Yes. I did forget. In fact, I may still be in the midst of remembering. And yes: I “passed with flying colors.”

It seems only right to begin with this image, as it a) continues the Gurren Lagann theme of my recent quals-related posts, Gurren Lagann also being the subject of the first real conference paper I presented (and later published) as an adjunct and independent scholar, solidifying my desire to pursue a Ph.D., and it b) illustrates a moment of major triumph formed out of the singular traumatic event in the series, which c) correlates to the trauma of the entire qualifying exam experience.

I search for patterns even when they don’t matter to anyone but me. It’s been my preferred method of sense-making ever since I started attempting to make sense of my intergenerational trauma regarding the Sri Lankan conflict, the problem of accepting that I’ve survived something when that something feels like nothing at all.

There’s a connection to be made there too, but I won’t beat the dead horse.

I realize I’m not alone in feeling like the qualifying exam is a traumatic experience, which simultaneously makes it seem better and worse. That is, I’m glad to be in good company, but if we all know this is how it is then why does it have to be this way? Maybe that’s just my natural inclination to dismantle all of the things, including academic habitus, speaking. There’s an excellent post about the experience of Ph.D. feedback at The Thesis Whisperer (2014); to quote it, “Why does a win in academia always have the sting of defeat?”

Honestly, why?

I’ve left this post dated the day I began to write it, May 31, before the beginning of what’s being called “Dark June” in Sri Lanka given the riots and ethnic violence against Muslims (and Tamils, again, so I’ve heard). But today is June 23. It’s taken over a month for me to grit my teeth and face the experience again, long enough to write about it, at least, to try to make sense of the patterns that over the past few weeks have surfaced and submerged unexpectedly, without warning.

I’ll begin at the ending.

At the 2014 Computers and Writing conference earlier this month, I called my condition a disability. I disclosed to people I admire that I have physical limitations that limit me mentally as well. It helps that my preferred learning style was, already, to consume intensely for a short period of time and then cease consuming to contemplate and create. That’s not the style of most Ph.D. programs, and it’s not the style of the qualifying exam. I had an entire year to read, and I still feel as though my brain failed me. I made notes well enough to write about what I read, but I’ve retained much less than I was hoping.

It feels like the easy way out to blame it on the fact that my collarbone moved out of joint in December, that my chest wall inflammation has gotten to the point where I expect a heart attack every night, that certain muscles got so tight I lost a little height and my digestive system has slowed to the point of stopping, or that I move through such a mental fog that simple words like “flash drive” or “accelerate” or “subway” escape me. I’ve gotten good at charades and at describing things by their function—”you know, the cooling thing,” meaning fan, or “can you turn the brightener on” for lamp (and I swear by One Look’s Reverse Dictionary and Thesaurus, formerly JustTheWord collocation thesaurus).

It’s demoralizing. I feel inferior all the time. At the end of the day I’m too tired and busy deciphering my own brain to start a revolution.

I wrote my qualifying exam answers in bed because I hurt too much to be upright. I taped my notes to the wall to emulate the feeling of a desktop. I revived the old tendonitis and nerve problems in my wrists from a practically ceaseless eight days of typing. And because I was worried I couldn’t trim my answers to size in time, I skipped my medication on the final night so I could pull an all-nighter, with disastrous consequences for the rest of the week.

Fast-forward.

Computers and Writing is always a rejuvenating, intellectually revitalizing experience for me. I needed it: the support, the commiseration, the camaraderie, the feeling of belonging to a community that cares about self-care as well as scholarship, where (with one or two unnamed exceptions) I could mingle with scholars I admire and feel welcomed, accepted, even appreciated. At a roundtable about personal disclosures regarding jobs, I disclosed my experience as a fibromyalgic suffering through campus visits to Remi Yergeau and Cindy Selfe. Later on, Cindy thanked me for sharing an experience that was enlightening to the rest of the group. I said something like the comfortable nature of the table made it easy to disclose, and she replied, “Well. That’s this conference.”

That is this conference. That is what I often feel like I’m missing in my program, what I maybe started missing as early as my M.F.A. As a writer and a teacher of writing, I think I’m accustomed to a certain mode of feedback. As an undergraduate at Dartmouth, where teaching was prioritized, I had close relationships with almost all of my professors, and I’ve maintained those relationships for somewhere between 11-13 years. I was self-directed back then too, but the written and oral feedback did wonders for my intellectual growth. My diverse interests directly grew from my professors’ responding to my existing interests, encouraging the convergence of my creative, scientific, and English/rhet-comp sides. In my M.F.A. program at Columbia, professors were more hands-off, but I was able to establish close relationships with one or two, who, again, ended up being extremely influential on me. A lot of my creative nonfiction work derives from an emotionally difficult project begun under Margo Jefferson, for instance, who was invested in my work and me as a human being, emboldening me to freely experiment with form.

