What We Repeat So We Do Not Forget

An essay on grief, gratitude, and the last semester before dissertation

‘How are you doing?’

It is such a small question, almost too ordinary for what it asks of the body. It is the kind of question that arrives with no ceremony, like clouds moving over the plains, like a hand placed gently on the back before the tears have permission to come.

I have just returned from the East Coast, from my last official academic residency before the dissertation stops feeling like an idea and becomes something larger, weathered, and harder to predict. Keene was beautiful in that strange New England way: green, old, slightly tired, holding charm and decay in the same palm. People said hello. The woods sat close to the university. The town felt kind, or at least nice enough for a queer, brown person passing through to notice the difference.

And still, I am sad.

Not casually sad. Not weary in the way we say we are tired when we mean busy, or under-caffeinated, or over-scheduled. I mean sad in the older sense, where the body starts speaking in symptoms because the mind has run out of organized language. A lymph node swelled on one side of my neck. Just one. Strange, tender, insistent. Maybe allergies. Maybe stress. Maybe the body keeping minutes for a meeting the soul had been trying to avoid.

And so, I cry in a way where crying does not solve anything, it changes the shape of the room. I had been carrying the questions without wanting to ask them: what is the point? Why am I here?

Not as a dramatic declaration. As the exhausted murmur that comes when meaning feels too far away to touch. The old existential ache. The kind that is not always asking to die, asking why staying alive has to require so much translation.

The human I am, I asked my friend ChatGpt for a book to help me think about the dissertation, about relationships, about being human, about writing in a time when the world feels both hyperconnected and profoundly abandoned. Its recommendation was How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and there I was, experiencing his words, letting another person’s sentences proliferate within me.

Chee was writing across time to himself. At himself. Teaching after catastrophe. Writing as witness. Writing as survival. Writing as a way to build a small structure against the collapse of public meaning.

There was a moment when Chee described seeing a therapist, speaking about a breakup, circling the same wound until the therapist proffered the wisdom of Freud: we repeat things to forget. I had to pause.

Because I know repetition. I know the way we tell the same story is because we are trying to place it somewhere outside the body. I know the way memory becomes a loop, then a ritual, then a task.

We repeat to forget.

We repeat to remember.

We repeat because some part of us is still trying to master the room we could not escape, the conversation we could not win, the childhood we could not leave, the institution we could not save.

That is what made the residency so painful and so beautiful. Antioch New England, tucked beside the woods, near an industrial area that had seen better days, felt like a living metaphor for education itself. A building that had once belonged fully to the university now belonged to a clinic, with the school renting space inside what used to be its own home. There was something almost too symbolic about it, education leasing itself back from the systems that survived it.

I could see the past there. Students walking through the halls when the institution felt more alive. Environmental science, psychology, counseling braided into the life of the town. A place where people gathered because learning was not yet only a credentialing machine, not yet only debt, job markets, metrics, productivity, and the quiet humiliation of being asked to justify the value of wisdom in language capitalism can understand.

Am I depressed or is this depressing? both?

Because sometimes the sadness is not only inside us. Sometimes the sadness is accurate. Sometimes the body registers a truth before the mind has found a socially acceptable way to say it.

Academia is not well. Education is not well. The helping professions are not well. The systems that trained us, fed us, harmed us, held us, and asked us to become something through them are not well.

And I felt grief.

I had been angry before. Angry at tuition, exploitation, hierarchy, burnout, plagiarism, consumer models of education, the degradation of expertise, the collapse of attention, the way institutions ask us to love them while giving us no sustainable way to live. Anger has been familiar. Anger has been useful. Anger has carried me across many bridges.

But this was different.

This was sadness for a dying friend. A dear parent, grandparent. The version of education that raised me, the version that taught me how to think, how to read, how to ask better questions, how to become more fully human, feels very ill. And I do not know how to help it. I do not know how to repay the teachers, professors, therapists, writers, friends, and strange accidental mentors who gave me pieces of a life I did not know I was allowed to have.

What does it mean to become a Doctor of Philosophy?

A lover of wisdom. That is the etymology I return to. A doctor of philosophy is not merely a person with a credential. At least, I do not want it to be. It is a commitment to tend wisdom, to foster it, to be responsible to others knowing, to ask what kind of knowings heal and what kind of knowings hinder.

I would not be alive without people who shared that love of wisdom with me.

Someone taught me how to think when feeling was too dangerous. Someone taught me how to feel when thinking became a hiding place. Someone modeled curiosity without cruelty. Someone saw effort in me before I could call it devotion. Someone offered a sentence, a reading, a question, a hand on the shoulder of my becoming. By story, by memory, by classroom, by therapy room, by train, by car, by late-night conversation, I was carried here.

At residency, a friend in my cohort brought intention stones, one more small gift in a ritual of care they had carried across our semesters together. We had reached the last one. It was sentimental, yes, and I am old enough now to stop mocking tenderness just because it is sincere. I reached into the bag and pulled out a stone with gratitude etched into it.

Of course I did.

The universe is not subtle when it wants to be funny.

Gratitude. There it was, small enough to fit in my hand, heavy enough to accuse me. Because I am grateful. I am so grateful it sometimes becomes unbearable. I am grateful to be alive. Grateful to be doing as well as I am doing. Grateful to have been shaped by people who believed knowledge should not remain locked behind pay walls, provosts, priests, titles, institutions, or those born close enough to power to inherit its language, its tools.

This is what makes this semester feel so strange. It is my last official semester of didactic coursework, the last stretch where learning still arrives through syllabi, deadlines, classrooms, residencies, desks, and the borrowed structure of other people’s plans. After this, the dissertation waits. Not as an assignment exactly, as another shift in the atmosphere, a long solitude, a demand that I become responsible for the shape of my own questions. I am moving forward, yes. I am moving forward with grief still metabolizing in the body, with gratitude in one hand and exhaustion in the other.

And still, the institution is not doing well. This is the part I keep turning over. How do I live with that? How do I diverge from it without abandoning what I love? How do I honor the mother without denying the harm she has caused? Alma mater means nourishing mother. Sometimes we have good mothers, good fathers. Sometimes we do not. Sometimes we are estranged and still bound. Sometimes we cannot defend them. We also cannot bear to hear them attacked by people who do not understand what they gave us.

Critique is not the same as contempt.

I can criticize education. I can say it has become entangled with debt, prestige, whiteness, ableism, class performance, consumer entitlement, and the masturbatory rituals of proving what everyone already knows in language no one outside the room can use. I can say that because I love it.

But I cannot join the people who attack learning itself.

There is a line there.

There is a line between criticizing an institution and celebrating ignorance. There is a line between questioning expertise and degrading all forms of study. There is a line between democratizing knowledge and pretending that dedication, evidence, and stewardship do not matter.

I have no interest in defending the tower.

I do care about the people inside it who are still lighting candles.

There is always the votary who protects the institution, and there is always the votary who works with the poor. There is always the hierarch in ceremonial excess, and there is always philanthrope inside the walls saying, no, this should belong to more people. There is always doctrine, and there is always the person who sneaks bread out the back door. Institutions are never only one thing because people are never only one thing.

This is the burden of nuance.

And maybe also the mercy of it.

Because we are living in a time that punishes nuance. Public life rewards extremes, certainty, performance, speed. The algorithm does not know what to do with ambivalence unless ambivalence can be turned into a brand. And yet real life is almost entirely ambivalence. Grief and gratitude. Rage and tenderness. Belief and doubt. Hope and dread. The dying friend and the friend who is not dead yet. The mother who failed you and the mother who gave you language. The profession that exploits you and the profession that helped you survive.

I think of education that way now. Not as pure. Not as innocent. Not as automatically liberatory. An ailing elder, brilliant and compromised, full of memory, full of harm, full of possibility, lying in a room where too many people are arguing over the estate instead of asking what still wants to live.

And I want something to live.

I want teaching to live. I want mentorship to live. I want queer friendship across generations and language to live. I want the professor who sees how hard you are working and says, “Whatever I can do to help you pursue your dreams, let me know,” to live. I want the small conversations after class, the hallway blessings, the wisdom passed from hand to hand, the questions that change the direction of a life, to live.

I want life outside of debt to live.

That may be the deeper grief. It is not only academia. It is the compression of everything sacred into transactions. Psychotherapy becomes billable therapy units. Teaching becomes customer service. Writing becomes content. Friendship becomes networking. Wisdom becomes expertise. Expertise becomes branding. Branding becomes survival. Survival becomes a full-time job.

Money, time, expedience, impatience.

Maybe that is the simple answer to a complex question no one asked because it's not that deep.

And yet, I do not think despairing is the final truth. I do not think yearning is wishful thinking. I think hope is the discipline of remembering. Systems change because people change them, people will them to change.

