An Autobiographical Moment
February 20th, 2010I was recently asked for the most private thing I was willing to admit on a web site. I thought about it for a moment, and the exact answer came to me:
I have a M.Sc. in Computer Engineering. Despite my barely above-average grades in undergrad (where I worked like a cat) and uncomfortable tendency to screw up one graduate course per term, my supervisor offered to take me on for a doctorate based on the strength of my thesis. To this day, I wish I’d published more stuff that he could put his name on, because he was the best supervisor I could imagine having, with a heart to match his considerable brain. On the other hand, I don’t regret turning down the offer for an instant.
I can’t imagine how unhappy I’d be as an engineering academic, a mere 400-metre walk from hundreds of lovely young people doing exactly what I knew even then that I should have done in the first place. And so that degree represents seven years of running from my dreams and beating myself up for it.
It’s really astonishing in retrospect. How did I not see? How did I not act?
My notes were 75% doodles, often lacking critical information in favour of shapes, squiggles and cartoons. I avidly collected obscure old computers, which I admired for their astonishing craftmanship and the ingenious ways they bent the limitations of their technology. I collected strange music, which I admired for their skill with their instruments and their subversion of my expectations. I also listened to a lot of angry and pretentiously sad music, where admiring the skill of its execution was honestly a cover for deeply identifying with its desperate cries for attention, admiration, acceptance, love… whatever.
At the end of undergrad, I had two close friends who were engineers. One sang in choirs and shared my admiration for the brilliant artistry of the deeply arcane guts of our computers and the beauty of well-composed music, though he has always been more willing to accept the beautifully trite as much as the beautifully unexpected, and he’s still one of my dearest friends; the other shared my more obscure and violent tastes in music as a balm for pain he clearly had no idea how to deal with, and renounced me after a crush on my sister went sour. I found one more close friend in grad school, a gifted and pudgy Chinese man who shared my tendency to understand the phenomena of our field intuitively before even looking at the math—a helpful tendency in research, where the math often doesn’t exist yet. I lost track of him in the following years. I hope he’s doing well.
The rest of my friends were misfits, humanities or arts students, musicians, and seekers. I pursued friendships with people in cultural and artistic fields, more often than not pushing them away with an unending barrage of questions and a childish admiration paired with an arrogant assumption that I was one of their peers. I took every opportunity to hang around the opposite end of campus, because arts and humanities clearly had more interesting women, although I had no idea how to relate to them, feeling that they were part of a braver, more sophisticated species than I.
It’s a wonder to me that I could so deeply understand where I wanted to be and still keep myself so very far from it. What forceful self-denial! What savage self-flagellation! Or more accurately, what fear!
And if I’d found any believable solace, I might have kept resisting until the flow of life wore me down to a nub. Even now I regret the loss of parts of my being that surely must have died, and parts of me that might now never grow. Some day, I hope I learn to forgive myself for it.


