All of this was worth it

“All of this was worth it just for the chance to see Cate in high heels,” said Barnett when he introduced me at the start of my Final Oral Review. I looked more elegant than I think people usually do for traditional dissertation defenses, but nothing about the way my school does things is conventional. Our FORs are framed as “celebrations” of our work, and I dressed accordingly – but our committee is still arrayed at the front, and the presentation of the work is formal, followed by questions that put you through your paces.

As I flicked onto the first slide, my throat tightened and I had a swell of emotion. I acknowledged the privilege that I had since this was Barnett’s last FOR as chair, and we met eyes that briefly welled up. I surveyed the people in the room and felt a kind of surprise to realize that there was no one in the room I didn’t know and care about – from the unlikely crew of my ex and my best friend of 25 years and my mother and sister whot had traveled from Toronto and Windsor and Ottawa, to Pamela and Carol from Chicago, Nick, and the broader Fielding community. People who’d been beside me in various stages of my trek through this degree, trek through multiple identities and rewritings of self. A landscape of self-revelation, despair, hope, discovery, tears and falling-on-the-ground laughter.

The first statement I made was about the roots of my dissertation, locating it back to the first summer session I’d been at when I met Barnett and he pronounced “I no longer spend time with people who construct me in ways I don’t want to be constructed.” In repeating that provocation, I shorthanded myself into my discovery of CMM, enwrapping in social construction theory, spreading out into explorations of identity, of the social construction of emotion, of the linguistic turn in epistemology of self. And alongside the theory, was completely tangled into the reflexivity of self-construction. All held in an instant, the questions, the shapings of who I can be, the hope for living into the story of who I want to be and the meaning of my work.

My second slide was a hard fought attempt to capture the highlights of my work in four points, the first two the location in the broader theoretical conversation, and the second two my contributions. 1) When we talk and interact with each other, we are shaping who we are and who the other person is, as well as what we can do together. Therefore HOW we talk and interact is extremely important. 2) By talking about what we do in interaction as potentially “generative,” we pay attention to the possibilities we are making together. 3) When we allow our differences to be a constructive part of our interaction, we enhance who we are and what we can do. I call this “relational generativity.” 4) We call our ideas of who we are “identity stories.” When we use our identity stories and other resources in the most generative way in our conversations, we are acting in what I call a “relationally eloquent” way.

As I presented that slide, I got more confident, and slid my way through my explication of the theoretical roots – relational self, generativity, social construction communications – my definitions of relational generativity and relational eloquence, and illustrations of identity practices, relationally eloquent moves and types of generative consequentiality. I had four of my long-suffering friends enact two conversations from my study as a starting point, and I focused on my “index couple” as the main illustrations. I played some soundfiles from their conversations, and showed how each conversation set up a possibility for the next one.

I was grounded and sturdy as I spoke, but oh-so-conscious of not wanting to talk endlessly, of wanting to make this more of a dialogue. I’d felt a lot of pressure earlier in the week to KEEP IT SHORT, and this had been daunting even as it made sense. Distilling all of this had felt impossible, and I felt like I was missing so much… but I’d found a groove that captured enough of it. I kept checking in with Linda to see how my time was, and I kept catching the eyes of people. My committee, my family, Pamela and Carol and Sara and Jane and Jeff and Linda and Kathy… everyone so very present, so with me.

I finally wound up, saying clearly that I’d missed much and would be happy to deal with anything in questions. I concluded with a comment about what I think of as the paradox of my work – that I spend all of this time looking for observable structures of something that’s both structure and mystery, learnable and chemical. Then I stopped.

The photos from the afternoon show me trying to sit down as Barnett stood up, not having absorbed the presence of mind to remember that now I stood up in front of everyone and responded to questions. I think there was applause, and I remember savoring it a bit, but mostly feeling like I was now more vulnerable than ever. Heart rate accelerating.

Barnett offered the first question I think, to Lita, who commented about my own “relational eloquence” in dealing with the committee. I made a self-deprecating comment about that, and people laughed, and the tone changed from formal to me in conversation with my group. She asked about my methodology – the importance of the interviews – and about where I now saw the originating conversation of relational responsibility. I responded… and then I think Frank started talking.

Frank was oddly subdued, sort of mumbling into his beard – Keith asked him to speak up – and I can’t remember everything he asked, except that he made some shockingly superlative comments about my capacity for complexity, and about not wanting me to graduate and leave, and that this might be the first FOR he cried in. He asked me an excellent question about the origins of identity. I don’t know if I answered it that well, saying something about finding passions that defined us by accidentally running into other people who had those passions – like mountaineering. He also asked about what was a resource that wasn’t an identity story, a provocative tangle that I have answers for but still don’t feel satisfied with.

I know Barnett and Linda and Anne asked questions or made comments – I think Anne asked me what surprised me the most – and her question dovetailed with Nick’s, when he asked me about the relationship between my work and literature. I talked about what I felt as the passion for my participants, for what I’d come to see as the incredible courage and vulnerability that it takes to live in intimacy, to create ourselves and each other every day, to try to do that well. I talked about how I’d once thought that poetry and literature were the real artistry of that, but that now I saw that as polished and mannered, and that it’s the fumblings and the half-starts and hopes of real people in real talk that stirs me, that makes me feel humbled and powerful.

That conversation interpolated again a question that Carol asked me – maybe the first one outside my committee. I think she asked what doing this work had done to me personally, how my own sense of self had changed. It was in this moment that I found myself in the most intimate space of my life, here in this room full of people. I faltered and welled up, caught, and said “doing all of this work about generative possibilities, about alternatives that are better choices – this makes you tremendously aware of every time you could have done something better.” I paused, tearing up, and most of the people in the room teared up together.

When I’ve been in therapy, on and off, I’ve had a continual theme of wanting to be able, in a relationship, to be both strong and vulnerable. In this FOR, I was both of those things – I found the liminal space between work and personal where both fuse, where the meaning of my work is tangled around the meaning of my life and who I want to be. I want to be the person wearing the black comrags dress that outlines me elegantly, who has the clear voice and confidence in the theoretical work she’s presenting, who is simultaneously conscious of the vulnerability of the people who shared her stories and able to weld those stories into patterns and theory that can have meaning outside that context. This is the purpose of my work, and I found it in that moment. And I found the powerful vulnerability of being able to let myself honestly, openly admit the faltering self I also am, the near-despair of recognizing the power of making non-generative choices, the profound responsibility of carrying that recognition, the vulnerable humanness of it. Feeling seen most profoundly for the first time in my life, through the fused prism of self and work and self-work.