On "ripping a new asshole"

There have been very few times in my life when I have actually been "ripped a new asshole," as the saying goes. When it has happened, mostly in response to my relational misconduct, the person doing the ripping has always been a "loved one," or at least, someone who claimed to be.

Given this backgound, I shouldn't be hurt or discouraged after today's ripping; instead, I should view it as a compliment: obviously, the people who did it care enough to go to the trouble. However, this was the first time I have been criticized so honestly as an academic, and due to the fact that the ripping has taken place in new territory, it stings more than a little bit.

Here's the story: I am in the process of applying to PhD programs, and an integral component of the PhD application is a horrible little essay entitled the "statement of purpose." In this essay, you must "sell yourself," i.e., make yourself attractive to the schools you want to attend, by "setting yourself apart" as a student and future scholar. This seems simple enough, but it's actually very complex given that everyone has a different idea of how it should be done. Oh, and it's often considered a "decisive factor" in whether or not you get into a program.

This is a nightmarish situation, especially for me, because I don't "sell" myself well. I've been told in the past that I either come across too matter-of-factly or too naively. So, to confront the current situation head-on, I enlisted the help of two professors who have written recommendations for me and who have been helpfully candid in the past. Yesterday, I sent them a rough draft of the statement of purpose I'd been obsessing over for a few days. Today, after reading it, they both ripped me a new asshole.

To quote one of them: "It's OK, but your capable of much, MUCH better work." To quote the other: "This sort of thing is just not going to cut it." And it went on and on.

Did I think the essay was great? No. Was I expecting them to be critical? Yes. But somehow, it felt a lot worse than I thought it was going to. Why? Well, quite frankly, academia has been pretty good to me in the past. I got a 4.0 in grad school, and received mostly praise and very little criticism on my oral and written work. My profs liked me as a person, and I won't say it was all fun and games, but it went pretty smoothly for me. But now, I'm approaching the top of the academic ladder, and suddenly things aren't as easy as they used to be.

My friend Amy, a PhD student, told me to get used to having a lot of new assholes ripped on a regular basis, and while I'll have to in order to survive, I'm certainly not used to it now. In fact, my new asshole is very tender, and it hurts a lot to sit down. But very soon (probably after a few long discussions with friends and maybe a few glasses of wine) the tenderness will be gone, and I'll sit down and redo the damned statement. And it'll be good. Or at least, it'll be better than just "OK."

And if it's not, well, then I won't be going back to school. But I'm not going to think about that at the moment; I'm going to go over to Joseph-Beth and anesthetize myself with some trashy magazines.