My Tragic Love Affair with International Relations (March 5, 2022, the severed branch)
Transformations, dreams, and disappointments while struggling to translate academic passions into the realities of networking and employment
Above: Traveling somewhere in Kyrgyzstan (April 2017)
Before spending the summer in Germany with a host family, my 11th-grade German teacher required that I reflect in writing on what I hoped to get out of the trip. “I will not allow myself to be influenced by the socialist Europeans,” I declared.
She returned my reflection with a question mark next to my anti-socialist declarations.
A question mark? Did she not understand that my credentials in this domain were already confirmed? In 10th grade, I took an online quiz about my political views. At first, on a scale from Jesse Jackson to Ronald Reagan, I was just slightly to the right. Troubled by these findings, I retook the quiz repeatedly until I was 100% Ronald Reagan. I reviewed each question and ensured that my viewpoints aligned with what I understood to be the right-wing options.
My teacher sometimes used her German class as a vehicle for exposing us to the realities of a different country. Susceptible young minds might conclude that things could be better here if only we emulated Germany. And I was indeed distressed by how easily my peers succumbed to the corrupting contemplation of the so-called European Dream.
The Germans could only pay for their depraved social welfare state because American soldiers protected them, thereby diminishing their need to fund their own defense. For all their criticisms, if war came knocking, they’d all come crawling to Washington. So if my exchange hosts had criticisms for my great leader, George W. Bush, then they could go fuck themselves.
On many nights, I eagerly retreated to the basement to watch Fox News in darkness on a big screen TV. I tried to change my liberal teacher’s anti-war views by using what I learned from Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. I even gave her a CD with a speech by a Ohio Republican who compared Saddam Hussein to Hitler and the Democrats to Neville Chamberlain. I was startled when she approached me to discuss the recording. I delayed this encounter for several weeks. But finally, she gave me a stern invitation to her classroom after school. Meeting with me at last, she fluidly referenced her copious notes as she demolished the Congressman’s argument. It was evident that she had listened to more of the speech than I had. I had nothing to say. “Andrew, don’t come to me with things like this if you’re not actually ready to talk about it.”
Conversations like that one left me with a faint apprehension that maybe I wasn’t learning anything at all in the darkness of the basement. But after a month in Germany, I returned still clinging to the politics I had imbibed underground. I pretended to be scandalized by the European depravity. 15 year olds were drinking and fornicating. Teenagers were allowed to have their partner sleep over and fuck them in their bedrooms. They could then just come down and enjoy breakfast with their families as if they were just as much of a virgin as I was.
And they all really did hate George W. Bush. Which was to be expected, I suppose. They surely hadn’t joined me in calling French fries Freedom fries after France had opposed the invasion of Iraq. But they did have some lingering sense of their responsibilities to Christendom. One told me they opposed letting Turkey into the EU because “they are Muslims and we are Christians.”
My teacher had us all write a reflection after the trip. “At least I know now that I will never study abroad again,” I wrote. But I did reflect briefly on one thing I had learned. Having struggled with the German language during my time there, I said the experience left me feeling more sympathy for people who struggle with English.
“Yes,” she wrote in her comment. “It is very humbling.” She underlined “humbling” four times.
Sometimes I thought about how small my world was, and how it was expanding only gradually. I hardly knew what lay beyond a thirty-minute drive from my parents’ house. Even a quick trip from one suburban town to another made me feel like I was traveling, like I was seeing something new and different. I felt my little world map slowly expanding, and soon enough it would extend to East Lansing as well. Despite all my efforts to claim I was opposed to any further growth, some instinctual essence inside me demanded I continue to explore.
Two summers after Germany, having just finished my freshman year at Michigan State’s James Madison College, I spent many mornings immersed in the readings required ahead of my upcoming study abroad in Cambridge, England. I read several books for my class about the British social welfare state, and soon enough I was astonished that I ever could have been so cruel as to think it was acceptable for any human being to go without health insurance. Arriving in England in July, I took my seat in British Foreign Policy since 1900 to discover that my professor was a radical leftist with relentlessly critical views of British and American imperialism.
My friends in Cambridge were an international group of students coming from France, Sweden, Belgium, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Turkey. I was stunned by how much more they had read and seen than me. They spoke easily about historical events, authors, and even languages I’d never even heard of before. I soon accepted how much I had to learn. Alas, my younger self would surely have been devastated to foresee that his escalating interactions with the “socialist” Europeans would one day leave him very corrupted indeed.
