Around the middle of the semester, everyone is getting back grades for their first really major assignments, and no one’s particularly joyful about them. College is hard! And we should be challenging them to raise the stakes; that’s our job. I take that task seriously, in that I don’t think my job is to pat talented students on the head and tell the rest they’ll never make it. I want everyone to develop their writing and thinking.

The problem is that, when we develop our thinking, making really big strides in our ideas, our writing is now insufficient. High-school thinking is not particularly hard, so good students get by with essays easily composed around a thesis like “Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations is about a young man who develops socially, physically, and emotionally,” and then there is a paragraph about social development, one about physical development, and one about emotional development. I’d rather eat a dirty shoe than read it, but if everything is spelled correctly, it won’t get a terrible grade. In college, we’re asking disciplinary questions in English, like why do writers describe the things they choose to describe, and in what terms, and what are the stakes of making those decisions in the composition of prose narrative? What are the political or ethical stakes of these decisions, and how does the text, as a work of prose, function, if it does, and to what extent is it coherent or not, and, if not, why not? Once we’re thinking in these disciplinary ways, the thinking gets much harder, but it’s possible. The writing, on the other hand, is going to take more work.

Whenever we make huge leaps in thinking, our writing sucks. I tell my students about the five years I spent writing my dissertation, because I had to invent a way of writing that was a clear way to express the idea I had. I wrote a lot of crap before it got better. Or I give the example of major philosophers, who, after conceiving of world-changing ideas, produced first books that are practically unreadable—dense, vague, jargony, neologistic messes—before they found a way to write what they wanted to say in a way that can be read and understood by others.

I tell them this because I know that when their papers seem a little crazy (sentences trailing off into, literally, “blah blah blah,” or repetition in sentence after sentence of some insane generalization about what “we, as humans, throughout time” have felt), it’s usually because they’re trying to think about something new in a new way and their writing hasn’t caught up with their ideas. My students aren’t lazy or dumb. I honestly would not say that about any student I’ve ever had. They’re just wrestling with concepts they haven’t had sufficient time to think through, discuss, analyze, evaluate, and articulate. So they panic and their writing drifts into outer space.

Some of them know this, and they say so when they turn in their papers. “I know this really isn’t there yet, but I really want to make an argument for something that is a kind of new idea for me.” Great. Others hold the paper at arm’s length as they hand it in, never having so much as glanced at it after typing the words in it, hoping for a miraculous A. Either way, a revision is probably in the cards.

I don’t assign a ton of writing, in part because I want them to have the time and space to think through their arguments if they want to. I’m not going to force them to do great work, but I will reward it if they’re willing to do it. The problem is that revision means seeing their work again, when some of them didn’t want to look at it in the first place. When they look at their work, and read it, and ask themselves what the point they were trying to make was, they can’t even figure out what they meant by it in the first place.

Maybe it would be more kind to assign a paper a week, and give them better grades as the semester goes on and they learn how to do what they want to do. But all I’m asking is for them to read their own work if and only if they’re dissatisfied with the results, and to do something they can be proud of, that they’re willing to defend. And doing that makes them sad.

Oh, they’re so sad. They asked, before handing their papers in, “So you mean we can just revise our papers if we don’t like the grade?” Yes. “And we can get a few points for extra credit if we revise?” No, I regrade it, completely. “Wow, that’s awesome.” It’s hard for me to communicate how painful revision is.

Revision is brutal. I hate it. It’s humiliating, and not just because someone else has told you your work doesn’t make sense. It’s humiliating because you are forced to confront your own limitations, and see yourself as the world might see you. When you revise your work, you don’t get to give yourself a pass, or play the role of your own infinitely loving parents, or make excuses because you were really tired when you wrote it. You realize that you don’t sound as smart as you think you are. You realize that sometimes you don’t make sense.

I don’t want to cause sadness. Bad feelings are not something I enjoy creating in other people. I don’t even think they’re necessary for learning, and they aren’t if you know what you’re capable of and what your limitations are. But college is where you start figuring out what kind of a figure you really might cut in the world if you were turned loose right now. And I see their sadness and say, but I do think you’re special and smart and that you deserve happiness. I just want you to be able to show that to someone else.

The conference date was approaching, and my paper wasn’t finished. To be honest, it wasn’t exactly started.

Months before, I had drafted an irresistible abstract. I reread the two major texts I promised to discuss. As the weeks ticked by, some critical articles arrived via interlibrary loan. Some online research got done in the wee hours. A Word file optimistically titled “Ideas,” containing quotes, questions, and the occasional fully-drafted paragraph, swelled to unmanageable proportions. In the back of a notebook, I sketched out a number of possible outlines for the argument. But still no paper, nothing I could sit down at a conference table and present to a full room.

For several nights before my departure date, I stayed up late and tried to write, staggering into my office the next morning to prep for classes, which I then sleepwalked through, distracted. One of my colleagues caught the fatigue in my step and said, “Aha, the Conference Shuffle. We all do it.”

