MA

I wrote this last year and am rediscovering it now, logging onto this blog for the first time in months. It's an imperfect piece of writing, but it captures a lot of what I felt in one of the most formative years of my life so I'm pressing publish and leaving it here. 

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This morning I spent several minutes taking a segment of my hair and slowly pulling it into a loose knot before undoing it with my fingers. Once the strand was loose from the knot, I twirled it and began the process again.

As I sat doing this in the law library, a group of girls on my right were having a frenzied conversation about an upcoming exam and my curser blinked on the open Google doc on the screen in front of me.

If I had pulled myself up onto my toes and looked over the screen partition behind my computer, I would have made out the first clear blue sky of spring through the sliding library doors.

I focused on getting the ends of my hair through the loop I had made.

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I get asked a lot about what it's like to be a master's student. There are a lot of potential answers to this question and I have offered up almost all of them to various askers in their various contexts.

To friendly inquirers at church I breezily reply that it's 'great!' and that I'm getting 'good experience!' by delving into a topic I care about.

To my supervisor I am slightly more open about the intellectual challenges of reading Bourdieu and Adorno, which I think is a good move, considering he's one of the few people who can actually help me with them.

Lillie (best friend, flatmate extraordinaire) is privy to the full spectrum of my emotional woes: the fear that what I am writing is terrible, the fear that I am wasting a year of my life, the newfound, constant desire for conversation with any other human being during the day.

But I think the picture of me twirling my hair between my forefinger and thumb while sitting in the library on a Wednesday morning is possibly the most accurate picture of the master's student's life that I can give you.

The tedium I experience on an almost-daily basis, the feeling that life is swirling all around me and  more pleasant ways to spend my time are waiting just beyond my reach, and my firm decision to show up and park myself down at the grimy communal computer anyway - all of this is somehow captured in this one simple vignette.

The truth is that doing a master's is taxing and uninspiring and boring a lot of the time.

I cower at the thought of having to read more of Bourdieu's words, even more so at the thought of re-reading my own for the hundredth time.

Writing is a slow process of typing out a few hundred words only to have to sacrifice a third and re-work the rest in a few days' time.

I have been going to the law library since March and I have yet to have a conversation with another person that extends beyond a 'thank you' and 'you're welcome' when one of us is holding a door open for the other.

But I am also aware that in the midst of the endless reading, re-writing and staring into space, something deeper is going on.

One of the first things I ever heard my supervisor say, at the Arts postgraduate orientation back in February, was that we would have to remind ourselves through this process that furthering our education is a privilege. It is not something that we have to do, but rather something that we get to do.

At the time I nodded along emphatically, and I nod still, albeit wearily.

Writing a thesis is a privilege. The fact that I will get to hold a piece of paper at some point next year that pronounces me an MA, is a privilege.

At the start of the year, I wrote this in my journal:

"I think that studying will be a final 'trial-by-fire' that I can get through in order to be a better writer and to grow my character."

January-me was actually right on this one. Putting in the work for a research master's has indeed made me a better writer and it sure as anything has shaped my character.

This process, with all its frustrations and little indignities, is shaping me somehow.

To the library I go.