A Dutch guy talked to me about documentaries he’d seen showing millions of Americans living in what he called “dire destitution.” “Is it true?” he asked me. “Are there Americans who really live in those conditions?” A German guy asked me how a wealthy country could ever allow so much poverty for so many of its citizens. He argued sometimes about politics with a German girl who supported the center-right Christian Democratic Union, but even she told me that American acceptance of poverty made little sense.
I left England stunned by my ignorance about the world outside America. But this self-castigating conviction of my own inferiority was an energizing force. I knew so little that I could hardly even come up with the correct questions for exploration. And I felt grateful for what felt like a spontaneously granted superpower to at last perceive the vast darkness I inhabited. I needed to learn more about the world - about its history, politics, and literature. I needed to learn about as many countries as possible. And now, having learned so much through courses and conversation during my short stay in Cambridge, I shivered with a manic euphoria at the mere contemplation of how all I had learned was only a fraction of a fraction of what was to come.
Yet in the semester after England, feelings of self-hate and inadequacy consumed me. The devastating end of a long-term relationship was an initial instigator, but that only went hand-in-hand with the broader crisis. A weakening faith in God, and with it the onset of a gloomy certainty that this world was all there was. A terrifying sense of shame for things I had said and believed fed into a conviction that there was something about me so bad I would need to hide it forever. If anyone who claimed to love me discovered that “something,” I would lose them.
But there was one especially bright light that gave me at 19 a compelling reason to stay alive. In comparison, the other lights sometimes seemed like mere hallucinations of a happiness I could never truly have. It was my newfound quest to catch glimmers of what it might be like to keep inside my own head what I imagined so many others to already have: a dense atlas of global geography and an encyclopedia about world history and politics. I knew that I would never reach the level of enlightenment I harbored in my fantasies. But knowing I’d never attain brought the relief of realizing that my journey could not end. Unless, that is, I died during one of my many close encounters with suicide. Don’t kill yourself, I told myself. You need to keep reading.
I survived an emotionally tumultuous fall by reading histories of UN interventions, wars in the Middle East, and the 1848 revolutions in Europe. Steadily filling in details on the maps in my mind yielded a rapturous exhilaration that was an end in itself. So did the literal maps that I sometimes just stared at when I was alone in my room.
But there was a purpose beyond acquiring knowledge purely for pleasure. Noam Chomsky’s were the writings that first brought to my attention everything Washington had done to destroy democracies and lift up gruesome dictatorships in Latin America, Central Asia, and Africa. I felt like a fool for how much faith I had once had in America as a force for good in the world.
Coupling this with my emerging atheism, I became even more certain about my major of International Relations. If there is no God who might one day enforce some kind of objective morality, or who might have some divine plan to guide human history toward a greater level of justice, then the state of the world is the sole responsibility of humans. The globe is awash with genocides, refugee crises, famines, environmental devastation, wars, invasions, oppression. If humans do not put an end to it, and if there is no God who will, then it will simply go on. We, collectively, decide what kind of world we inhabit. In the absence of any morality existing independently of the human mind, we also decide which values will govern that world. Those are the stakes of international diplomacy.
Spring bloomed and with it an academic richness that filled me at 20 with a new joy for life. I took courses on International Political Economy, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Public International Law. My roommate, who studied Political Theory, shared my passion for self-education and for actually doing the readings. He had studied abroad that summer in Romania, Bulgaria, and Turkey. We discussed the falls of the Ottoman and Soviet Empires. We shared an admiration for Mustafa Kemal and his vision of secularism. We lionized the Eastern Europeans who had resisted Soviet brutality. We often took vows of silence lasting several hours, during which we agreed to remain confined together on the futon devoting ourselves to our studies. We would simply read the entire time, not saying a word until three, four, or five hours had passed. We emerged from our dorm on those evenings buzzing with a happy energy, which we eagerly deployed in conversations over dinner about the world and its history.
It was a growing desperation to see more of the world that sent me back to Germany, this time for my entire junior year of college. There, just when I believed I was close to fully rectifying my ignorance through courses in German on Indian foreign policy and the development of the European Union, I met an American whom I will call Maes. I walked into his kitchen where he was cooking while listening to BBC World Service. He talked to me about international political events over the last thirty years in places like Libya, the DRC, Zimbabwe, Syria, Bosnia, and Uzbekistan. I struggled to keep up as he casually deployed the most unfamiliar information about events in Turkish Kurdistan. He shifted easily between conversing about döner kebabs and casting well-researched predictions about climate change.
Shortly after I turned 21, he told me a story about a time he had been walking alone in the woods in Bosnia, only to be picked up as a hitchhiker by a passing car.
“You were alone in Bosnia?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s perfectly safe.”
“I would never travel alone,” I said, terrified.
“Why not?” he demanded. “I thought you wanted to go to Bosnia.”
I soon followed in his footsteps, overcoming my fear by traveling alone in the Balkans. I soon found myself standing in the mountains surrounding Sarajevo, gazing down upon the city just as a Serb sniper might have in the 1990s. The owner of my hostel, a Bosnian named Haris of nearly my same age, had taken me here for a sledding contest beside the overturned 1984 Olympic bobsled tracks. Here was a city that, just eight years after hosting the Olympics, had found itself surrounded by an invading Serb army that kept it under a brutal siege from 1992 to 1996. The bobsled tracks themselves had been transformed into a barrier for Serb artillery. Now, they were tipped over and cracked, with graffiti surrounding holes in the concrete.
Talking with Haris and his family about their hostel, I was struck by the absurd injustice of the contrast between our childhoods. While I was playing in the backyard, he was struggling to survive a siege of his city.
“You think that NATO would have allowed it to continue if it had been Christians being slaughtered by Muslims in the middle of Europe?” It was Bata, one of the owners of the hostel I stayed at in Mostar, who asked me that. He described how many of his Muslim friends had been rounded up and murdered by Catholic Croat and Eastern Orthodox Serb militants. He himself had barely made it out alive, living for years as a refugee in Sweden before returning to start a hostel. There, he gives daylong tours to backpackers that highlight the rich beauty of Bosnia while he also explains the history of what happened there from his very personal perspective.
He talked about the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. The United Nations had declared Srebrenica a safe zone under its protection, encouraging the concentration of refugees there. But the advancing Serb armies faced minimal resistance from the Dutch peacekeepers. NATO fighter jets gave up attacking the incoming Serbs after a few airstrikes due to “poor visibility.”
The Serb militants entered crowds of refugees who were gathered around the headquarters of the UN-sanctioned Dutch military operation meant to protect them. With the Dutch looking on, Serb militants sorted and executed hundreds of Muslim refugees. They pulled women and girls out of the crowd to be raped. According to some survivors, one Serb even killed a baby in front of a Dutch soldier listening to his Walkman. In the end, the Serb soldiers slaughtered some 8,000 refugees in the UN safe-zone. These are the real lives that are implicated in seemingly abstract scholarly debates about international relations theory between Neo-Realists, Liberal Institutionalists, and Constructivists. These are the stakes of international diplomacy.
I returned to Germany having thoroughly explored the Balkans. I felt overwhelmed by the unearned privileges of my American passport, which allowed me to move easily between so many countries without a visa even as people from places like Bosnia could hardly go anywhere. The differences between my own childhood and the terrifying struggles of the people I had met in Bosnia instilled my studies of global politics with a sense of moral responsibility.
Maes returned from his overland journey to Georgia, a country about which I knew little beyond that it used to be in the Soviet Union and had been invaded by Russia mere months ago. He spoke of his journeys in Turkish Kurdistan and Nagorno-Karabakh, another place whose name I was only just now learning. As I wondered aloud at what lay just beyond Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea, he told me of his dreams to visit Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.
Soon I found myself pleasantly confined to my room in Freiburg on many afternoons. I had become addicted to reading books and articles about these seemingly obscure Central Asian countries. No one in my life except Maes had ever talked about them beyond making Borat jokes. But my ignorance only meant that each new data point entering my mind from those books left me energized by fantasies about the mountains, rebellions, explorers, and languages I had yet to encounter. These supposedly remote lands had been the center of the Silk Road trade routes. My mind constantly conjured visions of Central Asia’s ancient markets and cities. Points of trans-Eurasian interactions between countless soldiers, merchants, and missionaries from Europe, Asia, and Africa. Places full of different philosophies, religions, and languages. I imagined the monstrous mountains and treacherous deserts through which those traders somehow passed. At night I gazed hypnotically upon maps of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, envisioning the day I might finally visit.
