The Permission Trap

What Academia Couldn’t Teach Me About Worth

Last week, I posted an essay called The Grand and Powerful Idea Inside of Me. In it, I recounted a time in undergrad when my boyfriend sabotaged my attempt to gain a fellowship.

Reflecting on this twenty-six years later, I concluded that there will always be people who don’t believe in you—gatekeepers who tell you that you do not belong. At the time, I didn’t stand up for myself. Ironically, I am now doing the very same kind of work I proposed all those years ago.

Because of this, I teach my students that it’s their ideas that matter, and that their job is to keep shouting from the mountaintop that they have something to say—something that needs to be heard. I am still trying, twenty-six years later, to take my own advice.

I thought that was the end of it. I thought I had plumbed the depths of this memory. But afterward, I realized I had more to say about what it taught me. It turns out, a lot more to say.

I have an obsessive-compulsive personality. Am I officially diagnosed? Well, sort of. It depends on your interpretation of the myriad mental health-seeking horrors I endured in my twenties, particularly my hospitalization in a mental health facility for depression when I was twenty-four. But that’s the subject of another essay. For now, let’s just go with it.

If I get a thought stuck in my head, I will ruminate on it for days, weeks, months, or even years. Obsessively turning it over and over until it resolves itself, I either find a solution, or I get bored and distracted by a new issue. It is exhausting.

During COVID, I went back to Mississippi to help my mother move up to Virginia to live with us. We sold her home in Mississippi. I toured the empty house before we got in the car. That dark, wood-paneled home sitting on a hill surrounded by woods—the house where I was so sad in high school. The house I visited on breaks in college and lived in during the year after my breakdown.

We drove past my undergrad, the restaurants I visited with friends, the bookstore where I worked. I gasped, and one memory took root in the part of my brain that craves obsession. "This one," my brain said. "This is the one you need to figure out." And from that moment on, I was of two minds:

There was the one that everyone knows. The one that ferries my daughter from activity to activity, who teaches (sometimes very annoying) ladies Pilates, who says "gosh darn it" in public and curses like the nastiest sailor in private to my poor husband, ears burning. The one who loves to talk about spy shows and nineteenth-century whaling practices.

And then there was my secret brain, the one that lies nestled in the corner. Next to the place I store the menagerie of my past: the smell of chalk and coffee in my elementary school hallway during the quiet time before all the other students entered the building, the slick, smooth feel of the dominoes I played with my Uncle Lamar, the taste on my tongue of Certs touched with the scent of her Chanel No. 5, poached from my grandmother’s purse, the clink of my mother’s perfect nails drumming a table, the look in my father’s eyes as he told five-year-old me, speeding in his truck, me by his side, that he was going to kill my mother.

My second mind told me I must figure this out. What did I do wrong? What could I have done differently? Is there an alternate universe where I am successful because they gave me the fellowship? Where I stood up for myself and fought for my idea?

My public mind smiled the whole time—demonstrating a beautiful teaser pose in Pilates for my students, advocating for my daughter, watching good movies, and discussing politics with my husband. But my secret mind was whirling.

I began to tell people about this experience. What did they think? My husband was horrified. "He should have lost his fellowship. That administrator was unprofessional." But he didn’t stop there. No, he was clear: I had allowed this to happen. I had accepted that behavior. I lost the chance at the fellowship. At the end of the day, I had no one to ultimately blame but myself.

I did—and continued to—ask permission to be smart, to pursue the things I want to pursue, will pursue. To need the stamp of approval, the gold star on the board.

To prove my point, I’ll give you an example: my magnificent graduate advisor’s “good job” green stamp. I learned about this prized spot of ink before graduate school classes even started.

“Oh, it’s very difficult to achieve,” the older graduate students said.

“Nobody gets one for all their papers,” a kind student assured me, making sure we understood it would be okay. We were all failures together.

But I thought, What’s wrong with these guys? They say, ‘nobody gets,’ not ‘nobody has, yet.’ They were just leaving this treasure, this precious pearl, gleaming on the table.

And I did it. Not a single paper without a green stamp. I used to touch that little “good job” compulsively, willing my fingers to detect the microscopic rise of ink.

So, yes, my husband was—and is—right. As much as I hate-hate-hate to say it: Yes, I could have stood up for myself. Yes, I could have complained.

I realized recently that after the loss, I simply redirected my energies somewhere else. I gave up on a project I believed in because I did not receive external validation. I was asking permission to have my grand and powerful idea. I could have continued to work on it—even if I did it on the side, outside of school. Instead, I used that time to cry, to ask a new set of people with a new project if I had permission to be smart—to be who I am. That’s on me.

This led me to think about the problem with gatekeepers. Academia is filled with them. Good gatekeepers uphold standards of decency and collegiality, protect freedom of thought and speech, ensure we follow ethical standards in our work, and safeguard the scientific method.

But bad gatekeepers allow their own biases, insecurities, and prejudices to block and damage others they deem different—or, in this case, “not one of us,” whatever that means.

Good gatekeepers preserve excellence; bad gatekeepers preserve power. And every time good gatekeepers silently comply, they allow those mountains to grow, molehill by molehill.

Looking back, I realize the biggest mistake I made wasn’t losing the fellowship—it was waiting for someone else to give me permission to chase my idea.

The project was—and is—mine alone. It should travel within my bones wherever I go, waiting until I find the right community, one that deserves to have it.