Encore un doctorat

Encore les escaliers.

Again the stairs.

My husband and I heard these words while walking up a fort on a hill in the town of Namur in Wallonia. They were uttered in the kind of despairing voice only an exhausted child can issue. We were engaging in what my husband called “an adventure,” an excursion by train to see some of the other cities in Belgium. This was when my husband was working on his doctorate at a university in Brussels, and I stepped into the role of “trailer wife,” as the expats we met so colorfully described the identity of the spouse who follows their husband’s career instead of their own.

I loved this utterance from the child for so many reasons. For one, this same thought occurred to my husband and me and likely most of the other people climbing (mostly trudging up) the seemingly never-ending sets of staircases that had been built into the side of the hill.

It was only the child who articulated what everyone else was surely thinking.

There seems to be something that happens, a threshold that is crossed at some point in the transition from childhood to adult, when it becomes less acceptable to communicate our thoughts and struggles. My husband and I got quite the laugh out of hearing this child. I can still remember her body language, so expressive, as she dramatically lifted her feet up the stairs, one step after endless step.

To this day, when something feels like it will never end and is taxing and exhausting, we say dramatically, “encore les escaliers,” sometimes inserting whatever it is we are doing in place of “escaliers.” When we first began bicycling around Seattle, the phrase became “encore les collines” (again the hills).

My husband likes to chide me that I make life much more difficult than it needs to be, and I supposed embarking upon a second PhD could fit into this category. In French, “encore un doctorat.” But surprisingly to me, my husband has been incredibly encouraging and supportive of my decision to pursue a doctorate in a field called Community Music. When I told him about this piece and the title, he suggested I might think of this second doctorate in musical terms, particularly as I am studying music.

Consider this your “encore,” he told me.

It took me a long time in my trailer wife capacity in Belgium to figure out what I was doing and what I wanted to be doing. I did not want to be depressed and lonely. I did not want to be resentful of my husband, who had immediate purpose and community by virtue of his studies.

I will not say that I succeeded in no resenting my husband. I really struggled in Belgium. Part of the challenge was that a lot of old trauma was triggered by the elements of life that I found most stressful. Things that when I write them down or have tried to explain to people might seem trite and the challenges of privilege. Yet for me they were truly difficult.

I don’t self-regulate well, and I would find myself overwhelmed when I knew I had only a few minutes to get to the bus and still had to coax our highly sensitive rescue husky into his crate before making a mad dash to catch the bus. If I missed the bus, it could be anywhere from 15 minutes to a half an hour before the next bus would arrive, thereby setting me behind for every other connection I would need to make (bus, metro, tram) to get anywhere around Brussels and the surrounding towns.

Sometimes, I would be running to the bus and it would pull away just as I was approaching. I would swear the bus driver had seen me and driven off anyway just because they could, but who knows if that was actually true.

These were times when I would proceed to text my husband as a means to vent my frustration. I would proclaim hatred for life overseas. I would threaten to leave and go back to the states. And so on. At first, my husband would tend to respond with empathy and try to help me calm down. Over time, my response to being triggered became a trigger for him.  By the end of any interchange, my husband would respond with the “sigh,” and I would know I had gone to far and feel enormous shame and remorse.

What was wrong with me? Any number of our friends and family witnessing our life through the lens of social media would express jealousy and desire to trade places. It was difficult to explain how and why I felt constantly on edge.

The times I felt most grounded were studying and teaching yoga and volunteering at a migration asylum center on Monday afternoons. As the latter most relates to my current field of study, I will stay there for a few moments.

In studying for my first PhD in the field of Sustainability Education, I noticed early on something that took me several years to articulate with clarity. I sensed a kind of “wrongness” and almost hypocrisy in the sustainability of our personal, professional, and lives academic and our approach to creating sustainability in the world.

We would meet and present our research several times a year either at the private university where we were studying or other venues. At the start of these sessions, we would have a “check-in” where everyone would share what was going on in their lives. Largely, the information people shared seemed (to me) to denote an imbalance. People were overworked, did not feel valued or adequately compensated at work, were deeply unhappy, or raising young children while their partner or spouse was constantly traveling for work.