I emailed a professor back at James Madison College in Michigan. He was an expert on the former Soviet space. I heard legends of him studying something like Kazakh vocabulary on flash cards at football games. I told him that I didn’t know any Russian (the lingua franca of Central Asia) and hadn’t taken any courses on Central Asia, but I wanted to complete an independent study about the region which would feed into my senior thesis. He might have been skeptical, but he graciously took me on as a remote student, serving as my thesis advisor the next year. I was so proud when I submitted my paper detailing the findings of my independent study. I learned all this myself, I thought. I buzzed with happy confidence for future research, and with a certainty that nothing could give me so much satisfaction as this did. I bought maps of Central Asia and the Balkans. I hung them up around my bedroom.
The next spring, back in East Lansing, I took a course on Russian Foreign Policy, co-taught by the dean and my advisor. I stepped into the dean’s office for a consultation. I gazed admiringly at the shelves harboring many volumes of scholarly material on Central Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Caucasus. I had read so many books on these places in my free time, but looking at these reminded me of the many great journeys to come. I felt a primal and existential necessity to read every single one of them. Sitting in a cushioned armchair across from him, the books that surrounded us activated intense emotions of the kind I kept repressed deep inside. Why? For fear of being seen as a freak. I did not dare confess to him aloud how badly I wanted to be like him. I told him simply that I wanted to learn Russian in grad school. “Ah,” he said, smiling. “You’re like me.” Words I dared not fully believe. But he told me he had been a late learner of Russian himself, and this certainly encouraged me.
I soon presented my senior thesis on Central Asia to a panel of professors. And in the aftermath of these studies, I truly felt like I could do anything I set my mind to. I can do it, I thought. I can learn Russian like the dean did. And then maybe one day I can have an office like his in some university, full of hundreds of headache-inducing volumes I had conquered and shelves stacked with decades of Foreign Affairs issues which I had read cover-to-cover. I could advise some hypothetical future student on the pleasures of scholarship, teaching, and traveling.
A few months later I was sitting on the Cascade steps at night in Yerevan, gazing out at the lights in the city. I had at last truly followed in Maes’s footsteps. I had traveled overland from Germany to Armenia, visiting Turkish Kurdistan on the way. And I was about to launch a long career grappling with the problems of international relations. Because on the heels of the presentation of my thesis and my journey to Armenia, I was going to Washington, DC. There, I would be earning a master’s degree at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service.
Not realizing how formal the expectations there were, I showed up during my second week in town to an evening talk at a think tank. I was eager to learn from the experts on the panel. But I arrived to discover everyone wearing suits and ties. Another student mocked me for having donned jeans. I sat through this panel in the ostentatious ballroom of a five-star hotel, but I left before the “networking” over alcohol really began. I knew now that I couldn’t be so reckless as to meet an important person while wearing jeans. And a voice in my head told me that I was nothing more than a silly provincial merely pretending to have any business here.
I tried at my internship with the Atlantic Council to build connections with the titans I admired. Before my journey that summer to Georgia and Armenia, I had read amazing books on the history of the Caucasus and the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict by the journalist Thomas de Waal. He came once for a luncheon, and he seemed deeply startled when I, the lowly intern, approached him to tell him how much I loved his books. His eyes widened as he left me.
During lunch, I went to coffee shops to continue my reading. One day I encountered another intern who asked about my book. I told her it was a fascinating account of U.S. policies in Central Asia and Afghanistan. “Oh nice,” she said. “I would read that, but I already know all that stuff.” It was an exchange that came back to my mind years later when I met another alum of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. “Yes,” I confirmed after being introduced to her. “I went to Georgetown too.” At first she was excited, but then she discovered that mine was a lesser degree - a Master of Arts, not of Science. “Oh,” she snickered, rolling her eyes. “That’s not the same.”
I sat in on meetings with my Atlantic Council department, which was focused on Eurasia. The head of our team was a former U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan and Turkey. The other interns often told me how lucky I was to have a “networking” connection with him. Indeed, he now serves as the ambassador to Afghanistan. In our department meetings, during which we decided what to research that week, I excitedly contributed ideas I had. But he reacted with a grimace. “Others have also said that,” he said. But of course, I wanted to clarify. That’s how I know it. Others wrote about it. I’m just trying to start a conversation about it. But his frown left me questioning why I had ever dared open my mouth to begin with, and so I gave into the internal voices telling me to keep quiet. I sat silently in all future meetings, submissively awaiting his logistical instructions.