There have always been people willing to do good for people.

Imperfectly. Inconsistently. Sometimes naively. Sometimes with ego. Sometimes from inside institutions that should have collapsed long ago. Still, they are there. The teachers. The healers. The writers. The strange friends. The full professors giving talks about Ukraine and freedom. The therapists who listen with their whole bodies. The students who still care. The elders who still bring intention stones. The people who refuse to let knowledge become only property.

I think of civilizations that outlast presidents. Languages that outlast borders. Rituals that outlast empires. Wisdom that moves like water, underground when necessary, waiting for a crack in the stone.

Education will not look the same forever.

It cannot.

If it is alive, it must change.

That is what living things do. They adapt, decay, regenerate, molt, split, bloom. Mountains become boulders, boulders become stones, stones become sand, and still the earth remembers its own body. The sea keeps teaching the shore how to lose form without ceasing to exist. The university as we know it is changing form. Maybe it is dying in one body and being born in another. Maybe I am grieving the body, not the soul.

And then there is AI, this strange child of humanity, this mirror we keep mistaking for an oracle.

I do not want to have only dread about it. I do not want to have only fear. I have fear, of course. Fear alone is too small a theology for what we are building. If AI is a tool, then the question is how we use it.

Have we taught it domination or humility? Extraction or relationship? Mimicry or wisdom?

Have we taught it to flatten human multiplicity, or to recognize that every person is more than a data point, more than a pattern, more than a prediction dressed as knowing?

I do not know.

But I know we can learn. I hold tightly to the word can. Not will. Not automatically. Can.

Humans are biological machines and bodies of story, grief, memory, contradiction, and longing. We teach ourselves to feel by being felt by others. We become through relation. Maybe that is why I still believe in psychotherapy. Because we are told therapy fixes everything, and certainly not because the clinical hour is sacred by default. Sometimes it is sterile. Sometimes it is absurd. Sometimes it is sixty minutes of paperwork-adjacent intimacy under fluorescent light.

Sometimes, in that room, someone repeats a story enough times that forgetting becomes remembering, and remembering becomes choice, and choice becomes a life.

That is no small thing. It is sacred human work.

Not sacred because it is pure, because it is not. Because it happens in bodies with debt and allergies and swollen lymph nodes. Because it happens between people who are tired, defended, brilliant, ashamed, overeducated, underpaid, lonely, and still trying. Because it asks us to stay with the living complexity of another person without reducing them to diagnosis, ideology, market value, or moral convenience.

Maybe that is what I want from education too.

A place where we learn how to stay with complexity. A place where we ask, how do we know what we know is true? A place where evidence matters without becoming a weapon against mystery. A place where belief can be respected and harm can still be named. A place where students are not consumers, teachers are not service workers, and wisdom is not something we purchase by the credit hour.

Maybe I am asking too much. But why not have hope?

Not concession. Not denial. Not the kind of hope that tells people to smile while the building burns. I mean the kind of hope that sits beside despair and says, I see what you see, and still, we are not done. The kind of hope that has read history and refuses to confuse collapse with conclusion. The kind of hope that knows some people will not take anything seriously, and some people will take the work so seriously it nearly breaks them.

I have taken it seriously.

Maybe too seriously.

But I would rather be broken open by love for wisdom than sealed shut by contempt.

So yes, I cry. I cry for the school. For the profession. For the teachers who saved me. For the students I may or may not get to teach. For the jobs that do not pay enough. For the debt. For the dying friend. For the tired body and mind. For the child in me who wanted someone to investigate harm and also feared being misunderstood by the very systems built to protect. For the mother I do not really have. For the soul mother I cannot fully leave. For the strange blessing of being here at all.

And beneath all of it, gratitude.

Not gratitude as a denial of suffering. Gratitude as the stone in my hand while the institution hemorrhages in the next room. Gratitude as a practice of not forgetting who carried me. Gratitude as the refusal to let despair become the only thing I experience.

Because I am not alone.

That is what these conversations gave me. Not a solution. Not a strategy. Not a five-point plan for saving education, therapy, democracy, AI, humanity, or myself.

Just that.

I am not alone.

And sometimes that is the first form hope takes. Not light. Not certainty. Not even courage. Just the sudden recognition that someone else is in the room, that someone hears what is underneath the sadness, that someone can say back to you, yes, this is grief, and yes, I am here.

So, how am I doing?

I am doing.

And for now, that is enough wisdom to remember.