The Grad School Diaries: The Sartre Conundrum

The suggestion that I am not a very social person, which my various critics have often raised (beginning with my late mother, when I was about three, and continuing to this day) has never seemed entirely fair to me. Given my extravagant trust issues (developed during my train wreck of an early childhood and also, unfortunately, continuing to this day) I’ve always considered myself to be remarkably friendly, approachable, and easy-going. I don’t make a lot of friends, and I don’t do so easily, but I tend to hang onto the ones I do encounter; I’m currently in touch with a whole circle of people I’ve known for 25-plus years now, and married to someone I’ve known since 1983. I have enough self-awareness to realize that I can be considered a “difficult” man (and sometimes am) and that I can on occasion give offense without ever meaning to – thus, I try to make up for those failings by being loyal, supportive, and very difficult to offend myself. But that said, there are still days when people get on my nerves…

When I made the decision to join this program I was expecting a number of challenges, not least of which would be taking up the lifestyle of a full-time student again after all of these years. I hadn’t anticipated a return to the sort of existential angst that is so typical of young intellectuals in their late teens and early twenties, but I suppose I really should have. This program is by far and away the most difficult thing I have ever attempted, and I am even less prepared for (and indeed less suited to) this life than I was to becoming an undergraduate in 1982. Already, just a few weeks into my first semester at MSU, I find myself floundering, trying to cope with a massive load of reading and study, and a middle-aged man’s memory, which is not a good combination. I’ve compared it to being an old athlete trying to get back into a familiar game, and that analogy is sound as far as it goes. But some days, there’s a much darker image that comes to mind…

Have you ever run down a steep slope, so steep in fact that you could not have walked up it? It’s more of a slide or a controlled fall than it is an actual run, particularly if the ground is covered with loose earth and gravel, shifting under your feet as you try to find your footing. There is a combination of agility, balance, experience, skill, timing and sheer dumb luck that will bring you safely to flat (and stable) ground again, if you can just find it; otherwise, you’ll probably fall, scrape the heck out of your knees, rip the skin off your palms, break one or both legs (or one or both arms/wrists), break your neck, or just bash your head against something and die (although combinations of the above are also possible). Now imagine that a whole pack of people who are younger, thinner, faster, more agile, and generally in better shape than you are, all of whom also had acrobatic or gymnastic training you couldn’t have qualified for (let alone completed), are telling you how easy this challenge is and how little trouble they had with it…

I know, of course, that they mean well, and that in fact most of them didn’t have anything approaching the trouble I’m having. But that still isn’t helping. In the play called “No Exit” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote “Hell is other people” – and anyone who has been forced to deal with unpleasant strangers on an airplane or in a place of public accommodation knows how right he was. It’s possible, I suppose, that there is some other venue in which you could study the strange contradiction that being surrounded by helpful people is sometimes worse than being alone – particularly if you have to try to be bright, and upbeat, and hopeful whenever they’re around. But this one will do until something worse comes along…

Assuming, of course, that I can manage to cope with the anger, frustration, complete intellectual inadequacy, panic, fear and crushing depression, all without breathing a word of my difficulties to another soul for fear of being seen as "displaying negativity." I'm surrounded by people trying to be helpful, and yet, more alone than ever. How is this even possible? It's the Sartre Conundrum, and I'm not sure even the existentialist master himself could answer it on a day like today...