Boarded the flight with a laptop and big plans.

The hotel situation was less than ideal. It was a gorgeous room, comfortable, with a real desk. But (unusually for academic conferences, which usually take place near the coasts) the hotel was in the Rocky Mountains, at a seriously high altitude—so high that I was actually sick. It was like being stoned in the back seat of a car hurtling down a winding road. After doing a hundred jumping jacks. It was like that the whole time. Still, really under the gun now, I hunkered down to write.

At the last minute, with no time to spare, few distractions, and the dubious advantage of oxygen deprivation to up the ante, I wrote the hell out of that paper. Time ceased to exist. It was all pure flow. At the end of the day before my panel, I had thirteen strong pages, the distillation of who knows how many hours of thinking and planning. The outline for an article three times that length crystallized, finally, while I wrote. The presentation itself? Fine. Superfine. Powdered sugar fine.

I’m no Aaron Sorkin, but I do relate to his rituals. Back in the early days of The West Wing, when he was writing every word of every episode, Sorkin was known to check into the Four Seasons in Vegas with a duffel bag of crack, mushrooms, and pot, where he’d spend the next six weeks banging out an entire season of scripts. The only way the man knew how to write was on a bender.

No crack here at Casa Berkowitz, of course, but were it not for alternating infusions of coffee and beer, five-pound jars of Jelly Bellys from Costco, and catnaps during weekly all-nighters, my dissertation would never have been completed. I’m not proud of it. Everyone I know has some fucked-up ritual, though. One friend went days without showering, feeling she didn’t “deserve” it unless her chapter was finished. Another wrote the entire thing in a squatting crouch, naked. Another swore by the practice of stopping every two hours to masturbate, claiming it “cleared her head.” I used to smoke and drink like a demon when under a deadline. What the hell is wrong with all of us?

Put another way: why is it so painful to get to that creative place? Why do we fight so hard against it when we know it feels so good to get there? What’s with all the self-punishment?

Lots of people work under pressure, and lots of people have discipline. They will tell you that if you put in a fair amount of time every day—let’s say three hours, to be magnanimous—the work will get done. Do three hours of daily butt-in-chair concentration, writing whether or not you feel you have something to say, and the “flow” will happen eventually.

(Picasso very famously said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” In other words, work to get inspired, not the other way around.)

For those of you who get to “that place” without much drama, what is your routine? How do you move to and from it and the real world?

For those of you who agonize over your writing (or playing, or painting, or whatever), circling the pool endlessly before finally diving in, how do you cut through the inertia and anxiety?

For those of you who enjoy creative pursuits without tears, experiencing only the joyful communion of self-expression…what do you think you are, a unicorn or something?

Since then, I’ve made very close friends with a few people, because that’s what you do in this sort of scenario. Immediately, I found the other single woman on campus who loves Kurt Weill operas and non-monogamous bisexuality, and that’s how things go. In New York, that would have taken three years, but in small-town America, we’re celebrating our birthdays together and I’ve met some of her family. How else you gonna do?

The weird thing about small-town life is the married people. I don’t dislike them, but they are different from the marrieds I know in the city. I’m really hard-pressed to think of strictly monogamous couples I know, or people who define their relationships according to clear definitions of Straight or LGBTQblahblah, whereas here a friend has encouraged me to be a faculty adviser for the queer club because I’m one of the few who doesn’t consider a husband part of the landscape. What do I have to offer these kids? I have pretty random sex, if I have sex at all, with whoever is around and doesn’t bore me. Is that a sexual orientation? I’m mostly celibate because I can’t be bothered to give a fuck.

There are somehow a million meetings and yet nothing to do. I met this amazing woman, truly beautiful and talented and emotionally present, who said she plays music and drinks every night because that’s what there is here. Is that what there is here?

I don’t know if I have time to try to date, or the energy to do so. I wish I had visitors all the time to distract me from this question because I don’t think I’d like to. The prospect is not entertaining.

And yet, there is so much going on. Every time there is a reading or a gallery opening I see all the people I know because that’s most of the people that are. I thought that would feel claustrophobic, but it doesn’t. It’s rather nice, in fact. I feel known, and no one is hostile or demeaning to be around.

It’s been a week since I saw my classes for the first time, because of Labor Day, and it feels like forever ago. My classes have almost doubled in size since then. Every week is like starting over.

I spend my time in this big quiet house thinking about crickets and how the cicadas are gone. I sleep like a baby.

The grad student, we are told, is the kind of fucked up baby monkey who prefers the wire mesh mother, because at least she doesn’t lie to you. I knew all these things, and I was that sad, perverse little monkey who wanted to cling to the wire rather than feel betrayed.

Can I tell you what I found, though? The wire mesh mother taught me how to love.

I finished my education yesterday. I thought when I started my Ph.D. program that, if I survived, it would be after years of constant, clenching fear, watching my back while covering my gut in case of a sucker punch. What I’d been told about grad school was exactly what I’d always heard about life; everyone’s out to get you. If I got the chance, I’d have to eat the weak.

