Archive: Space Lizards

From Living Deliberately, Living Well 1.0; 21 August 2020

It’s a Monday evening and I’m six or seven or eight, somewhere around there. I’m over at Heidi Brittner’s house with my mom, my sister, and my brother because mom and Heidi’s mom are working on some Girl Scout business. I’m walking through their living room and there is something on TV that looks a lot like Star Trek - space people in red uniforms - and I think “Hey, this looks like Star Trek!” so I stop what I’m doing and watch and then the space people UNZIP THEMSELVES or something and they are LIZARDS underneath and then one of them eats some kind of rodent and I nearly pass out from fright.

(NB: in the mid- to late-80s V and V: The Last Battle would be in reruns occasionally on NBC and I happened to cross in front of the Brittner’s TV when these were on. I’m not quite old enough to have seen it in its first run. Whew. Anyway.)

I live with anxiety and depression and it has become clear to me in these last few weeks - weeks during normal years in which I’m getting ready to return to the classroom - that the late summer is a time of high deflection. I use planning, classroom structure, and a re-immersion into institutional politics as ways of shielding myself from parts of the psyche that get knocked loose over the summer, parts I can just clip back into place and move on from because I have other things to do. The rhythm of the classroom, its interactions, and the sense of wholeness I get from teaching all cooperate to recover from the summer’s exposure. I think this sort of deflection is okay, on the whole. Or better, I think it’s okay from where I’m standing right now because I am not deflecting and am trying to live in and with the loose parts as they come loose. 

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I received word that a project I submitted for a national fellowship program was not funded. On Monday I got the feedback on my project, which was harsh and personal, indicating that my project was not even in the ballpark for consideration. Among other reasons, the reviewers cited my insufficient scholarly recognition (that is, I don’t have enough citations on Google Scholar) to ensure my project would receive a wide audience; they indicated that my sabbatical project is not sufficient for a national fellowship for a prestigious endowment, and that my writing reads like a reflexive blog post. (Touché.) It all sounded an awful lot like the feedback I got when I submitted my work in the disciplinary fellowship competition for this same endowment back in January, in which I was told my project had little philosophical merit and that I wasn’t a well-known scholar, that it didn’t seem likely I could complete the project in a year, and a number of other, seemingly personal reasons why my project didn’t merit funding.

When the feedback came on my Monday morning walk I stopped at 23rd and Steele and felt like I could spontaneously combust on account of the shame and humiliation I felt from that feedback, and it started an brutal cascade of inquiry into my failures. The rejections by five fellowship programs over the last two years (for which I thought I was qualified and believed my work to be competitive in), to the inability for me to get my book into mainline philosophical channels for review and discussion, all of it suggested to me that I must be kidding myself about being a philosopher or a scholar. Even along the pathway I took to where I am now - winding, unexpected, and unusual - I told myself it seemed like I should have “seen the signs” all along and quit while I was ahead.

Monday was a rough day.

As the day wore on - and thanks to a clutch intervention by AV - I was able to get outside that sense of deep dislocation, but not before cracking myself up thinking of how absolutely terrifying those human skin suit lizard aliens from V were for me that night, and how being a human for whom the world shifts in gross ways every now and then because of chemicals might also think of themselves as a human skin suit lizard alien from V. Sometimes the human suit stays zipped up - I see the zipper and I say oh, hey, that’s there and go about my business and could someone bring me a rodent please. Sometimes the suit gets unzipped and it’s life as a lizard and this is cool sorry everybody but I’m a lizard and could someone bring me a rodent please. And then, then, there are times like Monday when I think hey, what’s that zipper and HOLY SHIT I AM A LIZARD IN A HUMAN SUIT AND HOW COULD I BE A LIZARD I THOUGHT I WAS A HUMAN AND WHAT WILL EVERYONE THINK OF ME BECAUSE I AM A FAILED HUMAN I AM A LIZARD AND COULD SOMEONE PLEASE GET ME A RODENT and then I pass out from fright.

It’s just how it is sometimes.