He caught me unawares. But that’s his job, I guess.
For the past few months, I’ve been seeing a therapist to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder — two conditions with irritatingly similar names but markedly different challenges. My therapist specializes in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, a method that might work well for my set of neuroses.1My hope is that, eventually, if I target some bad memories in my life and wiggle my eyes around enough, I can rewire my brain’s pathways and have a better relationship with others and, ideally, myself.
Some weeks ago, during a phone session, I told him about a shift in my thinking. I just got a promotion at work — the first time I felt financially stable since leaving academia five years ago. Still, I felt fairly dismissive of it. I couldn’t allow myself to say I had earned the new role so much as received it, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Over the next few days, I had what I believed was an epiphany: I spent so much of my life trying to impress everybody, professionally and personally, my ambition like a greyhound pursuing the mechanical hare, that I never allowed myself to accept any achievement as real. “Instead,” I mused over the phone on my tenth lap around the block, “why don’t I just focus on impressing myself?”
The pregnant pause was audible. “Yeah, okay, but why, exactly, do you need to impress yourself? What does that even mean?”
The jig was up. I could no longer con myself into enlightenment. I had been papering over my academic past in some dogged attempt to remain unbothered while leaving it all behind, feigning an attitude somewhere between “I just want to tell you, some people have war in their countries” and “Why would I have even wanted that life anyway?” My therapist, from but not of the world of higher ed, asked me why I stopped pursuing academic jobs. At a relatively quick pace (I only do one session a week), I sketched the key details: there have long been comically few tenure-track academic jobs for historians relative to the number of PhDs awarded per year; tenure-track positions often go to people from select prestigious institutions; applicants with more than a year’s distance from their PhD are usually treated as spoiled goods; one year became two became five; I’m no longer settling for sub-minimum-wage adjuncting gigs without insurance; I had bills to pay; I have bills to pay.
“So would you ever go back into that world,” he asked with five minutes left on our clock.
Sweat pooled in the small of my back, three miles into my ninety-degree walk. “No, I think — No. That dream is dead.”
What I felt as death — what my therapist would call unprocessed trauma — was the embodiment of what I had imagined as failure. I had a dream (I want to teach and write!), I gave it a shape and a name (I want to be a historian and work at a college!), I dressed it up and fed it well (Here’s a doctorate and some grants and conferences and public-facing work!) — I gave it a name and it died. I gave you a name and you died. I didn’t learn either of my remaining grandparents died until a couple years after the fact, but this felt more real. Still: there was no body. There was nothing to bury, no gravestone to visit, no one to light candles for. I could pray for Foxy and Ken’s souls in hell but there is no remembrance ritual for the long pursuit, the failed relationship with myself.
What’s harder to accept — because it’s more work to undo — is that there really was no death. I’m still here and so is my brain, give or take a few cells, as well as most of what I crammed inside it during my twenties. But in order for me to move on, I had to imagine some part of me had genuinely died. I didn’t want a reputation that preceded me. I didn’t want a shadow that hugged me close in the midday heat. I wanted no lineage, no pedigree, no meemaw. Still, here is my body.
The bone-deep irony is that I already knew I wasn’t alone in these feelings: a decade of research taught me better. While this long-simmered stew of neuroses feels awfully personal, the recipe has been around awhile, and it has to do with how our society defines worth. Social worth is often calculated through axes of inequality: racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, xenophobia, among many others. Intentional or otherwise, this inequality is reinforced and replicated through institutions — the law, higher ed, the media, stuff like that. But institutions alone can’t determine social worth or compel social order; they’ve long employed other mechanisms for measurement, regulation, and sorting.2 These mechanisms especially thrive when they exist as their own industry, doing the work their client institutions cannot — often at a huge profit.
Enter standardized testing. Standardized testing is a defining feature of contemporary American society. It not only governs how people are channeled through their schooling, but also amplifies existing social disparities; it’s our shared track rabbit. But the reason standardized testing endures — even when nearly everyone truly seems to hate it, our collective obsessive-compulsive ritual — is that it has been a vital tool for the American state since the end of the Second World War. The state uses standardized testing to make meaning of its citizens, in a way that the state, by its own devices, cannot.3 The United States already had massive success employing standardized testing during wartime, when the Armed Forces hired a team of psychologists to rapidly design the General Classification Test (GCT). This exam allowed the state to sort through roughly ten million men for various combat roles, often to racist and classist ends. The GCT was truly high-stakes testing: a high score could mean a life-or-death difference in the role a draftee held during combat.
As the Cold War developed, standardized testing became a way to cultivate a new vital geopolitical resource: brainpower. If the United States did not harness and refine this national resource, experts warned, the country would squander its ability to maintain geopolitical supremacy against the Soviet Union and communism writ large. (A recurring, unwanted set of fears.) The nation needed a way to determine which youth had the greatest potential, guide them toward rigorous high school coursework, and encourage them to pursue science and engineering tracks in college—all while ensuring youth who weren’t “naturally gifted” were also steered to paths that fulfilled the nation’s needs and fostered personal satisfaction. There was, however, one catch. Despite the fear the United States would slide behind the Soviet Union in scientific and technological innovation — and despite the burgeoning administrative state — the federal government remained reluctant to overextend its role in the shape of American education, a system historically built on decentralized authority and populated by non-state administrative actors.4 (Irrational rules governing behavior.) Standardized testing companies solved this dilemma by providing products for identifying brainpower that both validated traditional divisions of educational oversight and served the needs of the Cold War administrative state. (A highly repeatable behavior prone to extreme escalation.)