I spent long days alone in my cubicle writing summaries about current events in Central Asia for the ambassador’s consumption. An intermediary sometimes came to my cubicle to inform me that the ambassador was enjoying my writings. But she said it with such a cold formality that I thought maybe she just wanted to keep me motivated in my unpaid labor. I looked over her shoulder and saw the ambassador sitting at his computer a mere twenty feet away from us. I was left stunned that I had once seriously believed I had something of value to contribute to DC.
He himself hardly ever talked to me outside our formal meetings. He almost did talk to me once, however, at the Atlantic Council’s holiday party. It was my last day. I stood with a group of interns in a circle around Senator Chuck Hagel. I could see the ambassador lingering nearby as if trying to find a chance to speak with me. But I avoided him, yielding to the voices in my head who informed me I would only say something stupid. This man is only trying to talk to you out of some sense of professional etiquette, the voices told me. You’re worthless. So I spared him this task by never fully looking at him. We never said goodbye.
Once he and the other elites were gone, I got very drunk with the other interns in the conference room. Then I went with them to some bar nearby. Shortly after we parted ways, I was stumbling down the street to my apartment in Arlington, crippled with a suddenly reanimated depression as I arrived alone to my bedroom. After briefly sleeping, I woke up to myself puking in the middle of the night. There is no hope for you here, said the voices, but obviously you can’t drop out.
The ambassador sent me an email the next week. “Thank you for your work,” he said. “Let me know if you ever need anything from me.” “Ignore his email,” the voices said to me. “There’s no point in responding.” And after a brief attempt to fortify myself to defy their commands, I feebly obeyed.
Almost never again, in my remaining year and a half in DC, did I ever dare show my face at a networking event. I was certain I would stand out as uniquely ignorant or unfashionable among all of my companions. Any time I found myself speaking with an academic expert or a well-connected diplomat, I froze up entirely, unable to utter even the most basic thoughts.
By the end of the first winter, I was already writing off my chances of finding any success in the field of diplomacy. I confined myself on most weekends to near total isolation in my bedroom, where I clung to my passion for global affairs by reading fifty books each year on countries and regions about which I felt ignorant. Sometimes I completed these readings at a coffee shop. There after dark, I would contemplate the geopolitics of what I believed to be an inevitable return to Great Power warfare and a subsequent apocalypse. We’re all going to die one day in a nuclear war, I thought to myself. Then I would walk back to my apartment alone.
Academically, Georgetown was a wasteland, with coursework far inferior to that which I had enjoyed at James Madison College. I should have listened more seriously to the advice of a professor at Michigan State. “You’re not going to learn very much in that program,” he had told me.
I visited my former German teacher whenever I was back in my hometown. I came to her classroom and gave presentations to her students about study abroad programs and foreign travel. It was easier to be happy among my fellow wealthy provincials, far away from the intimidating foreign policy elites of the imperial capital. Though perhaps it was partially just vanity, a perverse desire to be some kind of extremely local celebrity. A way to feel like I was still doing something important when my German teacher told me she was glad that people like me were going into diplomacy. But in truth, I still championed a firm belief in the transformative effects of international exposure, and I wanted younger people to also have that experience.
In DC that first spring, I often socialized over coffee with another student who had become a close friend. We would sit for several caffeinated hours just talking about international politics in terms of the books and articles we were reading. But when I was invited to big gatherings with the other students, I usually declined. You don’t belong there, the voices told me. And I obeyed. If I went, the voices came too, and I struggled to work up the courage to behave authentically. You’re a fucking freak, these voices said. Don’t let them find out!
I graduated from Georgetown having passed the comprehensive exam with distinction, and then I joined Teach For America. I claim that I did this because I ultimately didn’t like the jobs on offer in the field of international relations. But this is only partially correct. It’s something I say to make myself feel better, to make myself seem more ethical, perhaps even to obscure my own responsibility for having squandered so many opportunities.
Since I had given in so early to a complete collapse in confidence, I never actually truly tried to find any relevant work that I would like. In fact, although I did three internships during my masters degree, not once in my life have I dared actually apply to a professional job in international relations. I’ve almost never even looked for one. So I joined TFA partly because I did not believe I could otherwise succeed. It provided me with the security of a program and a salary, eliminating any need for risk-taking. That’s one way I found myself teaching high school biology barely two years after I had stood in awe of all those hefty history books on the dean’s shelves.
Of course, I had arrived in DC animated by the stakes of international diplomacy that I had encountered in Bosnia. But in my cubicle internships at the Atlantic Council, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, the stakes on the ground for actual people felt more distant than ever. Or perhaps these were too proximate, as when I stood across from General Petraeus in Berlin. I was obviously not brave enough to ask him why he was drone-striking so many civilians in Afghanistan. And when I expressed my distress at the fact that the U.S. Ambassador Phil Murphy was an investment banker who spoke no German and appeared to have gotten his job by donating 100,000 dollars to President Obama’s inauguration committee, a more enlightened intern shook her head at me with annoyance. “Money is what makes the world go around, Andrew,” she said. Would that be my life if I became a U.S. diplomat? A career spent defending drone strikes and corruption? I soon came to see the classroom as a place where I could actually make an on-the-ground difference in the world.
I met my German teacher in Berlin. She took her students on a tour of the embassy, where I watched her verbally challenge Ambassador Murphy on the U.S. position regarding the Palestinians. He gave some robotic and rehearsed response. I got a beer with my teacher afterward. “You’ve become a dear friend,” she told me. It meant so much to me after how patient she had been with me in high school. I wasn’t going to launch a career that involved defending repulsive policies against the Palestinians.
I had one final networking event before I could leave DC. The reception after graduation for students in my program. I found myself speaking to a professor who asked me what I was doing next. When I told him I was doing TFA, he politely nodded and then almost immediately walked away from me to talk to someone else. Perhaps my plans had rendered me worthless to his purposes. I assume that even he needed to network, or at least he craved clients to patronize.
Five years later, in 2017, I was with a friend in Kyrgyzstan. The country I’d once fantasized so fervently of visiting. But it had been a couple years since I had regularly read nonfiction books about the world beyond America, and I had never learned Russian. My days on the job were long and exhausting, draining away my motivations to pursue my studies. Working as a school administrator, my international relations background was reduced to an obscure piece of trivia about a version of me that might have been. And the Central Asia episode was even more obscure.
As we walked through either Bishkek or Osh, my friend asked me something about how excited I must feel to be there after having devoted myself to studying the region in books and articles. I inwardly cringed with shame at how drastically I’d fallen short of the future I envisioned in the dean’s suite long ago. I don’t remember how I actually answered my friend’s question. Maybe I lied or told a half truth, a defense mechanism to avoid such a debilitating contemplation. With the accumulated interest, I carried over 100,000 dollars in student loans just from Georgetown alone.
It’s okay, I half heartedly convince myself, for these academic passions to just be a hobby which I work into the edges of my life. It’s the trouble with late capitalism, after all, that it demands so much of my existential fulfillment be related to my job. I should see jobs as they really are: tools for something else rather than sources of satisfaction in and of themselves. But perhaps this is all just a way for me to avoid the reality that I simply refused to risk the disappointment of failing to realize the dreams I once had in the dean’s suite at Michigan State. Of course, there is a freedom in now recognizing the lies I told myself for what they are. It shows that nothing was inevitable, nor done to me by some external force. So much of the past was a product of the choices I made, and so much of the future will be too.
Theoretically, no job has ever been required to bring back that past academic happiness. I felt it for the first time in almost a decade in mid 2017, when that conversation in Kyrgyzstan helped inspire me to truly go all-in with my studies of the Spanish language. And again in mid 2020, when I listened to an audio course about ancient Persia, flooding my mind with imaginings of an ancient past. It returned this fall, when I read several textbooks on Roman history. And it’s here again this week, flowing in overwhelming waves as I read Empires of Ancient Eurasia by Craig Benjamin. Is it even international relations specifically that I love? Or did that subject simply instill in me a lifelong need to learn about the world?
There were professors who encouraged me to pursue a PhD straight out of undergrad. It almost seems tragically obvious in retrospect. Twelve years later, I prematurely fear that I have grown too old to pursue the academic credentials necessary for me to pass my days joyfully immersed in my studies. It is too late for you now, say the legions of sinister voices in my head. But I am still sharply relieved to have rekindled the embers from that once extinguished happiness. The cruel voices in my mind continue to constantly discourage me, but I steel myself against them with the reminder that I am more prepared now for any endeavor than I was at 22.