Category Archives: Mental Health

Coursework, Guest Posts, Mental Health, Uncategorized

Digging in My Tool Kit: Navigating Identity in Academia

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My first year as a PhD student has come to a close, and now after two months of much needed distance I can say that I somehow survived. I made it out with my skin still attached, I scraped past the beast and kept my teeth. I refer not to the “nightwalker” that is the looming deadline, or the paralyzing gorgon of self-doubt. I am not bemoaning the money that grad school has sucked out of my pockets like Charybdis did the sea. The hazard that I escaped is one that I had forgotten between my stints as a student: I had forgotten how it feels to be a problem.

Before I lose anyone on that point let me be clear. I am grown. I am not sitting at the cramped table of the intimate basement classroom tossing spit balls and forgetting to raise my hand. Oh no, this is PhD life honey! I am a problem in the same way all Black folks are in academia. I am an issue because I placed my body and its otherness into a space that fought so long and hard to maintain its monogamy. I hear people tell me, “You’re in the door girl! Now all you need to do is work!” To that I say, sure; if the proper symbol for the Black student’s entrance into academia were a door, then that would be an appropriate stance. But that expression isn’t fitting here. In entering the university, the Black student has not “gotten in the door,” the Black student has instead made her way through the first in a series of gates. These gates are meant to compartmentalize, to discourage, to limit and to control our experiences in the university.

The second of these gates to come crashing down in front of my feet was the gate of assumptions. The otherness of my body came with a great many numbers of expectations. My body belongs to a Black person, and with this package comes ideas about my personality, my speech, my history, my motivations, my interests and of course my abilities. My body also belongs to a Black woman. The otherness of my womanhood only tacks onto these expectations and with them comes a danger. In this body, in this skin I have to be careful. This gate, and its expectations, reappear over and over during the academic odyssey. It comes back y’all. It is battled using the greatest and most important tools in the Black student’s arsenal: The Black Performative.

For the sake of keeping things simple, I’ll speak on the most essential tools in the kit that is The Black Performative; these being the successful voice, the successful body, and mindful usage. Girl, Sis, lovey and my brother too; y’all know what the successful voice is. It is the change in our tonality, in our speech pattern, in the use of our dialect. Some of us call it “the school voice,” but it follows us. We pull it from our pockets on the phone, at the checkout, even when someone strange bumps into us. It is a defense mechanism that is literally needed to succeed in academia and so to call this tool the successful voice is very easy and very appropriate. I am immensely guilty of indulging in my successful voice. As a Black woman with southern roots I speak a very different English at home, one of which I am proud to say I could break down the grammar rules of on a dime. My home speech is unique, it is the remnants of an old code spoken in Dothan, Alabama. It is complete with its own rules and unique vocabulary that, outside of the comfort of my home loses all of its meaning, but y’all kin come takes muh words from muh cold dead hands. Ain’t not nare ‘nough yenom on earth to pay me to divorce muhself from muh language.* And the act of requesting me to do so is pure barbarism! I feel strongly for my words and advocate for inclusion of multiple Englishes in higher learning, but I am still guilty of falling into my performance. Should I blame years of knowing that it was necessary, do I not want to make things harder on myself as I near the end?

Digging back into that tool box, we come to the successful body. In the year that flew by between completing my MA and beginning my PhD I had forgotten the stress that comes with my physical presentation. See that pesky gate of assumptions coming down again? You may say, “Now Justine calm down we all need to look professional.” Sure darling, that’s true, but what is acceptable and professional in my culture doesn’t always fly in an academic setting, nor is it always worth the aggravation. I’ve taken care to make sure my shape, you know the body I physically live in, doesn’t show too much. God forbid, I am too obviously a possessor of two “X” chromosomes. I’ve waited an extra week before changing my hair for the eighth time in a semester just to push back that “your hair is always different conversation” and I have bitten back venomous words when classmates with whom I have never had conversations with reach out to grab, stroke, and pull my hair while they shower me with foreign compliments. God, I had forgotten what it felt like to be a problem. I have to smile through all of this, attitude in check, resting bitch face buried beneath a smile that reminds me of Barbie’s friend, Christie. I grew up in the 90’s and back then Christie (the Black Barbie) didn’t have any African features aside from her brown skin.

