Today I learned that my best work is driven by intense masochism. This is not the same as saying “all grad students in the humanities are masochists because they work themselves to pieces with little guarantee of a future in their field,” or whatever. This means: unless the subject I’m studying causes me emotional pain, I don’t think it’s worth doing, and I don’t fully commit myself to it. Very specifically: I study terrorism and trauma and death, and it fucks me up, and if I didn’t and it didn’t, I wouldn’t respect my work.
This has been the case since at least 2002. I know I’m not terribly introspective, but to not recognize the prime motivator of one’s work takes a terrible kind of blindness.
The only way to make this post more self-indulgently puke-a-rific would be to add some Radiohead. So here you go:
