Just a short thought today because I’m running crazy trying to get a bunch of events at work rolling, but I’ve been thinking about something for a few days and wanted to share it.
There’s a “hidden track” (like those exist) on the new Run the Jewels album entitled “Kill Your Master.” The second I heard it, I thought about the old adage which has always harmed me deeply, the one that says we can’t be our own people until our parents have died.
My father is no longer with me. I DID become a different person (in some ways literally) when he left my world. But I cannot imagine a time without my mother’s support.
With the lack of a father in my life, I was always looking for father figures. And they all failed me. Over and over I’d take on male mentors only to have them ultimately disappoint me or misunderstand me. This ultimately led to a moment of extreme crisis during the end of my education where my mother was in too much pain to be my rock and all the people I chose to replace that role in my life refused to take up the slack.
Then I realized something– picking teachers and bosses and such to be my father-figure wasn’t accurate. That in that relationship, they didn’t view me as a son, obviously. I’m not going to claim education is the slave trade because that’d be a hideous metaphor that I would smack myself for, but if we had to pick between parent and master, the people I was choosing were more like masters (more in the master to pet than master to slave sense, but they considered themselves to be superior to me and capable of telling me what to do).
The day I quit relying on people to fill that role and started looking at older professors as colleagues and trying to build supportive friendships without expecting someone to mentor me, I became a different scholar.
So tl;dr, we need a loving support net, but as soon as you can, kill your master and start again. Those voice of judgment and expectation are stopping you from being you.
And could you be anything else, really? Why fight a losing war when there are so many things you should be fighting right now?