The state found its greatest testing supplier in Educational Testing Service (ETS), which designed a wide array of standardized tests for the government and military, higher education institutions, secondary schools, and occupational licensing boards, among others. By the time Sputnik was launched into orbit, American education was already becoming a nationwide talent hunt, with standardized tests determining which brains were most geopolitically useful — and which Americans held the greatest marketplace value.
Over the next few decades, Americans began to understand themselves more and more in the numerical terms set by standardized testing. Recalling one’s SAT scores became the socially-sanctioned analog of frat bros discussing dick size. The archetype of the “underachiever” was born, defined as someone who scored high on aptitude tests but whose performance on achievement tests was relatively lackluster.5
By internalizing standardized test scores as a reflection of personal strengths — and, all too often, collective shortcomings — Americans could couch insidious politics in the name of “objective measurement.” Hence, realtors could justify racist selling practices and reinforce educational segregation by touting that a neighborhood “has good test scores,” while Harvard President Larry Summers could blather endlessly about how test scores revealed women’s natural shortcomings in science and math rather than systemic issues in STEM education. The racist, sexist, classist, and ableist logic of the postwar American state already ensured that standardized testing was never built for ensuring the wellbeing of Black, female, working-class, and disabled youth: the postwar state always already discounted their brainpower, and so did the tool used to measure that resource.6 Success has always been a fucked-up term.
Did I bring up my old research to convince you I wasn’t a complete failure? Maybe. Did I bring up my old research to convince myself I wasn’t a complete failure? Maybe.
While it feels harder with each year to see myself as a historian, I still hold dear the belief that we are never outside of a deep context. History rhymes; history is a river; history is an obsessive-compulsive ritual. I don’t think that former academics’ sense of failure is a mass delusion or, worse yet, a problem completely bound by higher ed itself. But I also no longer know what I can do about it. I’m a racing dog no longer welcome at the track, and all I have is the pace of my therapist’s hand, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, one part of my brain talking to the other, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, a new rhythm for the stories I tell myself about myself.
John James Audubon, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1851–54; via Wikimedia Commons).
- Just how useful EMDR is for certain conditions is routinely up for debate. EMDR is an approach rooted in addressing trauma, and while many people who develop post-traumatic stress disorder also develop obsessive-compulsive disorder, it doesn’t mean EMDR is specifically built for the type of ritualistic behaviors and catastrophizing thought patterns that characterize OCD. Nonetheless, in this instance, studies indicate EMDR is probably more effective than certain SSRI medication and about as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy — the long-held gold standard for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder. Put another way: I didn’t feel like licking a toilet seat and/or processing whether I would get cancer-lupus-AIDS after putting my hand in a running stream, so EMDR it is. Edna B. Foa, “Cognitive behavioral therapy of obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 12 (June 2010): 199–207; Zoe Marsden et. al, “A randomized controlled trial comparing EMDR and CBT for obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy 25 (Jan. 2018): e10–e18. doi:10.1002/cpp.2120; Hedayat Nazari et al. “Comparison of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing with citalopram in treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder,” International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice 15 (Nov. 2011): 270–74.
- Desmond King and Marc Stears, “How the U.S. State Works: A Theory of Standardization,” Perspectives on Politics 9 (Sept. 2011): 505–18; Laura S. Jensen, “Government, the State, and Governance,” Polity 40 (July 2008): 379–85; Julia Adams, “The Puzzle of the American State…and Its Historians,” American Historical Review 115 (June 2010): 786–91.
- This kind of thinking gets us into historical sociology — and often really theoretical spaces. Even if that’s not your bag, it helps to see how sociologists have made sense of what, exactly, the state is and how it is sustained. Theda Skocpol, “A Society Without a ‘State’? Political Organization, Social Conflict, and Welfare Provision in the United States,” Journal of Public Policy 7 (Oct.–Dec. 1987): 349–71; Daniel Béland, François Vergnoille de Chantal, and Sarah-Louise Raillard, “The American State: Between Political Invisibility and Institutional Fragmentation,” Revue Française de Science Politique 64 (2014): 1-14; and Gillian E. Metzger, “Agencies, Polarization, and the States,” Columbia Law Review 115 (Nov. 2015): 1739–87.
- There are so many good works on all of this, but as a sampling: Barbara Barksdale Clowse, Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981); Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), esp. 55-72; Marjorie Murphy, Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 175–95; and Robyn Muncy, “Cooperative Motherhood and Democratic Civic Culture in Postwar Suburbia, 1940-1965,” Journal of Social History 38 (Winter 2004): 285–310.
- Leonard M. Miller, ed., Guidance for the Underachiever with Superior Ability (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961); Maurice F. Freehill, Gifted Children: Their Psychology and Education (New York: MacMillan Company, 1961).
- Larry P. v. Riles, 495 F. Supp. 926 (N.D. Cal. 1979).
