Depression crept up slowly during my time in graduate school. I used to think I was, paradoxically, both one of the angriest and one of the happiest people I knew, a sense of purposeful outrage and moral disgruntlement being (I thought) the flipside of the coin of joyful energy and vitality. Over time, and thanks in large part to escalating political events, I began to realize that rage was killing me slowly: poisoning my wellbeing, hindering my relationships, and making me increasingly avoidant of even simple tasks. For a long time this was a bigger problem for my personal wellbeing than for my scholarly work (which often was a joyful respite from terrible dealings), but eventually the latter couldn’t but be affected by my descent into lifelessness and despair. I re-entered therapy in 2017, a first crucial step, and have since invested a great deal of energy and earnestness into my personal recovery. One of the greatest challenges in this has been to tune out, or put in perspective, the Princetontian voices (which are often subliminal but sometimes quite explicit) that tell me that my academic work is the reason to get better, rather than something that will naturally and happily benefit from the work that I do to thrive as a human being. The ideology of this feverish moment in late capitalism makes it all too commonly assumed that the reason to thrive is so you can be productive (i.e. for an employer or institution). That idea itself is a cause of depression, and I’ve been hard-pressed to find this kind of instrumentalizing thinking sufficiently refuted or disrupted at Princeton. What has been of the greatest help to me is to speak honestly about my experiences with depression and alienation with others who understand or at least are willing to listen deeply. A thriving community–both personal communities and collaborative work communities–is what I seek, and the precarity of these (even once carefully and lovingly established) is a great source of loneliness and depression. I have found that many individuals at Princeton are hungry for a little authenticity and honesty and have responded extremely favorably when I have opened up about my experience; and yet the normalization of ongoing, unattended suffering as part of the academic game that’s supposed to be taken as a matter of course and born with a stiff upper lip is widespread at Princeton, including within my own department. In other words, the stigma around mental health continues unabated even as we hear endless talk about the need for a “conversation” about mental health on campuses. I am waiting for the day it becomes actually okay to talk about, not just okay to talk about talking about it. This will not get better until the culture and values of academia improve and we learn to prioritize full human beings, not just functionaries who produce impressive data or research. Bell Hooks says teachers have a responsibility to self-actualize so as to be able to support their students in doing so; it’s not something I’ve ever heard someone say at Princeton, but I believe it from the bottom of my heart and have taken the greatest comfort of all in being a teacher and preceptor so that I can put this belief into practice in my own classroom.
Anecdote #19
