Yes, I’m working on a PhD. But that fact is routinely mistaken for the point.
The degree is not the axis around which my thinking turns. It’s a container. A temporary structure. Useful, sometimes generative, occasionally constraining. What it is not is an origin story, nor a corrective arc meant to sand down who I already am.
One of the tensions I keep encountering in academic spaces is the tendency to read clarity as rigidity. When a student speaks with confidence about what they are doing, why they are doing it, and where they are not willing to go, that clarity is often interpreted as resistance. As if seriousness of intent must signal a closed mind. As if conviction is incompatible with learning.
I don’t experience it that way.
I’m in my sixties. I’ve lived abroad for years at a time. I’ve made art for over three decades, long enough to watch entire theoretical fashions rise, harden, and quietly disappear. I’ve failed publicly. I’ve revised privately. I’ve changed in ways that mattered and refused change when it felt performative or hollow. That history doesn’t make me inflexible; it makes me selective.
There’s a recurring assumption in academia that improvement requires visible transformation. That a “good” student emerges looking markedly different than when they arrived. New language. New posture. New allegiances. Sometimes even a kind of aesthetic conversion. Growth becomes legible only when it announces itself as rupture.
But not all development works that way.
Some learning deepens rather than redirects. Some refinement sharpens what is already there instead of replacing it. For practitioners who come in with a long arc behind them, progress often looks less like reinvention and more like compression. Fewer detours. Cleaner lines. A stronger refusal of what doesn’t belong.
That kind of maturation can read as stubbornness if one expects the student to be plastic.
I actually like my program. I respect the faculty. I value the conversations. I’m not at war with academia. But I am uninterested in being improved in ways that dilute the very work I came to do. I’m here to articulate, not to audition. To clarify, not to contort myself into novelty for novelty’s sake.
If there is change happening, and there is, it’s happening subterraneously. It’s happening in how precisely I can name what matters, how quickly I can discard what doesn’t, and how calmly I can hold my ground when someone suggests that seriousness requires surrender.
I’m pursuing this path in my way. Not despite academia, but not because of its appetite for visible transformation either. I’m not here to become someone else. I’m here to say, with more precision than before, who I already am and why that stance matters.
That distinction feels worth defending.