Signs of an Abusive Relationship
- Dominance — Abusive individuals need to feel in charge of the relationship. Your abuser may treat you like a servant, child, or even as his possession, and try to control your time, your possessions, even your finances.
- Humiliation — An abuser will do everything he can to make you feel bad about yourself, or defective in some way. After all, if you believe you're worthless and that no one else will want you, you're less likely to leave.
- Isolation — In order to increase your dependence on him, an abusive partner will cut you off from the outside world. He may keep you from seeing family or friends, or even prevent you from going to work or school.
- Intimidation — Your abuser may use a variety of intimation tactics designed to scare you into submission.
- Denial and blame — Abusers are very good at making excuses for the inexcusable. He will commonly shift the responsibility onto you.
No, this post is not about Rob. I ran across these the other day in a newspaper or something, and while I was reading them, it hit me. Graduate school is an abuser. It controls my finances, it isolates me, it is often humiliating. There is the intimidation factor, which is especially bad because there is the threat of leaving grad school and being unemployable in other fields, and the threat of finishing and being unemployable in the field I've studied. And the denial and blame makes regular appearances whenever we are ballsy enough to complain.
Not that this makes me reconsider the wisdom of my decision to be here. As long as the funding is here, I will be too. Probably. But it did revive my fantasies about alternative modes of happiness, which now include careers as (in no particular order) baker, yoga instructor, writer, electrician, vice president, and translator. This is a Good Thing, because the job market was grim for people in my field even before the economy tanked. Now people around here are talking about the job market as if there is only one open position out there, and it's a 6-8 load as adjunct at the University of Timbuktu. I kid you not: the future is so grim that we are reading Kafka and talking about how hopeful it is.
In other news from the academy, I presented a paper at the Midwest Modern Language Association conference wherein I made jokes about feminine hygiene products and talked about fictional margins, I presented a list of issues on behalf of the graduate students here to our dwindling faculty wherein I reminded them that if they are so over the cannon that they can't be bothered to teach it to us then they shouldn't make fun of us for not knowing it, I presented a project to my theory seminar wherein I babbled incoherently about Derrida, Freud, Derrida, some other stuff, and Derrida and was warmly received despite the obvious fact that I had no idea what I was saying, and I found a pile of books I meant to read before moving that will now have to compete with wallpaper removal for my attention over Christmas break. Also, humanities are getting axed, those damn science people across the river are taking all the money, and bus fares are going up.
Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and I CANNOT WAIT to have several consecutive days in which I will worry about cranberry sauce and pies instead of my career, the ability of language to express meaning, the role of the author, ruptures, intertexts, or the aporia of prosopoeia.
Not that this makes me reconsider the wisdom of my decision to be here. As long as the funding is here, I will be too. Probably. But it did revive my fantasies about alternative modes of happiness, which now include careers as (in no particular order) baker, yoga instructor, writer, electrician, vice president, and translator. This is a Good Thing, because the job market was grim for people in my field even before the economy tanked. Now people around here are talking about the job market as if there is only one open position out there, and it's a 6-8 load as adjunct at the University of Timbuktu. I kid you not: the future is so grim that we are reading Kafka and talking about how hopeful it is.
In other news from the academy, I presented a paper at the Midwest Modern Language Association conference wherein I made jokes about feminine hygiene products and talked about fictional margins, I presented a list of issues on behalf of the graduate students here to our dwindling faculty wherein I reminded them that if they are so over the cannon that they can't be bothered to teach it to us then they shouldn't make fun of us for not knowing it, I presented a project to my theory seminar wherein I babbled incoherently about Derrida, Freud, Derrida, some other stuff, and Derrida and was warmly received despite the obvious fact that I had no idea what I was saying, and I found a pile of books I meant to read before moving that will now have to compete with wallpaper removal for my attention over Christmas break. Also, humanities are getting axed, those damn science people across the river are taking all the money, and bus fares are going up.
Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and I CANNOT WAIT to have several consecutive days in which I will worry about cranberry sauce and pies instead of my career, the ability of language to express meaning, the role of the author, ruptures, intertexts, or the aporia of prosopoeia.