What I learned was that everything else about life is like that. Career is the wire mesh mother. Dating is the wire mesh mother. No one knows how to be kind, so they aren’t. If you offer someone your tender baby monkey paw, they’ll bite it off. But grad school?

When I showed up, I didn’t know how to be kind. I’m still not good at it. When you think everyone wants to eat you, you don’t know the first thing about how to be actively helpful without looking to strike a deal or make a scam. A professor welcomed us by saying, as he did to new students every year, We chose you for a reason. We want you here. We also chose the person sitting next to you. We want that person here too.

This guy who said this wasn’t a particularly nice person. He could be cutting and flippant, and he was super-cool and brilliant, so I assumed at first that it was some shit people say. It took me a while to figure out that what he meant was, Don’t disrespect us by being a crappy student, and don’t disrespect us by being crappy to each other. My job in school, I was finally learning, was to be smart and do good work, not just for myself, but for all the people who would give me support and help, and never to prevent someone else from doing well.

This was policy in my program. When someone else succeeds, even if you’re envious, or you hate them, or you think they don’t deserve it, you fucking smile and say congratulations, or you walk out of the building and vent to some other friend. When someone fails, even if you hate them, you offer them the help you can, or you go take a nap if you can’t.

Because I was a nasty little monkey—most of us were during our first year—I didn’t see the point. I made allies, and even some good friends, but I quickly formed a cool kids’ club with some other women who hated the same people I did. We’d roll our eyes about how dumb this one was, or how that one needs a new girlfriend. We couldn’t see then what we know years later, that this wrote a brilliant dissertation lickety-split and is a ridiculously talented writer, and that one is a sensitive, quiet man who would devote his life to a massive, slow-burning intellectual project while raising a baby. All we saw then were what we perceived to be edible weaker monkeys.

I had my first psychological crisis during my second year. I’d gotten some bad birth control that contributed to my certainty that I was losing my mind. I ended up in the emergency room of the psych ward with uncontrollable rage. I was afraid of myself, and crying at school about my stupid hateful life. And then a woman, a more advanced student who I know thought I was not cool, came up to me and said, “You need to be gentle with yourself. Just, be kind to yourself right now.”

I had never in my life heard anything like it. My people, we don’t do that. Did she mean some kind of Cathy comic strip scenario where I get frustrated trying on swimsuits and then eat a bunch of chocolate? Because that’s not really my… “No. I mean, today, just go for a walk. Get a pedicure. Sit under a tree. Something that isn’t about… this.”

She didn’t have to do that. She did, though, and it changed everything. My boyfriend at the time was always trying to get me to fix myself; I was always trying to fix myself. That day, I just tried to be myself for a few hours. I’m still learning how to just be myself.

And that, it turns out, is love. Or it’s the love I learned in grad school anyway. Everyone is constantly telling you you’re not rich enough, smart enough, pretty, strong, nice, dedicated, sane, excellent enough, and then someone reminds you that you’re good enough to spend a few hours sitting under a tree not hating yourself. That’s kindness.

I’m not naturally kind. I’m self-absorbed and paranoid. I still gravitate to the wire mesh mother, given the option. But because of the brilliant and kind people I met in grad school, I have something to say to the student weeping in my office, or the near-stranger in the hall who is freaking out. It’s something I said many times to other people in my program who were losing their shit, and something that has been said to me countless times by them when I’m struggling. Be gentle with yourself. Ask for the help you need. You belong here.

Sure, 4:37 comes twice a day every day, but I’ve been making quite a chum out of this particular time of day lately. We’ve been having a lot of dates recently, going hot and heavy. Sometimes I think maybe I’m not going to see 4:37, but then there he is. He can’t live without me.

I’m not an insomniac anymore. When I was a little kid, I saw a great deal of 4:37, but that was because I had bad dreams, or would stay awake all night practicing speeches I wanted to give to various people but never would. In high school, I barely slept at all because I was so busy and life was so interesting. In college, if I saw 4:37, it was usually because I had a term paper due in the morning.

It turns out that the month before you turn in a dissertation is kind of like having a term paper due every single day, except now you’re too old to be awake 20 hours of every day. A few years ago, I realized it had been a very long time since I pulled an all-nighter, and I wondered if it were even possible. All-nighter? Me? Pff. I’m an old woman now for a reason: I sleep like a champ.

This month I’ve been up past 9 am six different times. I really hit my stride as a writer around midnight, and I go hard at it for three or four hours. Then I dick around a bit and flirt with the idea of sleeping before realizing I still have way too much shit to do. The hours between 4 am and 8 am are totally brutal.

The good news is that I wrote a book, and I think it’s not a bad book at all. I showed it to some people and they kind of liked it, even some of the parts I am sick of. I’ve got basically one more night after tonight to finish it before I give it to my committee for whatever they decide to do to it.

I hope it’s my last time going to sleep at 9 am for a long time.