In hindsight, I would say that I was more attuned to recognizing the imbalances in my peers lives. it took me the better part of the first year in the program to turn the mirror on my own life and begin to notice a “wrongness” there. I think this awareness came in studying the concept of sustainability through a broad lens. The more I came to understand sustainability through ecopsychology, the environment, social justice, and so on, the more I began to see that I was not modeling sustainability in my own life.

I first recognized that my professional life was wildly out of balance. I was working several seasonal education jobs over the course of each year. None of them paid well or offered health insurance. None of them guaranteed I would be rehired the following year. I felt undervalued, especially as I bent over backwards to prove my worth and continued to see other people elevated ahead of me because they were the son of the boss of my supervisor’s wife or possessed skills that were deemed more valuable than my own (e.g. graphic design). I had demonstrated artistic ability, but I had not learned how to use Adobe Suite. I can clearly recall an elevator ride where the chosen graphic designed explained to me that you can only be a real artist if you have gone to art school.

Even though I knew he was full of shit, there was a part of me that believed him. This was the part of me that questions my intelligence, my value, whether I am lovable or beautiful.

It took a peer in my cohort to reflect to me that I seemed deeply unhappy not only in my professional life but also in my personal life. While her words rang true, the discovery only made me feel trapped, my life over because I was unhappy in my marriage and there was nothing I could do to change it.

It was this same person who gave me permission to leave my first husband. What followed was several years of navigating uncertain terrain, all the while trying to carve out a new beginning that resonated with my burgeoning understanding of sustainability.

This path involved a return to music and joint research with yet another member of my cohort in the program. I studied classical piano and performance for more than 14 years when I recognized my disenchantment with the rigidity of the classical music world and gave myself permission to change course to be able to study a foreign language (French) and other subjects, as well as to study overseas in Africa and Western and Eastern Europe.

I was able to make these choices despite critique from family and friends. The critique left residue, and I struggle to this day with the feeling that I have not lived up to my musical potential. That I am not a “real” musician because I did not end earning a music degree as I had originally intended.

Some of this shame was countered in my time studying sustainability when I connected with a member of my cohort who was a “real” musician, who was interested in musical composition and the creative process, and who identified me as person with innate natural talent for songwriting in a folk music tradition.

We connected creatively only briefly at the start of our second year in the program when my colleague wanted to share an idea he had for overcoming creative barriers in songwriting  by inviting a person to share a story from their life and using that story as the creative foundation and inspiration for a song. At a gathering of our cohort at Estes Park in Colorado, I volunteered to be the storyteller he would guide. The experience was profound and inspired my beginning revelation that I was unhappy in my marriage because I was trying to be the source of happiness for my husband at the expense of my own needs. I realized I had married him because I knew how much he loved me and how happy it would make him to get married. I realized I had been learning this behavior pattern from a young age, seeing my parents unhappy and wanting to do anything I could to be there happiness. It had never occurred to me that any happiness I created for another person could only be fleeting. We each negotiate and navigate this path for ourselves, and it is through our own work that a longer lived joy for life can be cultivated.

The following spring, my colleague and I reconnected, each expressing a desire to work together. We developed an independent course to study songwriting from a story. It was through this course and the subsequent regular meetings we organized to carry on our joint research, that a songwriting method came into being. What my colleague had referred to as autoethnographic songwriting I suggested we refer to as the sum of its parts. Shaping a story into a song could be called “Story-to-Song,” which is what we wrote on our IRB for social research.

From there, we practiced composing songs from one another’s stories and then with individual volunteers (members of our cohort, members of audiences at conferences and the university symposia each spring). Each new experience helped to reveal a pattern that we tended to follow, which we eventually delineated into a step-by-step template or model for composing a story from a song.