That 90’s Christie doll is a perfect embodiment of the last tool I’ll speak on today. She looks trapped in another body, carefully presented, forced to smile 24/7: This is mindful usage. Mindful usage isn’t about the presentation of the Black student’s body, it is about how the Black student moves in a public space. Those pesky assumptions that we have to fight against just don’t stop popping up. If I don’t mind how I move my body I typically get one of two responses: I am perceived as hypersexual or more annoyingly I am slapped with the violent Black woman sticker. I have to divorce myself from my non-verbal grammars, the languages I can speak with my hands and my neck, the nonverbal cues that are common place in my house, in my hood, in my space; they get left behind, unless of course I want to wear that “Black women have such attitudes” badge. I have slipped before and cocked my neck, given a sarcastic fluttering of the eye. This has led to some uncomfortable moments, but nothing of consequence, right? Oh, certainly not so horrible in the classroom? Well that depends on which side of the classroom I’m sitting. Yeah, I’m a PhD student, but I’ve been teaching at the college level since before I began this adventure. Being a Black woman at the front of the college classroom is altogether a different experience. I could write a book on that one. Girl, Sis, lovey and my brother too, the academic odyssey is a lot like sailing between Scylla and Charybdis, navigate as best you can. And I urge you, try to keep as many bits and pieces of yuhself in dat boat as yuh kin.

*Nare means “not any” but is more firm!  Yenom is an old code for “money”

nullJustine Nicole Wilson is a second-year Ph.D. student at St John’s University where she majors in English and received her MA in English from Stony Brook University (Class of 2015). Justine’s research interests span trauma literature, the graphic novel, mythology, folklore and children’s media. Justine’s recent work aims to dissect trauma as “the common language of heroism,” and explores our societal consumption of trauma as a product. She is in the beginning stages of drafting her dissertation prospectus which will focus on the portrayals of mental illness and trauma in the Superhero genre.

“A nerd is someone who is as social as possible and that’s everyone.”

Coursework, Guest Posts, Intermission 2, Mental Health, Uncategorized

Guest Post: A Series of Unexpected Events

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When I finished undergrad three years ago, I told myself a thousand times that I was never going to graduate school. Finishing a Bachelor’s degree was hard enough, why would I willingly put myself through more academic torture at an even higher cost (both mental and financial)? It seemed unnecessary at the time and even if I were to go, I had not a clue what I would study. My career path upon graduation was uncertain to say the least – the last thing on my mind was another degree. Now fast-forward to today… *cue maniacal laughter at my previous naiveté* …and I am headed back to grad school this coming fall. Yes, I said back, as in for my second attempt. It has been quite an interesting chain of events and along this journey, I’ve learned that sometimes where you need to be is right where you started from the beginning. *clears throat* Let me explain.

As a Virginian who grew up near Charlottesville, UVA was an obvious choice for college. I knew a lot about the University and had been there for football games and that sort of thing. From what I had experienced prior to enrolling, UVA offered the quintessential college experience, the kind you see depicted in the movies. When I got in, I was thrilled, proud, over-the-moon– but I was also nervous. My mom didn’t go back to finish her Bachelor’s degree until she was pregnant with me, so her college experience as a married woman with a family looked very different than mine would and my dad did not attend college at all. Not being able to rely on my parents to give me advice on what to expect as I ventured into unknown territory was scary, but I knew that I would figure it out. What I didn’t know was that most of the lessons I would learn throughout my undergraduate career would not take place in the classroom but in my day-to-day interactions with other students and other members of the University community. The biggest lesson that I learned about myself during those ever-important four years? I have anxiety. At times, borderline crippling anxiety, and the worst part was not that it took me until college to figure it out. The worst part was that I was unaware that it wasn’t normal.

Growing up in a small, rural town in Central Virginia, mental health was a rare topic of discussion and during instances where it was actually acknowledged it was always with regard to extreme cases of mental health disorders. In high school my classmates would make ignorant jokes toward others about having multiple personalities or being “special.” So that was really my only exposure to what constituted mental health issues. At home, there was even less talk of it. My parents maintained a very traditional black household where things like “what do you have to worry about?” and “mind over matter” were phrases that framed anything stress related. They always made it seem like my sister and I were too young to know what anxiety was so I didn’t know any different. Maintaining the idea that nothing was wrong kept me from seeking help, kept me from understanding that it’s okay to talk about my anxiety and depression, especially when it came to being a young black woman studying at a very prestigious predominantly white institution.

The source of my anxiety and depression while in undergrad was this: I never thought I was good enough. I compared myself to everyone at every turn. I had no concept of my worth. Then my self-esteem hit the lowest of lows following a bad break-up that took place during my first year of college. I didn’t know it then, but I was seriously depressed for over a year after that split. College is hard, breakups are hard, finding confidence in yourself as a single black woman when it feels like the world is on your shoulders at all times is hard. Finally getting my diploma at graduation and reflecting on all of those tough experiences had me thinking, “there’s no way I could ever go back and do this again,” but then I landed an unexpected job offer. Four months after graduation I was hired as an Admission Counselor for UVA and I found my passion– working with students who don’t see their potential, students who struggle to see their worth. Students like me. That’s when everything changed.

