In the real dark night nothing gets in the way of these words. Perhaps my prolific tendencies in my past were due to my incurable insomnia.
As morbid as it is, I miss that lingering disorder. I miss the concentrated time of the night, the stillness, the silence. The day stretches my mental capacities around such issues of whether that deadline at work was met or finding out why Jaak Panksepp’s latest book’s publication date has been extended. Though I am not particularly anxious, I find myself obsessing over myriad elements of my work a day life. It’s a rare moment my frontal cortex can focus on identity outside of work.
The regularity of it, while excellent for my health, has taken its toll. After nearly two years of it since graduating, I hang on to the thought of mental freedom every day from 7am to 4:30pm when I take off my apron of concern, of advancing professionalism, of the opportunity I have but just can’t take, and hang it up for the night.
Longing for the creative more mentally stimulating life of academia again, I find myself being hit with small pangs of sadness. It’s like salt has been poured on my muscle of a heart and it contracts and withers, momentarily injured and fleetingly broken. They are deep but invisible pangs, leaving very little surface effect and are quick enough to not drag down my current mental state.
I never thought I’d find myself in a place between college and graduate school that I could so tolerate as I do my job; where I could possibly have a future and have respect for my education and even use a portion of my mental faculty. I expected inconsistent shift work and insurmountably more struggle.
Talk to a group of anthropology majors on graduation day and you will see why I had that expectation. No one is going off to work as an anthropologist. No one is even going off to work in a related field unless they are archaeologists, which I firmly do not categorize with my ethnographic self for reasons that may be delineated in a future submission.
No. For us the only road to practicing what we’ve learned is through further education and this is the road I’ve chosen. I figured I’d take some time off, learn those life lessons I kept hearing about and explore the world outside of the grassy knolls of campus life but within the confirms of city limits. The pangs are mounting as I write this among my stacks of university-borrowed ethnographies I’ve gathered to read. I wanted my “real life experience” to conclude organically and softly, like the last fall of autumn leaves. Perhaps with a finality and closure I feel should come.
While my professional experience has been placid there is a change I’m internally preparing for, like the last leaf has broken from its dried stem and has landed on an embankment; with the only direction option is towards the cold, still pond.
In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o' clock in the morning, day after day.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