I think of my first PhD kind of like my first marriage. I can see the ways I followed behavior that was familiar and enabled behavior patterns in other people for fear of rejection and abandonment (my research partner) and/or retaliation and emotionally extreme response (my first husband).

Revelations have taken years to form and to find language to articulate. They often began with a feeling of “wrongness,” followed by a sense that there was something inauthentic going on, a way I was not honoring myself, my work, my contributions.

It was not until I began volunteering to offer songwriting using Story-to-Song in Belgium that I even went back to revisit my dissertation. I had the thought that perhaps I might publish articles or even a book from the text, but I also had a kind of cringy feeling even thinking about returning to the text for fear that the document I had worked so hard to bring into the world might not hold up well.

What I found in rereading my dissertation was that the writing and revelations were still interesting. However, I noticed that from the start I was not writing accurately about the research I conducted with my cohort peer. For one, I referred to Story-to-Song from the very beginning as opposed to simply songwriting exploration or songwriting research. I did not explain how we came to work together to follow a collaborative, iterative, and dialogic process to shift from discussions and experiments shaping songs from stories to a concrete method with specific steps that a person could follow. Rather than saying we studied songwriting, I wrote that my research partner taught me the Story-to-Song method.

It was kind of wild to read this years later and realize that not only had I written something inaccurate and published it for the world to read as “true,” but in so doing I was also participating in publishing a falsehood in hiding from sharing my actual role in our research. The discovery brought up feelings of shame and also sadness.

When I tried to talk about it with my research partner, the response was alarming but also not unanticipated. He disagreed with my revelation, saying he had developed the method, that is belonged to him.

My research partner described “ownership” and copyright in our work together, saying that if I composed a song and shared it with him for his feedback, and if he then made suggestions, whether or not I incorporated those suggestions the song would become one with shared ownership by both of us.

I remember the moment he explained this to me, feeling again a niggling sense of “wrongness.” If a person wrote a paper and sent it to me to review and offer revision suggestions, I would not ask them to add my name as a co-author. Why would a piece of music be any different?

At the time, I did not say any of this to my research partner because I was afraid he would get angry with me and stop working with me. Also at the time, I thought the only way I could successfully write a song was by sharing my ideas with him and getting feedback when I found myself stuck.

It has taken me more than a decade to realize that this hesitance was born of fear. And it was this fear that likely led me to write about our research the way I did, not giving myself any credit for shaping the songwriting process that came to be called Story-to-Song.

My research partner first proposed the idea of what eventually became Story-to-Song as Autoethngraphic Songwriting. All ego and “credit” aside for creating the method, when it comes down to it is an iteration of folk music at its essence. Had we not worked together, I am certain he would have gone on to develop some variation of a songwriting method. I also believe that without my participation, the method would likely have looked different. And in the years that I have been composing music with people, the method has also changed. We have taken different paths, he creating a non-profit to teach musicians how to use the method while I have changed my approach to music making to include groups of people composing multilingual songs from many stories.

I have to come understand that the magic of the creative process, for me, is through the richness that develops through collaboration. It was why I have spent so much time trying to figure out how to continue songwriting years after leaving Belgium and returning to the United States. It is one reason I feel so strongly about continuing to study the ways I guide songwriting so that I can be as sensitive and respectful in holding space for people to share difficult stories and to honor their creative voices through the process of shaping those stories into music.

While I have felt shame for not seeing how I was participating in unhealthy patterns like not crediting my contributions to the development of Story-to-Song, I also have experienced relief that I was finally making sense of it all. For a long time, I felt a lot of anger and hurt toward my research partner for not seeing our dynamic in the way I had come to see it. I don’t feel that anymore. I also don’t feel the same shame or disappointment in myself for participating in my own silencing, for not giving myself credit for my contributions.

My understanding of my self and other people has taken time and effort, study and therapy to understand. And I recognize that it is my own unique understanding based on my lens and way of being in the world, of interacting with other people over time.

