Can Public Scholarship Save Your Life?
By: Yung In Chae
Tags: Writing, Academia, Byedolon, Reflections, Classics

Something that I’ve never admitted in writing: when I started working at Eidolon, I was the most depressed that I have ever been in my life. And it was caused by, of all things, a visa issue. (For this reason, I can’t stand books or movies where characters spontaneously decide to move to another country. Visas are a thing!) After receiving numerous rejections during my last year of college, I had finally come up with a plan to pursue a master’s degree in France. But my school would not send me a document that I needed to apply for a visa, and at some point, stopped responding to my emails altogether, while the start of the semester drew closer and then passed. All I wanted as a teenager was to get away from home; college in America felt like an escape route. But really, I had traveled around the world only to end up moored where I had started — in Seoul — with no idea if I could ever leave again.

I knew this was not the worst problem one could have, or even the worst problem I could have. But I was unable to take it in proportion. I started going to bed as early as possible so that the day would end as early as possible, but that meant that I woke up early too, and I would hide under the covers for hours, terrified of the day starting all over again. I had dramatic, prolonged crying jags at the slightest inconveniences. I would stand before crosswalks, watching vehicles zip over the white stripes, and think about how I didn’t actively want to die, but wouldn’t mind if one of them happened to crash into me, either.

Meanwhile, I started my job at Eidolon, which I only applied for because, at twenty-three years old, I was too naïve to consider that the other applicants might be more qualified than I was. (They were, but Donna hired me anyway. There’s a lesson in that.) Every week, I somehow pulled myself together for long enough to edit an article and participate in a meeting with Donna and Tara, our then-Managing Editor. In the moments that I pulled myself together to work, I felt like I was pulling my life together too.

Then in one meeting, Tara, who was an adjunct instructor in a small town at the time, suddenly said, “If I didn’t have Eidolon, I think I’d be depressed.”

“Before Eidolon, I was a stay-at-home mom, and I was depressed,” Donna responded.

I was taken by surprise. I had spent so much time submerged in self-pity that I had lost sight of the fact that I was not the only person in the world who was capable of feeling lonely or directionless or afraid. I found it comforting, even moving, that our small journal could help three different people in the same way.

That day, I did not find the courage to express to my co-editors just how much their words resonated with me. But that day, I started feeling less alone. I let myself believe that whatever this heaviness was, no matter why it had settled in my life, it was coming to an end. That something else was about to begin.

Much has been said about the value of public scholarship: it helps scholars gain certain skills, it makes knowledge more accessible, it challenges the rigidness of institutions. But I rarely hear anybody say what is, for me, the most important part: public scholarship, or writing for a wider audience, or whatever you want to call it, provides human connection. This is valuable in academia, where loneliness attends intense competition, endless uncertainty, departmental politicking, long hours of research in isolation, work that reaches few people. And it is also valuable elsewhere, because loneliness is present everywhere.

The exposure to other human beings is not necessarily positive — public scholarship can lead to conflict and even harassment. But I think at its best, public scholarship makes somebody feel like they are part of something that’s larger than themselves, whether that’s a community of academics or a community of people who share an emotion, experience, idea, or interest. One of my fondest Eidolon memories is a lunch talk at Cambridge where a research fellow told me she loved the journal. “I read it when I’m sad,” she added after a beat. I had been struggling in school, badly, and the idea that our work could make her less sad made me less sad. These glints of human connection are, at the end of five years, what I remember best.

My first Eidolon article — “Apples and Oranges, Ravens and Writing Desks” — was also my first attempt at non-academic writing. Not a lot of people read it. But among those who did read it, and responded to it, are some of the most important and influential people in my life. This article was the catalyst for my first conversations with Johanna Hanink and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who are now not only members of Eidolon’s board but also good friends of mine. Maybe that’s why it’s still one of my favorites.

Two years later, I wrote “White People Explain Classics to Us.” I originally conceived it as a personal essay, but once I started asking other classicists of color whether they, too, had experienced epistemic injustice, I realized that my experience alone was inadequate and eventually wove in four different conversations. People with power tend to flatten the experiences of people without, but the truth is that experiences of race are unimaginably complex — they can overlap, they can contradict each other, they can be unexpected, they can be uncomfortable — and bringing in multiple voices, I thought, is a way of acknowledging that complexity. Nevertheless, quite a few people wrote to me saying that one part or another resonated with them, and I learned what it was like to feel solidarity with strangers.

For our music special, I wrote “Like Dionysus,” which was ostensibly about classics and BTS but was really about the complicated experience of receiving validation from an imperial power. I wrote it because BTS’s journey was so wondrous to me, especially because it seemed to be laced with my own pain, that I wanted to make somebody else feel even a fraction of what I was feeling. I wanted to give it to them, like a gift. In return, I received hundreds of responses. Readers from countries like India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Vietnam said that although they were not Korean, they understood what I meant, reminding me that so many of us live with the legacy of colonialism or imperialism in some way. Mothers said they got to know BTS because of their daughters, who, through their love for this boy band, were learning more about both another culture and racism. I cried along with everybody who told me they cried.

As you can see, during my five years at Eidolon, I have had a few people respond to my writing, I have had dozens of people respond to my writing, and I have had hundreds of people respond to my writing. I mean it when I say that it has felt the same every single time. The gratitude I feel is so powerful, so complete, that I have never cared whether it was one person or many. It is a gratitude that is all the more overwhelming because I fear that I do not deserve it. It makes me want to write better, so that I do deserve it. This job has taught me that readers give you the most valuable thing they have — their time — and it is the writer’s responsibility not to waste it.

Recently, I went to a tarot reader who, before she even touched her cards, spent an hour talking to me in the manner of a therapist. She asked me what I wanted; I said I wanted to be a writer. She said this was not a goal, because I was already a writer, and I had to figure out what I wanted to do through my writing. Did I want to make money? Did I want to be famous? Did I want to write something consequential? Or did I want to resonate with the public?

Our conversation confirmed something I already suspected: I am not the sort of writer who can write for herself. If I ever stop writing professionally, I expect to stop writing entirely. This is partly because the writing process is very fraught for me: it exposes and exacerbates my worst habits; it plunges me into my greatest fears. I think I might hate it almost as much as I love it. But the ability to meet readers halfway in this weightless, infinite space makes writing absolutely worthwhile. It may be the only thing that makes writing worthwhile. I’m not entirely sure what Eidolon’s legacy will be, but I do know we have made people feel less alone at times, in the way that Donna, Sarah, and Tori make me feel less alone every day.

When I say that this job saved me, I don’t mean that it got me through some dark periods in my life, even though it did, nor do I mean that it led to opportunities that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, even though it did. I mean that it gave me a reason to face the day, goals to pursue, a life that is more than just life. Or to be more precise: you, reader of Eidolon, did. You found me at a time when I desperately needed a purpose, and you made me a writer.

And so, I don’t know how to end this piece, and this chapter of my life, except by saying: thank you. Thank you for saving me. I can only hope we were able to do something for you too.

Yung In Chae is a writer and the Editor-at-Large of Eidolon. She received an A.B. in Classics from Princeton University and an MPhil in Classics from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. She is the author of Goddess Power, a children’s book about goddesses in classical mythology.