-diagnosed adhd! (Nobody tell my therapist I haven’t called the testing people! I’ll get to it, I swear!) It’s an important lesson— one that surely requires many re-tests— to learn how your own best strengths can be misconstrued, even by yourself.
Remembering the reason
I recently got a call from a local legend in my hometown, Grady Butler. Mr. Grady was one of the few friendly faces I’d see repeatedly at various community gatherings when I was debating/petitioning the removal of the confederate namesake of my high school as a teenager.
He called me out of the blue as I was doomscrolling, and something in me knew I needed to answer.
He was “just calling to check in with [his] young people.” I was on his mind, he said. I hadn’t seen or talked to him since I was towards the end of college, almost three years ago. He is turning 89 this month. He spent 4 days in a jail cell with Dr. Martin Luther King when he was around my age. He’s been a student, an activist, a professor, and is exactly the kind of person who embodies, “love [your] people, say [your] prayers.”
As I finished my brief updates about my life since we’d last spoken, he said, “You were always a lightning rod. I knew it as soon as I saw you. I saw myself in you.”
He said he wasn’t sure what I’d do with my life, but he knew I’d pick a good path. He was proud to hear I’d chosen to become a professor and a scholar, continuing the work he saw growing roots when I was a teenager debating community members three times my age. He then reminded me to stay focused and take my time before making decisions.
Somehow his phone call was exactly what I needed after this season of wrestling with myself and others. I have had many moments of doubt recently— come very nearly to making course-altering decisions, and I am not usually one for acting on impulse or whims.1 But for now, I’ve settled on a quickly-jotted list in my notebook on ways to survive the PhD. The list is a little silly— staying up on running, trying new coffee shops, and taking it 14 weeks at a time— but my why is still thrumming a steady heartbeat behind it all.
At the heart of it, there’s still a 16-year-old-me with a sense of something she can’t quite put words to, but what she knows is there. The symbols speak, she feels the stories of her community around her, and something unnamed calls her to say something. Life is so circular in such strange and unexpected ways. This is the point everything comes back to, even when I try to redirect myself. My reason is with little me, and she holds a big grudge, but she also holds a lot of hope. For our community, for justice, for (our)self.
Moving forward
It’s solidly summer now. It will soon be too hot to leave the house been 9am and 9pm. It pretty much already is. The PhD is year-round, but luckily this first summer only calls on me for a few things.
My advisor and I will be spending a month in Belfast at the end of July. I’ll get to conduct preliminary research for my next masters thesis and what might become the foundation of my future dissertation. In between now and then, I’m building my reading list for qualifying exams which I’ll take in approximately a year and eight months. That sounds like a long time from now, but it’s not really. I’ve been saying I want to get more serious about my own research, and now we’re getting into the thick of what it takes to become “an expert.”2
I’m still thinking about alternative paths for myself— weighing pros and cons of different decisions, but for now I’ve decided to stay still— (to take Mr. Grady’s advice) to weather whatever is bothering me and wait until something makes more sense than stillness.
And with that, I say, bring on the retrograde(s).
Unless the impulse/whim is signing up for a marathon.
In parentheses because I question if we are ever really experts, and I am somewhat side-eyeing because I know it is easy to stop learning once you have the rights and titles you seek as an academic.