Looking back with what I know now, it is not at all surprising that I wrote my dissertation the way I did. I was participating in a power dynamic and hierarchy that was familiar. That is likely in part why I entered into the relationship in the first place. It was familiar, if a bit dysfunctional. I stepped into the role of apprentice to my research partner’s identity of expert. Anything I created did not belong to me but to the one with the greater power in the relationship. No different than my beginning experiences with the professional world and working for a government agency. My ideas, my opinions, my creative work was not mine.

I was also very accustomed to stepping into the role of enabler, of behaving in ways I derived would be acceptable and palatable to any person I worked with, of saying the things I sensed they wanted to hear. I did this in most relationships, professional and otherwise. And being a highly empathic and sensitive person, I was good at it. I could read a person’s energy and body language and deduce these things with a fair level of accuracy.

It took a personal toll, and I eventually experienced a deep depression and psychological collapse that led me to therapy long before I began studying sustainability through the lens of an individual human system. I have seen many therapists following different methods on and off for the better part of the past two decades, and I am still practicing understanding my needs, my fears, and how to communicate all of these with sensitivity and grace.

As I have moved along this journey, one challenge I discovered over time was that in recognizing these patterns, at least for me, came the revelation that if I continued embodying any unhealthy role then I was essentially choosing to remain a doormat. I was choosing unhappiness. This was a big piece in my path to sustainability and my research into a concept I termed “self-sustainability.” And I did push back from time to time with my research partner. I pushed back in the familiar roles I was inhabiting in my professional and personal lives as well.

The response to my revelations and behavior changes was unique to each relationship I had cultivated. With my supervisors in my professional life, I often experienced pretty severe retaliation when I stepped out of my doormat role and began to speak from a more authentic voice.

From some friends, members of my cohort, and my eventual second husband, I experienced encouragement and celebration. I also noticed that people in my life outside of my doctoral studies in sustainability sought me out to share their own struggles with authenticity, determining what they needed for balance and wellbeing, and then communicating and honoring those needs as they became more familiar with their true selves.

What became clearer was that I wanted to spend more time in community with people who not only supported my endeavor to honor my true self but also who saw me as valuable and lovable without expecting me to be anything but my self. It became more difficult to stay in situations where I felt I had to pretend to be someone else according to another person’s set of values, rules, and comfort.

There are situations that still call for this, but I step into them with more awareness than I used to. And I have found that through a lot of practice and trial and error, I now recognize the unsustainable relationships and situations  more quickly and am then able to decide with intention whether or not it is healthy for me to continue.

With the clarity that comes from years of reflection, I can see how my breaking out of my traditional, familiar role made many people in my life uncomfortable. Perhaps, this discomfort came because my transformation cause them to shift the mirror onto their own roles and ways of being and behaving. This self-reflection can be difficult, especially if you are worried you won’t like what you see. So instead of supporting me, I can see how some people in my life pushed back and doled out punishment instead. It was easier for them and for their superiors if I stayed in a static state rather than getting all uppity and self-aware.

Awareness is a kind of gateway behavior. And it can ruffle people’s feathers and shake all of those metaphorical boats in one’s life.

When I look back, I try to practice being gentle with myself for how long it has taken me to get here. I mean, I think it’s called self-work because it is just that. Work.

I also try to hold people in my heart who have behaved in ways that were hurtful and that have left a painful residue that takes time to heal from. It is my hope that I will continue to give myself permission to be more and more my authentic self. In life, in my research, and in how I reflect and write about both of these interwoven elements.

What I discover about myself may not always be magical or pretty, but I hope it will be as true as I am able to uncover with everything I have learned up until now. I imagine that somewhere down the road, I may read this piece and realize that once more there was still so much hidden that I had yet to discover.

But as one of my favorite yoga teachers used to tell us, don’t be in a hurry to learn everything. If you know everything, then you’re dead.

My intention is to live with with clarity, love, and authenticity and continue asking questions and seeking answers.

Here we go, second PhD!

Encore un doctorat!

Or to use my husband’s loving suggestion, an “encore” doctorate.