Beyond Checked Out

It was an out of body experience: I was hanging out with some friends today and it made me realize that I wasn't coming back to grad school next year. I had it in my head that I was going to try to resolve this conflict and see what happens, but even though my head was on the fence, my heart was no longer here. It made me feel very sad and alone. It felt like I was saying good bye to the friends here, I couldn't get excited about the plans and projects they were excited about, and I almost couldn't even hate on the people I normally hate because I'm now expelled from the community and no longer have the right. This is why all the power problems in academia remain intact despite hundreds of years of social progress: by the time a problem gets bad enough that you have to do something about it, you've lost all the enthusiam necessary for putting up a fight. But I have to remember that it's worth fighting for. Even if it's only so that I can prove to myself that I'm not an easy quitter, that this isn't just an accidental bump in the road, but a deep poison in my well. If I don't see it through to the end, I'll always wonder if I just had a paranoid freak-out for a few weeks, and what seemed to me to be the poison in my well was actually just a little pee in my pool.