I have long believed in the joys of re-reading. My favorite Nabokov quote, which I invariably cite to my students every semester, is, “The only good reader is a re-reader.” I always cite it as proof that texts always contain hidden layers and meanings that only become apparent with subsequent readings, and as incentive for students to attentively re-immerse themselves in words they think they know. However, it’s taken on a new meaning for me in the last three weeks or so as I’ve struggled with acute and apparently chronic insomnia.

I’m under no delusion that my insomnia is entirely due to the fact that I am a graduate student, now in my fifth year of study, in the process of writing my dissertation. Dissertation writing is an incredibly isolating process, where you’re left for long stretches with nothing but a blank page and your brain, which, in those long, lonely periods delights in allowing your worst self-doubts to run rampant. As I approach the end of my funding package, and have to consider how to pay for what will hopefully be my last year of graduate school, my brain now has new thoughts to torment it, about what the future will hold, and whether all this education has been worth it.

In an attempt to quell these thoughts and lull my brain to sleep, I’ve been reaching for books, which I read in my dimly-lit living room, sometimes accompanied by my cat. Rather than using those many hours to catch up on dissertation reading, though (those books already take up every waking hour, I’ll be damned if they have my half-awake thoughts as well), I’ve been cozying up with old friends like Sara Crewe, Anne Shirley, and Alanna of Trebond. I hoped, at first, that they would be “easy reads,” that the familiarity of the texts, and the lower age of their intended audience, would facilitate exhaustion. Eventually, though, and true to Nabokov’s adage, I found something new in them.

I’d always been attracted to those heroines because of how deeply I related to them. I identified with their fierce outspokenness, but, like them, often felt crippled by my own weirdness or outcast state (I think this is why I’ve never loved Jo March quite as much as the women I encountered in other books– however ahead of her time she was, she was always held safe in the cocoon of her family, and never really made to feel alone or ashamed for being who she was). I found, in the quiet dawn hours, that my fellow-feeling for these women was just as acute as it had been in my youth, if not more so. I admired their gumption, their willingness to reach out and manifest whatever future they had envisioned for themselves, as well as their profound optimism, and their (almost) unwavering sense of hope. When I read those books as a girl, it was with an eye towards the future, viewing these women as models of what my life could and should look like. Now I look back to them, as torchlights of what I have lost.

It’s easy, during the long slog of graduate school, to lose sight of one’s sense of purpose, and then one’s sense of hope. The end seems both too near and too far: the dissertation will never be finished, and yet the funding will soon run out, and one will be thrust unceremoniously back into the real world, without ever having accomplished what one set out to do. One feels both incredibly old and unspeakably young, worn by the many years of thankless work, and yet acutely aware of how little one knows about the thing one is supposedly an expert in (this is called imposter syndrome, and it gets worse the further into grad school you get, simply because the more you learn, the more you know about what you don’t know).

And even though I can’t sleep, I’m reminded to continue looking for the beauty in the small things; that a pond can be a Lake of Shining Waters, that every woman is a princess. I’m also reminded of the power of imagination, and its capacity to realize dreams; if Sara can imagine herself to be in a palace, I can imagine myself in a professorial office rather than in my bedroom, and if Alanna can be a knight, then I can be a Doctor of Philosophy. These books shrink problems back down to their correct size, so that instead of looming ominously over you, they retreat into corners, still lurking, but less frightening in the daylight. Adults need hope and guidance just as much as children, it seems, and graduate students especially so. Even if I’m not sleeping, at least it doesn’t feel like I’ve wasted these hours.