Tag Archives: Journey

Guest Posts, Hair, Mental Health, Other Resources, The Journey, Uncategorized

Don’t Wait Until Tenure: A Journey of Hair, Self-Love and New Beginnings

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By Angela Crumdy

On November 17th, 2018 my locs turn three years old. Yes, I plan on throwing a party or at least getting my hair done. It’s been a journey worth celebrating. Until this point, my relationship with my hair has ranged any where from indifferent to antagonistic. Growing up, I was teased for having ‘Oprah Winfrey’ hair. Hairstylists often described my mane as thick, coarse and one even likened doing my hair to “performing surgery.” I started getting relaxers in high school, but I was never really happy with that either—it was convenient, but my hair was always limp and lifeless. I went completely natural my junior year of college after spending three months in Cuba for a study abroad program. I was liberated from the ‘creamy crack’, but being a loose natural had it’s own set of challenges. For four years, I struggled to find the right products, tools and styles to suit my 4c hair. I poured over Curly Nikki blog forums and various YouTube channels like Napptural85 hoping that something would be the magic fix. I spent most of that time being frustrated with my hair and myself, and yet, I persisted.

When I began graduate school, there was very little time for me to fight my hair, balance a full course load, adjust to life in a new city, and, given my ever present imposter syndrome, try to figure out if I’d made the right decision to pursue a PhD in the first place. My hair looked just as frazzled as my brain, and it was not cute. As the only woman of color in my cohort, I was hyper-aware of my appearance and what my presence signified in the predominantly white space. Early on, I had the all too common experience of a white woman putting her hands in my hair “because she does it with all of her friends.” This, coupled with the fact that my nearly four year relationship was coming to an end, is what finally got me to start my loc journey. What else did I have to lose?

There was a running joke with a few friends of mine that we would loc our hair once we got tenure, but the graduate school experience was already taking so much out of me that I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it to that point or if I even wanted to. I felt numb, and I realized that, life was too short to put off something I truly desired for an uncertain future. Maybe in all that was ending for me, I needed something to remind me that new beginnings were possible. I needed something positive to look forward to. So, after doing a Yelp search, I walked into a salon in my Brooklyn neighborhood, and made an appointment. I distinctly remember the loctician telling me that my locs were going to look like worms, but at that point, things really couldn’t get any worse.

As I approach this three-year milestone, I really think of it as a testament to how far I’ve come professionally and personally. There were times when I didn’t know what my baby locs would evolve into as they grew much in the same way that I didn’t’ know what would be in store for me as I developed my research project. As my locs matured so did I, and now, I am about to embark on fully funded dissertation fieldwork on a project that I found extremely rewarding. I’m finally settling in to myself as a scholar, and this is the first time in my life that I can honestly say that I love my hair. I finally don’t feel like I’m fighting myself, which is important when I am constantly confronted with external forces that would prefer I pursue the life of the mind and leave my body behind. My hair is now an adequate expression of how I’ve come to understand myself as person, and I am extremely grateful for the journey—ugly phase and all. Cheers to three years and not waiting for tenure to begin taking steps to become the person I’ve always wanted to be.

Angela Crumdy picAngela Crumdy was raised in Charlotte, North Carolina and is currently a fifth-year doctoral student in anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She holds a B.A. in anthropology and Latin American & Caribbean Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.  Her current dissertation research examines the experiences of Cuban women educators historically and during the country’s contemporary teacher shortage. In her free time, she enjoys salsa dancing, volunteering and blogging on her health and wellness site academicmuscle.com.

Ravynn: Act 3, Ravynn: Act 3, Scene 1, The Journey, Uncategorized

Week 9: Redirecting and Expanding Mid-Journey

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If you read this thread that I posted on Twitter Wednesday night, then you’re familiar with the story I am about to tell.

Two years ago, I would have told you quite confidently that I was not a digital humanist. My first year of graduate school was established scholars telling me which boxes I fit into: I was a cultural historian, I was an intellectual historian, I was a comics studies scholar, I was a digital humanist. I scoffed at all of them because while I might have identified as a comics studies scholar, that was not all that my work was, and in fact I preferred to self-identify as a literary scholar who happened to do comics. Even though identifying as a comics studies scholar sort of fit, I knew with certainty that I was no kind of historian– which left me with the mystery of the digital humanities.