I’m a lifelong lurker in online forums and classrooms, but I ended up being one of the top five live-Tweeters at the conference. I connected with scholars whose work inspires and sustains me when I feel as though academia’s sole purpose is to ruin me. I immersed myself in pedagogy discussions and remembered the professors whose care was integral to my process of becoming a writer and a professor myself. I still have cards and emails from former students who thanked me for being invested in their lives and their work, helping them see how life and work productively intertwine.

I understood from Appa that the doctoral experience is very different from the undergraduate experience, that I would have to advocate for myself and step up my self-motivation tenfold. It means oversaturation, given the way I learn. It means accepting that, in order to succeed, I have to inflict pain on myself. Ironic, given the experiences I’ve been through. After a certain point, the body refuses to keep working. I exited quals with an existential crisis, renewed PTSD responses to loud noise, and an inability to move.

That said, once the passing verdict was in after my qualifying exams oral defense, it felt like the dynamics had changed. I never rushed, but I was accepted into a sorority where any “hazing” was very light, more symbolic than anything else (like being asked to read a sex scene out loud to everyone from a poorly written erotic novel, if I was comfortable doing so). I hear it was worse at some of the fraternities, where alcohol poisoning could land you in the hospital.

That’s what this experience felt like to me: Get through the hazing ritual, become one of the Initiated. We went through it; therefore, so do you.

It’s the system I’m blaming, but systems are made up of individuals, and if systems are going to change, change has to begin somewhere.

I remember the first time I read about buses being stopped so Sinhala-Buddhist mobs could ask each passenger to say the word bucket in Sinhalese, because Tamils were likely to pronounce it with an accent. Answering with a Tamil inflection identified you as Them. So did refusing to answer at all. Then those who were not part of the Sinhala-Buddhist Us were dragged into the street and chopped.

It’s my own damn trauma over something I wasn’t even there for, it’s the slowness of my own damn brain, but when the criticisms pile up and I have nothing to say…

The process itself was simple. We went into the room. We sat in a sort of semi-circle. My committee members took turns by area. The first two professors to speak were on my minor area, and it was less an interrogation than a conversation about the larger thoughts and ambitions I began to touch on in my answer. This was the area I was confident in anyway, because it was the humanities-oriented area, and the support I’ve received in this discipline over the years has increased my confidence. The second area, my major area, was more difficult. I cut it down to size while off my medication and my edits reflected my taste for rhetoric instead of media studies or media history. I knew I removed important material on gender and race. On the spot, in the moment, as my professors spoke to me and I tried to keep up by writing things down, my brain simply stopped. I couldn’t play charades to get through an explanation for the selections I made. That was it. In my head, it was over. They debated over my head, and there was nothing left in me. I no longer had the vocabulary to say or the capacity for saying.

I “passed with flying colors,” and afterwards, I hid in the third-floor bathroom and cried. I’m not generally an emotional person, so once the floodgates open, there’s no telling when it will stop. When I asked around, I found that other people in the program cried immediately after their quals as well. Like me, they could only remember it in the weird half-light of post-traumatic memory: a total blackout illuminated by the occasional slice of dialogue and image, separated or superimposed.

One month later, after a spirited conversation with someone at Computers and Writing about it, I think I have answers. (In retrospect, I should have been able to have this conversation with my qualifying exam committee. What’s the difference? The venue? The fact that the system says so much rides on this one exam? What I’m perceiving as the lack of personal support from above? The fact that nothing has made me feel competent in this field, the way I have gained confidence and traction in two others?)

It’s as simple as this: Higher education, the higher you go, makes no allowances for deviance or vulnerability.

To come back to this after a conference like Computers and Writing is disheartening, even if it maybe needs to be said, or if maybe I just need to feel empowered to say it. It’s a ridiculous point on the Ph.D. track to stop and wonder. But I’m wondering. My funding is up, I get invited on campus job talks and apparently lose out to white men finished with their Ph.D.s, I’m considering cutting back on certain aspects of health care and trying to figure out which days I can spare to fast, to save on groceries. I can make ends meet but I’d be in no shape to work on a large intellectual project.

I love Computers and Writing, but I pay hundreds of dollars out of pocket each time, and every time I attend a conference, I lose weeks to the flu-like symptoms of post-exertional malaise (thank you, ME/CFS).

I’m a Ph.D. candidate. I have to begin thinking about my dissertation proposal soon and this morning I couldn’t remember the word “Thursday.” I watch the artists and scholars at Computers and Writing, I watched the higher-ed documentary The Ivory Tower the other day, and it breaks me up inside. I’m left with the poor solace of patterns. The pain I’m still working off. The resignation. The alternatives. The relief and wondering. This trauma.