Having a Good Cry

I am trying to decide between two beginnings for this blog entry.  The choices are:

I cried during my Master's Capstone Defense today.  There, I said it.
-or-
Hello.  My name is Liz, and I cannot handle positive responses to my work in a professional manner.

Everything was going fine.  I talked about the course the project has taken over the past year, which parts of the current draft I am most pleased with, and which elements still feel inadequate.  I talked about how I see this Cather project as the perfect point of entry for the larger project I imagine as my dissertation.  Everyone seemed pleased.

Then my reader wanted to explain his criticism of the paper, but fearing I would take his criticism too hard, he launched into an explanation about how proud he is of the work I've done before eventually getting to the criticism.

This was the problem.  I believe I could have reacted to an eviscerating line of criticism with composure, but I couldn't manage this "you should be proud of yourself" montage.  I am proud of myself.  I just don't quite yet know how to handle other people being impressed with my accomplishments and vocalizing that feeling so definitively.  I started tearing up during the "let's celebrate Liz's hard work" narrative, I started wiping tears during the explanation of what's missing from my argument, and I could not keep it together when it was my own turn to respond, either.

Afterward, I felt like I had to explain.  I wanted them to know that I wasn't crying because I can't handle criticism.  My (female) director told me she thinks it is a gendered problem, and that for a multitude of reasons, women in academia often find it much more difficult to handle praise than criticism.  Then she told me to "stop crying or people will think we didn't like your project."  The first words out of my (male) reader's mouth were: "I was too nice to you at the beginning, wasn't I?  I realized that after the fact."  So I think they both understand.  I'm mostly embarrassed because there has to be a third person in the defense, and since my project's director is also the current director of graduate studies, she asked the professor who will replace her in that capacity next year to attend.  So now I feel like the woman who will be my new graduate studies director is going to forever think of me as "the cryer."

I've been thinking about this all afternoon, despite my best attempts to put it out of my mind.  I can't let it go.  Just yesterday in class we were discussing the feminist work of Adrienne Rich, and I was appreciative that we've come so far in the past 30 years that we can actually offer criticisms about the limited scope of some of her essays.  But maybe we haven't come quite as far as I thought.

The other day, I watched my recording of the cast of Glee on Oprah.  While the show's creator, Ryan Murphy, explained why he had described Lea Michele's voice as a "once in a generation voice," the camera panned to Ms. Michele, whose gaze was firmly directed straight down at her Louboutins.  Before starring in Glee, she appeared on Broadway in Les Miserables, Fiddler on the Roof, Ragtime, and originated her role in Spring Awakening.  Sure, she's only 23, by why the inability to appreciate recognition for her vocal prowess?

And just yesterday, I attended a lecture given by my project's director.  She was visibly uncomfortable when the (male) professor who introduced her ran through some of the highlights of her lengthy list of professional accomplishments.  She began by thanking us for coming and then said she couldn't help but feel like we graduate students should be reading or writing instead.  And she apologized that her talk was going to take 45 minutes, even though I was expecting it to run 60 and would have gladly listened to the additional 15.  What gives?

I guess it should make me feel better that this anxiety puts me in the company of other women whose accomplishments I respect and admire.  But I don't like that we feel so uncomfortable with this kind of recognition.  And I'm the only one who cried.  Perhaps I should have adopted the stare-straight-at-my-shoes approach.  Or, at the very least, I should have brought some tissues.

Tomorrow, when my embarrassment about being reduced to tears is less fresh, I hope I will feel relieved about reaching the end of such an exhausting project.  Except that it's never really the end.  I already know what revisions I'll be making on the paper over the summer so I can try to get it published in a major peer-edited journal (which my reader assures me is a reasonable expectation).  I guess the fact that I look forward to tackling that revision, after I've had some time to decompress, is a sign that I've chosen the right career path.

(I read Robyn Warhol's Having a Good Cry for my narrative theory class last spring.  I remember recognizing it at Warhol's attempt to reclaim effeminate reactions to pop-culture texts as legitimate and meaningful.  I can't help feeling like I now need to read it again.)