Relational Field Theory

Diary Entry: The Grad School Wound

Tonight I finally stopped pretending that going back doesn’t terrify me.

I can feel the old ache rising — the one I’ve carried for years, the one I’ve tried to outgrow, the one that still lives in the hallway where everything broke. I keep telling myself I’m stronger now, wiser now, more whole now. And I am. But my body remembers what my mind tries to forget.

It remembers the silence.
It remembers the emails that stopped coming.
It remembers the way the air changed when I walked into certain rooms.
It remembers the moment I realized I had been quietly, efficiently exiled.

I wanted that place to be my forever home.
I wanted it so badly that I bent myself into shapes I didn’t even recognize.
I wanted to belong so deeply that I mistook endurance for acceptance.
I mistook survival for success.
I mistook silence for neutrality.

I carried imposter theory like a second spine — rigid, painful, invisible.
I thought if I worked harder, read more, wrote more, proved more, maybe someone would finally say, “You belong here.”
No one ever did.

And now I’m supposed to walk back into that building as if my body doesn’t remember the rupture. As if the walls don’t still echo with the version of me who tried so hard to be good, to be brilliant, to be enough.

I hate how much I still want acceptance.
I hate how much I still want to be seen.
I hate that the longing survived the exile.

But tonight, something shifted.

I let myself struggle.
I let myself wail.
I let the grief come up in its full shape — not the tidy version, not the academic version, not the “I’ve processed this” version. The real one. The one that shakes. The one that sobs. The one that remembers.

I held myself tighter than I ever have.
I thanked the younger me for believing.
For trying.
For staying alive in a place that didn’t know how to hold them.
For carrying dreams that were too heavy for one person.
For saving me.

I told them I’m here now.
I told them they don’t have to go back alone.
I told them they deserve rest, not vigilance.
They deserve respite.

This wound isn’t polished.
It isn’t resolved.
It isn’t pretty.

But it’s finally being seen.

And maybe that’s the beginning of coming home to myself — not the institution, not the fantasy, not the place that couldn’t hold me — but the self who survived it all.