The first advisor that I was matched with when I came into William & Mary was a Digital Humanist (capital D, capital H). Based on my writing sample, which was an exploration of identity in Issa Rae’s YouTube series “Awkward Black Girl,” I think it was assumed that I would want to come to do digital humanities, media studies and literature– in that order. The truth? That was the only 20 page paper I’d written in English during undergrad so it was the only thing I had on hand to submit. Former French major problems.

During my first advising meeting, my advisor asked me all kinds of questions about long term goals, publications I was hoping to write, conferences I wanted to attend, books and articles that I hadn’t read. I felt so in over my head that the only possible answer was to retreat into the world that I knew and had always excelled in: literature. Instead of diving head first into an unknown that I was attracted to, I crawled back into my comfort zone. I switched advisors, stopped going to Equality Lab meetings and I kept my head down.

I did well in my comfort zone. I did my master’s thesis. It was passable. It was interesting. It was exciting. After I wrote that thesis, however, my energy started to fizzle out. Then came Race, Memory and the Digital Humanities last fall. It was my first time being in an academic space with so many women, particularly Black women, doing incredible work. Watching rockstars like Gabrielle Foreman, Jessica Marie Johnson and Marisa Parham dazzle the audience was the equivalent of watching academic Beyoncés perform. I knew I wanted to be like them, but I didn’t know how. At the time I was still not considering myself a digital humanist; I was an outside observer, a literary scholar come to watch the festivities.

Another year passed. No conference presentations, no talks, no potential publications on the horizon. I told myself that I was just feeling burnt out after my Masters, which is probably at least partially true, but really I was feeling uninspired by my work. I was existing, but I wasn’t excelling.

Enter “Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black.” I enrolled in an Introduction to Digital Humanities class and my professor urged me to go to “Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black.” I knew Catherine Knight Steele from Race, Memory and the Digital Humanities and from Twitter, so I knew it would be a good time. Once I got there and was surrounded once again by Black women scholars doing incredible work, I finally started to understand where I fit. I was inspired by the words of Timeka Tounsel and Grace Gipson and their work on Black women digital content creators. I saw work that I could contribute to based on my own identity as a blogger. They showed me an opportunity to work smarter not harder. My former advisor has been telling me from the beginning that my identities as a blogger and a scholar do not have to be mutually exclusive but I didn’t have a model for how I could have them work together. “Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black” gave me models. Black digital humanities stitched my identities together.

And then I read Steele’s articles on Black women bloggers and for the first time, I finally had a good answer for “who do you want to be in scholarly community and conversation with?” My former advisor told me that half the battle of grad school is finding the communities where you feel supported. That’s what helps you finish. My community is in digital humanities. It’s where I fit.

So am I digital humanist? Not yet, I still have a lot of work to do– lots to read, lots to write, lots to think through. But I’ve decided to redirect, or even just add to, my identity as a scholar. I’m still figuring it out. But for the first time in a long time, I feel confident that I’m moving down the right path. This feels right. It feels both good and hard all at once, but it also feels very, very right.

So hi, digital humanists, it took me a while to realize this is where I belonged but I’m here now and I’m ready to get to work.

Guest Posts, Mental Health, Uncategorized

Surviving Postponement: Facing Fears During the Journey to PHinisheD

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by Chantae Still

Three is typically my favorite number. I pledged a sorority and was the “Tre,” I am the first of my mother’s three children, and I grew up feeling comforted by the Holy Trinity (father, son, and holy ghost). However, this semester, entering the third year of the doctoral program and still completing coursework, felt oppressive. In 2016 I started this degree feeling confident that I could exceed expectations and do the four-year program in three. At the very least, I planned to graduate in December and complete it in three in a half. I registered for a full-time load every semester and probably could have finished my coursework in two years had I not picked up a graduate certificate that required an extra four classes. Either way, I was planning to finish my coursework the summer after my second year and take my exam in the Fall. Before life happened.

I was one of the doctoral students whose marriage didn’t survive. Even worse than experiencing a major breakup, a dissolution of marriage that I have to say was pretty amicable, my mother passed suddenly in the summer of 2017. Within one month I had suffered two major losses. One was legally gone with the banging of a judge’s gavel, and the other ended with a phone call that changed my life.

During the last conversation I had with my mother she asked me how school was going. “So when you finish they will call you doctor right?” The week after she passed, as my sisters and I picked up her ashes from the crematorium, I thought back to that conversation and realized I had to finish. It was the last thing she knew that I was doing. I was going to be the first in my grandmother’s bloodline to obtain a doctoral degree; quitting was not an option.

