20180809.0430

Some of the projects I've worked on have occupied fair stretches of time and substantial amounts of attention. As an undergraduate, I put together a role-playing game (not that it was any good) and an article-length paper about it for the honors program where I studied; doing so took me more than a year. As a master's student, I wrote a thesis; it took about a year. As a doctoral candidate, I wrote a dissertation; it took me three years, and I need (still) to go back and revise it for some kind of publication. (Maybe. I don't know that I'm still enough in academe for it to matter.) And I recently concluded more than a year of putting out limericks in an attempt at a heroic narrative.

Each time, I have felt some sense of accomplishment at having drafted a project and carried it through. Each time, too, I have felt as if I ought to have done more and better than I did, but I am given to understand that that is something common among writers. (I fancy myself such a person.) Each time, though, I have felt somewhat adrift and bereft when I was done. With the undergraduate work, I had graduate school to look forward to, but the months between were somewhat aimless and fuzzy, the days blending into one another not so much seamlessly as jumbled together, and I am somewhat disoriented even as I think back upon it. With the master’s thesis, I moved straight into the remaining coursework for my doctorate, but it took me some time to get my head turned such that I could work on the dissertation project. Once that was done, I floated again. (And that was the fatal flaw in my search for academic work; I had a job, and I did not look for others until I felt forced to do so, when I ought to have done it as I was wrapping up the dissertation. But that is another matter entirely.) And when I finally abandoned the idea that I would have a full-time academic job, I felt untethered, ungrounded, unmoored, undirected again.

In the wake of ending the limerick cycle, I feel such a sense again, if not so sharply as in the past. There are other long-term concerns that occupy me, to be sure; there are games in the offing, there is a community band that has graciously allowed me to join it and which continues to tolerate my presence within it, and there is Ms. 8, who deserves all the attention I can give her and more. Having them helps; if nothing else, I can make the empty feeling ring with the sounds of other work getting done. But echoes soon fade, and when the games are done for the day, when my horn is put away, when my daughter is asleep, I know that I will once again search for something not yet clear to me.

That I will find it, I know. That does not mean the searching is a fun thing.