On Social Science and Matters of the Heart

"You look tired," he approached the topic gently. "Are you tired?"

There are all the ways I wanted to respond.

I watch the clock change to 1:45 am and force myself to shut/put/close it off/down. The book, the article, the computer, my journal. Its pages filling since September with run-on sentences and multi-colored ink. All of it, all. of. it. perhaps, with run-on sentences and multi-colored ink. Trying to make sense of. I chastise myself for confusion and the time lost, the hours ticking by on the clock, and so little to show for it all.

Or I force myself to crawl into bed moments after I walk through the door. 10:30 pm filled with hope for an easy descent into a dream. Hope drains and the hours fill with worry. Theories and data and what has come before and what I want to come after. I see 1:45 am and chastise myself and finally collapse into darkness.

My roommates come and go at all hours of the night. Visitors parading through our kitchen and shouts catapulted from the street towards our windows. After-hours showers at 4:30 am. Night and day, week and weekend, all mix and swirl. I roll over, careful not to fall off the edge of my narrow mattress, temporary turned permanent. I think this must be the early, carefree twenties that I missed. I think of everything I chose over that. Everything I chose that led me to this. 4 am and the twenties and then suddenly the thirties.

I screeched in the hallway the other day before class. Accidental and involuntary, I hardly recognized it as my own voice. Everyone looked at me, as startled as I, and I blurted out quickly before I lost my nerve, before I lost the truth, that I am tired of hearing about shriveled, old eggs. Tactless, yes. But only as a mirror of the tactlessness in which it is thrown my way. Without the necessary conversations, the necessary understanding. As if I am not also up against that ticking clock and watching the hours turn into years. As if I have none of the same decisions, the same struggles, the same hopes and dreams. I may not, but it is not known, it is not considered, it is not set in stone. These words, thrust my way, as if I am a non-participant, other than, not-seen. "That is on you," she said. And she's right. But it's still a heavy weight to bear alone.

"Do you want children?" he asked me one evening. I took a deep breath and pulled away from the leather couch already sucking me in and enunciated each word with its matching weight, "Right now, I don't want to raise a child as a single mother," I began. He laughed loudly and said that's the most cynical sentence he has ever heard, did I really feel that way about love? I didn't try to explain that it is perhaps the least cynical sentence I could have produced; that it's filled with hope and possibility. Hope and possibility for love and life and life and love and life and love and love and life... both and the spaces in between and for all the ways they combine. It's not the 'no' of my early twenties, it's not the 'yes' of somebody else's early twenties, it's a yes to life and love and however they combine. To hope and possibility and life and love and their endless combinations, I answer yes.

My alarm goes off at 6:45 am and I forget to calculate the five hours between the shut off, shut down, and the alarm. I've never been good with numbers and estimate eight hours of sleep. Heavy eyes, heavy bones, achy skin, a tiny bed in an unpacked room in a quiet apartment. I can barely roll over, getting up seems out of the question. The thought that I'll never be a morning person brings me to the brink of tears. Don't fall back to sleep, don't fall back to sleep, don't fall back to sleep becomes a semi-mantra, half asleep still, fighting with every demon I have. I think of the kids walking to school, the professionals sipping coffee in their cars as they commute to work, the stay-at-home mothers who have already made two batches of chocolate chip cookies. I diagnosis myself with some type of sleep-inducing disease, some form of mono. I worry I am depressed. Every morning. It's the bone-chilling fear of that black hole that leads me to finger counting. 5 hours of sleep. Minus the 4 am shouting. I am not depressed. I get out of bed. Some day, I will be a morning person.

The days are long and short and orderly and disorderly. Every day. Always, always filled. With the best of the best of gratitude and hope and life and love and their endless possibilities. Cynical? It's laughable. Depressed? Haha. Tired? There's always more coffee. I've learned, since 14, since 19, since 25, to make my decisions in the daylight.

I am terrified by my decisions. An innate disbelief in security, a trust for the disregard of risk. This is who I am. By my nature, by my nurture. My nurture as in what I choose to tell myself, what I choose for life-design, that which I value. The terror is still exhausting, of course.

"To collect your own data will take a year or two longer," we are instructed. I already know I will collect my own data. It will take me longer. I planned and planned and planned to do this and that by then and now. Those plans based on other people's data, other people's theories, based on other people's methods. Data and theories and methods and plans that crumbled under testing. My life as the test. I let it crumble. If I have agency, I will find it; therefore, I let it crumble. I will collect my own data. It will take me longer. It is the best of myself. It is all of myself.

"To collect your own data will be more expensive," we are warned. I think of the price I have already paid. In square footage, in paychecks, in evenings on the couch watching Friends re-runs, in road trips south, in mortgage payments, in double beds, in Friday happy hours, in hours of sleep. Yet, I only know the price I am not willing to pay - the price of hope and possibility and life and love. I know which is more expensive.

Significance. That is the goal of social science research. Data collection and theories and methods all should result in significance. It means something. The patterns point to something. It is not random. Perhaps it wasn't actual, by definition, data collection that I did last semester. Perhaps it was more the assembling of already available data into something I wanted to interpret. But still, I tried. Data and theory and method and... no significance. Of no importance. Random. Means nothing.

Last week, after trying again, after assembling different data, data that took longer to assemble and took into account a broader depiction, I found significance. It was, in some ways, the same - different measures but the same concepts, the same theories, the same units. I just had to look harder, look again, look broader. "You must be so excited," I heard a few times from a few people. I was. I was. But I also found insignificance last week. In a quiet, tucked away corner, I collected data, compiled theories, assembled a method and ran a test. The results came back insignificant. Of no importance. Random. Means nothing. Except that I have learned, when it is your life, insignificance means everything.

I went for a walk alone Friday night. Down through lower Manhattan as rush hour turned into happy hour turned into moonlit hours. For miles and hours, I walked alone. Amid twenty-somethings crowding the sidewalk in small groups, amid thirty-something couples who meandered the crosswalks holding hands. I thought about significance. What has turned out to be my insignificant twenties. How much I fear the same for my thirties.

He would be the first to tell me that my twenties were not insignificant. He has, time and time again. He knows how to rearrange the data. And yet, he is the one at whom I wanted to scream "INSIGNIFICANT!" Friday night. Loud and full of emotion. And I wanted him, unlike the others, to hear the hope and the possibility and the love and the life. I kept my mouth shut. The burden too heavy to bear if he only heard cynicism. I walked the night away, instead.

"You look tired," he approached the topic gently. "Are you tired?"

There are all the ways I wanted to respond.

And then there is the way I did respond.

"Yes, I think I need to get more sleep."