After finishing two admission cycles at my alma mater and loving the work that I was doing, I decided that I did want to go to grad school. So I applied and was accepted into UVA’s Master of Higher Education Administration program and I began taking classes part-time while I continued to work full-time. However, juggling both work and school simultaneously proved to be a challenge that triggered my anxiety in a slightly different kind of way than before. This time, my anxiety came from feeling stagnant. I got antsy with the idea that I was “stuck” at UVA, being that I had studied there, worked there, and was still studying and working there while many of my friends had moved on and found higher-paying jobs in cooler cities. I started to compare myself to others again, I felt like this whole “adulting” thing was a competition and it seemed like I was losing by a mile. So in an overwhelming state of frustration I made a rash decision. I chose not to enroll in grad classes for the coming semester and I applied for jobs at other universities until I got an offer to work for a school in DC. This was like a dream come true! I could finally move out of my parents’ house and have my first real apartment on my own, I would be in a city that was full of young black professionals, and I would be making more money (or so I initially thought). Well, life has a really funny way of humbling you when you least expect it and that’s exactly what happened.

I took the new job and hated every second of it. The leadership was awful, the electronic processes were archaic, the office culture was unhealthy, and given the higher cost of living in DC I really wasn’t making more money. This is when my anxiety and depression caused me to hit rock bottom. I started taking the prescription anxiety medicine that my doctor had given me several months prior hoping that it would make a difference in my day-to-day functioning, but I still had days where I could barely find the motivation to get out of bed. I was broke, unhappy, and I had never felt so alone. Emphasis on alone, living by yourself in the city sounds cool in theory until you realize that you come home to an empty apartment everyday. That’s not something that makes you feel any better when your work life is hell on Earth. I lasted six months in that position before I quit and decided to come back to UVA for grad school full-time. I’m even taking a class this summer to catch up so that I’ll still be on track to finish the program next spring (yay!) and it finally feels like I have my life back on track.

This time last year I never thought that I would be so excited to be moving back home and starting grad school again, that just goes to show that sometimes we have to go through difficult situations before we can see things clearly. It’s so true what they say about how the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. I definitely learned that the hard way but that’s okay. Not every lesson we learn in life will come easy. Moving forward I know that my anxiety hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s something that I will have to deal with through grad school and beyond. The difference is that now I’ve been through things that have taught me that I am stronger and wiser than I used to think I was. I have found ways to better manage the moments where I feel like I’m on the verge of a panic attack. Those are life skills that I may not have learned as quickly if I didn’t take that leap of faith and accept that other job. It may not have been where I needed to be but we gain insight from every experience we have as human beings, good or bad, and that’s the silver lining.

Do I still have moments where I question my worth? Absolutely. Are there times when I doubt myself? 100%. But at the end of the day, I don’t beat myself up about those things nearly as much anymore. What brings me peace of mind through those inevitable ups and downs is the reassurance that, despite the detours I may have taken along the way, I know I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.

IMG_1593Alexis Richardson, 25, completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia in 2015. After three years of working in college admissions she has returned to UVA as a full-time grad student to finish her Master of Higher Education Administration.

Guest Posts, Mental Health, Uncategorized

Guest Post: Black Boi Does Grad School—A Couple of Tips for Navigating the Bullshit

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When I started my PhD program last fall, my biggest fear was the academic work. I wondered if I would be able to keep up with the other students; imposter syndrome gripped my anxious mind as I rehearsed all of the disastrous moments that were sure to ensue: I would forget a major deadline, fail all of my classes, sound like an idiot whenever I tried to voice my opinions, and ultimately, bring great shame to all of my friends and family who were so confident that I was well on my way to becoming Dr. Smoot. Much to my relief, as I slide into the finish line of my first year of doctoral education, I can confidently say that my initial worries were unfounded. While my work has been by no means easy, it has certainly been manageable. I am brilliant, and slowly beginning to own this as my truth, in spite of copious external forces that try to wrestle this fact from my hands. What has been the most challenging, however, is navigating all of the unspoken politics and quotidian instances of systemic violence that are intrinsic to navigating graduate education as a Black, queer, trans masculine scholar.

From recognizing that my voice has been tokenized in a number of spaces—wherein my actual opinions were completely devalued—to having classmates openly espousing deeply hurtful and problematic rhetoric aimed at multiple of my identities, this past academic year has been fraught with realizations regarding my emotional resilience, as well as the innumerable challenges of graduate education at a PWI. To be clear, I love the work that I am producing—as dorky as it sounds, I can feel myself getting smarter, and sometimes I re-read my papers and think “damn! I wrote this?! I’m lit!” But sometimes I sit in my apartment and cry, wondering if I am right for academia, or if academia is right for me. Thankfully I have managed to make a few, very kind, very supportive friend-peers who regularly reassure me that I am valued, in spite of the moments in which this process makes me feel worthless. That said, below are a couple of things that I’ve learned, all of which I would have liked to know before starting this degree. Hopefully sharing them here will help someone else as they begin their doctoral program journey.

Visit the school/department before you accept admission.

I cannot stress this enough. A PhD program is a marathon, not a sprint. When I did my masters, I was relatively unconcerned about what my long-term future would look like in the city where the school was because I was fairly confident that I would not have a long term future there. However, my PhD was a different story. I figured, having lived in more than a couple of college towns, that I would have a pretty good idea regarding what life would be like here—without taking the time to visit. I was…incorrect. And in transparency, that decision has definitely been one that I’ve thought about often, and wondered if I would make again if given the chance to go back. The answer is, honestly, I don’t know. I am here now, and committed to staying present and enjoying all of the positive things that this experience has to offer me. But, one thing that I know that I would do, if given a do-over, is visit. That way, if I did make the same choice, I would have a very clear understanding of the life that I was signing up for—at least for the next several years.

People are important, but not everyone should be a close friend. Build community, but prioritize good energies; quality is better than quantity. 

This, I believe, is paramount to one’s social success and mental health in grad school. I came into this program assuming that I would quickly make friends, many of whom I would become very close with, based on my assumption that we would have shared interests and/or world views. This was…not the case. My first few months here were lonely as hell. Fortunately for me, I have a large network of good friends and family scattered around the country, so I struggled through that time with copious teary-eyed phone calls to my folx. I did ultimately end up connecting with some people from school, but if I’m being honest, I have yet to develop what I would consider to be a very close friendship. And I’ve come to realize that this is okay. Actually, it’s ideal. The people with whom I get along are great, but I am able to prioritize study/alone time, and see them when I need social time. Plus, having spent almost a full year here, I have come to effectively identify the people that I enjoy, and have identified the people that I enjoy…less. And that might not have happened if we had all latched onto each other from jump, purely motivated by loneliness. Loneliness is okay. It will pass, but surrounding yourself with kind, affirming people takes time. Don’t rush the process!

Advocate for yourself. Be kind to yourself. Take care of yourself. 

This one is hard. Well, harder. Being a graduate student renders one extremely vulnerable. To the powers that reign supreme over your academic/financial fate and trajectory, to your peers, to many sorts of illnesses, and to your own insecurities. There are many instances in which you will be forced to make very difficult decisions: study vs sleep, work outand eat healthy vs eat affordably and take leisure time, stay silent and stew in heartache vs speak up and face the consequences, stay because of all the work you’ve put in to get here vs leave because you are being dehumanized. The choices are endless, and unlike my examples, most of them are not binary in nature—they are nuanced and murky and scary and hurtful. Being vulnerable all of the time is exhausting. But ultimately, I am of the belief that no degree is worth literally destroying yourself for. As long as it remains feasible (and conscionable) carry on, but care for yourself. Sometimes, pick the gym over that hour of Netflix; sometimes pick the Netflix. Make that dentist appointment if you get health insurance through your institution. Maybe decide not to curse out that person in your class that said that heinously racist thing, and instead call a friend from back home to vent. Get some rest—that paper is not going to be A1 if you write it at 4am after staying up for the prior 36 hours. Also, realize that faculty and administrators aren’t gods, they are people just like you. And while you owe them respect, they don’t have the right to bulldoze your emotions or abuse you. Draw that line of distinction for yourself, and if it’s crossed…check them. Again, a degree is not worth your total degradation.

You can’t read everything. It’s literally not possible, unless you don’t enjoy human-ing. 

Get the main ideas, and craft some interesting discussion questions for class. Skimming is not only helpful, but it’s a necessary skill. You have to be able to read something, synthesize information, and make new meanings from it, quickly. That’s literally what this is about. Welcome to Skimming Bootcamp, y’all!

You don’t need to put your life on hold for 4-7 years; this is your life. Here. Now. Enjoy it. 

This past week my niece was born…6 hours away from me. Next week I will be driving those 6 hours to meet her—during finals week. Amidst final papers. Why? Because I value my chosen family, and they are just as (if not more) important to me as finishing this semester with relative ease. I know I can do both, so I will. In the short time that I have been in grad school, I have traveled much, gone to parties, hosted parties, photographed my best friend’s engagement (also 6 hours away), attended 2 funerals, and managed to get my hair done once a month like clockwork. Because I am a whole person, not just a student. And life is still happening around me. I refuse to be that person who denies myself fulfillment and close relationships with the people I love the most in the name of prioritizing school. All of my life is important to me, not just the portion of it that is in front of me on a daily basis. Showing up my best self to this process means showing up whole.

Ultimately, though, you will determine what works best for you. No one’s experience needs to be the blueprint for your graduate school experience. Take what you need and leave the rest.

Kelsey Smoot is a queer, non-binary writer. They consider themselves to be bicoastal but culturally southern, a master at crafting hypothetical questions, and really damn cool. They are currently working on their PhD in the interdisciplinary social sciences and humanities.