Two Graduations!

I know without any doubt that I have contributed to new knowledge. I have discovered things not known before I faced the difficulty of the past and fought, with understanding and healing, to bring it into the present. This is why we study. Why we research. Why we seek answers.

Summer School also gifted me with a tribe. I found my people. Goodness, we are an odd bunch! But that is something I love about my tribe—I fit in just fine.

I have gone on to become friends, good friends, with people from that tribe. We have shared something others haven’t. We have shared the brutal edge of practice-led research. No one tells you when you begin with this research methodology that you will be required to lay open your heart and analyse what you find. Then you must decide what is both helpful and bearable, for your exegesis draws from this place.

So we share that painful working out, deciding what is for the greater good, and what will remain for us alone. It all depends on your personal tolerance levels. If vulnerability is thought of as on a spectrum, then you will find me at the extreme. I am simultaneously able to feel and notice. Then when some time has passed, I can consider what it is that was felt and noticed. That is the place I write from.

Even now.

Right from my arrival, I was moved by the honour shown to me. The kind people who dressed me—pins in just the right places, reassuring me I was neat and tidy and ready to go—also spent time asking me about my research and congratulating me on this achievement. They meant it, too; it wasn’t just for show. They were genuinely pleased for me.

Then they handed me to the next person and they to the next person until we were briefed sitting in our seats on stage and then taken to what must be one of the most beautiful rooms in the university to wait with the academics.

There were twenty-four PhDs graduating. This is not normal practice. That’s because it wasn’t a normal graduation. All of us had, technically, graduated in June but due to Covid had had no choice; we graduated in absentia. The box for in-person graduations was greyed out. I couldn’t tick it no matter how I tried.

I was gutted.

Graduating had felt weirdly important. To receive an email with a link to my testamur seemed so entirely underwhelming and disappointing. I felt compelled to do something so I made the tentative suggestion to my year 12 English class that perhaps, if it was okay with them, they could “graduate” me in our school theatre, seeing as I was technically going to be officially a doctor on a day we were scheduled for English.

They were keen.

I bought robes and flowers and catered a “class party” type of afternoon tea. They sorted out the theatre and the speeches.

One student gave an address, another acted as the Chancellor presenting me with a testamur, and another played one of my favourite pieces of music, Clair de Lune. I gave a response and talked about the future and how with hard work more than can be imagined is possible. Then we ate chocolate and crisps and enjoyed soft drinks until the bell went at the end of the day and they had to catch the buses and head home.

That first graduation, shared with students, did the trick. I felt I had shared the achievement and hoped that maybe, just maybe, they might feel a little inspired to dream and work hard and do a thing they never imagined they could do.

At nineteen and in my first year of uni at Deakin’s Waurnponds campus— when it was still a concrete monument, a hope for the future, surrounded by paddocks filled with sheep—I was in awe of the PhD students. They were doing a thing. Something important. Something I knew I could never do.

I only just scraped into uni thanks to an economic disadvantage scheme I was eligible for. When my uni offer arrived, I didn’t even know where Geelong was. Life was hard. My mother was fully depressed, my father long gone. I didn’t know what to do so I deferred and spent a year lying on my bed reading.

Then I went to uni.

Mum never came down to Geelong. It was too far from our home in Gippsland. She never asked how my studies were going or how I was managing public transport traveling back to look after her every weekend. I mooched off friends before finding a kind older lady who let me live with her, charging me just $10 a night—it was the nineties, after all.

She made me cucumber sandwiches—and cut the crusts off!—and talked about the things I was studying. At seventy-two, she had not long finished the same Bachelor’s degree I was starting. She never commented on the way I watched Degrassi High when I got home from uni or asked why my mother never came to check I was safe.

At yesterday’s graduation, as musicians played U2’s Beautiful Day, my emotions rose up. Tears filled my eyes and a lump rose in my throat. I felt at risk of a very public “ugly cry” moment. It landed:

I did a thing.

I took all of that suffering and made it into something. I pushed back. I refused to become part of a cycle. I did what I could to make things better.

That first year of uni was pretty ordinary. The only thing I managed to get good at was playing pool—it turns out I have an eye for using a stick to hit one ball into another to get it to go into a pocket.

At the end of first year, someone, I don’t recall who, but someone at the university mentioned to me that I could change my major from psychology to literature and do first and second year literature at the same time.

I never looked back.

Yesterday, I did a thing!

As we were leaving, a Bachelor’s graduate looked at me the way I looked at PhD students all those years ago.

He congratulated me. And as I congratulated him, I smiled and nodded:

This will be you one day. If you want it to be.