Despite advisement from close friends and relatives, I didn’t take any time off. I believed that even the smallest break would result in me becoming another statistic: the failing fifty percent of doctoral students that dropout, often before doctoral candidacy. I continued taking a full-time load while working forty plus hours a week to support myself as a commuter student who lived over an hour away from campus. When things got too challenging I quit my job and relocated closer to my university to make sure that school remained a priority. I was dead-set on finishing by any means necessary.

This August I met with a committee member to discuss the qual question that I would be given for the qualifying exam and my fueled freight train was forced into an emergency halt. “To be honest, based on what I am seeing, I don’t think you’re ready.” In a fourteen-word sentence, my confidence was hit with a figurative bullet and one of my academic fears was realized. I almost didn’t make it out of the office and to the ladies room. It took me digging my nails into my thighs and looking away to prevent a premature breakdown. Initially, I couldn’t tell if it was anger or sadness, but part of me wanted to flip a desk over while another part of me wanted to crawl under a table and lay in fetal position. I entered a stall and began to cry with a convulsing pain. I have never before experienced a panic attack, but this may be the best way to describe what I was going through. Looking back, I think I cried the tears that I suppressed for my failed marriage and the children we didn’t stay together long enough to have. I cried the tears that I stifled after my mom passed before I could experience a healthy mother daughter relationship or make her a grandmother. I cried the tears that I generally concealed when I felt insecure about, unsure with, or unworthy of the opportunity to enter this graduate school journey. I cried with intensity for eighty minutes straight without an ability to talk without hyperventilating.

I survived that day.

After a lot of face-washing in the College of Education bathroom I even attended a campus event that I previously committed to and went to class that evening. In bed that evening I reflected heavily, as what I identify as Imposter Syndrome related thoughts, crept in my mind.

I was raised by a bipolar single mother in Los Angeles, California so I knew how to survive and exist; but, I wanted to obtain this degree and the tools necessary to confidently declare that I was a researcher. I want to stand at the intersections of all my margins, covered by the shadows of people’s suspicion of my aptness, and remain feverently undisturbed or distracted. To do that, existing wouldn’t cut it. Doctoral students need to thrive.

I decided to heed the professor’s advice and postpone taking my Qualifying exams to the next semester even though doing so would push back the anticipated graduation date I worked so hard to maintain. Several times I considered taking the exam anyway to show that my abilities should not be doubted. I concluded it was just too big a risk, and not worth the appeal process that would be necessary if I took them and failed.

I had not told many people, but at the beginning of that third year I was so full of anxiety that I did begin seeing a counselor. Sessions had been sporadic due to my busy work schedule; but the day after this breakdown, I quickly made an appointment and committed to consistent visits with my counselor. I also made an appointment with a previous professor who I admired. She was a well published Minority Scholar whose class I thoroughly enjoyed. I emailed and informed her that I was in need of a “come to Jesus meeting.” When I took her class, she encouraged me to perfect my craft and made me feel that my work would be a valuable contribution once published. I was in need of the morale boosting that she supplied. The following week I went to the church I had been visiting and decided that I would join. I also began reviewing the course catalog to identify additional research methods courses that could strengthen my research skills. This experience of presenting my work to someone and having them dismiss it due to their doubt about my abilities was actually one of my biggest fears. And I faced it.

I was told by several faculty members that you will receive a lot of “no’s” before you get that one yes that you need. This experience drove home that point for me. The next time someone expresses their disbelief or disinterest in my work, my world won’t fall apart. I have now learned how to navigate after academic rejection by utilizing campus resources and accepting the support my support system has been attempting to provide for the last year and a half. The next time I encounter a person with an opinion like this I plan to encourage them to “say less.” They won’t be the first and they won’t be the last and they won’t be able to knock me off of my journey to PHinisheD.

Chantae Still is a Los Angeles, California native, third year doctoral student, attending a university in the South Eastern United States. She holds a Masters in Adult Education, with a concentration in Counseling, from North Carolina A&T State University and recently obtained a graduate certificate in Evaluation. Chantae has a heart for Qualitative research and is interested in investigating the role of Spoken word venues as contemporary learning environments, Mandated Parent Education classes and parent behavioral change, Protective Factors against Colorism for Black Women and Evaluation as a tool for community improvement.

Twitter: @D_Chantae