(I’m applying for PhD programs for Fall 2011. This is the first draft of what will eventually become my Statement of Purpose. I imagine the final version will have, among other changes, a lot less information about my mom. But I thought you guys might be interested.)

Katharine A. Tillman
Statement of Purpose

I have loved language all my life. My mother is a voracious reader of such high caliber that these days she often complains of being unable to find anything worth reading that she hasn’t already read in an entire public library. I grew up surrounded by books, being read to and reading. I started keeping journals at a very young age. I was publishing my writing on the Internet by the time I was 14 years old and in print magazines by the time I was 18. I wanted to be a writer more than anything.

My mother, the eternal bookworm, discovered somewhat late in life that she also had an interest in and talent for science. The hard sciences satisfied her thirst for concrete and verifiable knowledge about the world in a way literature courses never had. When I was in elementary school, she went back to college for a degree in Biology. By the time I was in middle school, she was pursuing a masters in human genetics. She taught me how to do Punnett squares, to match up chromosomes for karyotypes, and to breed fruit flies with funny wings and eyes. I thought all this was a lot of fun, but I still considered myself to be an “arts person,” not a “science person.” I wanted to study writing, or philosophy, or art.

I changed my tune somewhat when I took AP Biology my senior year in high school. My teacher, Ben Davis, was phenomenal, and it remains one of the best and most rigorous classes I have ever taken. I stayed up all night studying. I loved it. I started my undergraduate career at NYU as a Biology major, taking junior-level molecular and cell biology courses my first semester of freshman year. Looking for a work-study job, I found an opening for an RA position in Denis Pelli’s lab in the Psychology Department. He and his students studied visual perception.

Denis, it turned out, came from a family of artists, and was interested in the question of beauty. This was one of my favorite topics in philosophy, and the moment when I realized that it was actually possible to ask (and answer!) questions about how people see the world from a scientific perspective – even question about aspects of perception as seemingly ephemeral as what makes a particular painting beautiful to a particular observer – completely changed my life. I still remember that moment vividly. I was 18 years old; it was nearly a decade ago.

I worked in Denis’ lab for one semester, and then, for personal reasons unrelated to school, I left NYU entirely for almost 3 years. During that time, I travelled all over the country, worked in a yoga studio in Washington, DC, wrote, and did freelance technical editing for the Journal of Vision, which was then very new. When I decided to return to New York and my studies in 2004, Denis offered me a full-time job as a researcher and lab manager. One of the perks of this was that I could take NYU classes part-time, for free.

In the five years it took me to complete my BA, with a major in Psychology and minors in Creative Writing and Classics, part-time, I also published 3 papers in collaboration with Denis and other members of the lab, presented my work at 8 conferences, learned vast amounts about psychophysical research, and, as lab manager, about teaching, mentoring, NIH grant proposals, and dealing with the IRB. Most importantly, I learned how to think critically. I learned what makes a scientific question interesting and what makes an argument convincing. I vehemently denied it almost the whole way through, but I became a scientist. Thanks to Denis’ unwavering concern for my development and rigorous intellectual standards, I became a very well-trained one.

My first scientific paper, “Parts, wholes, and context in reading: A triple dissociation” (Pelli & Tillman, PLoS One, 2007), used a novel knock-out method of text manipulation to prove that word shape, letter-by-letter decoding, and sentence context make independent, additive contributions to reading rate in words/min. It received press coverage from sources as diverse as Scientific American, BoingBoing, and FontFeed. My second paper, “Crowding and eccentricity determine reading rate” (Pelli, Tillman, et al., JOV, 2007), was a mammoth with several mathematical appendices, laying out the visual factors constraining how fast we read text. My most recent paper, “The uncrowded window of object recognition” (Pelli & Tillman 2008), a review of what studies of vision crowding have taught us about how the brain combines features to recognize objects, was published as a Perspective in Nature Neuroscience.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, it still took me another year to realize that I really was a scientist, and that a career in academia is not only what I have been preparing for all my life, but also what I am best suited for and I what I want. The “problem” has always been that I have so many other interests. I still publish my creative writing (both fiction and essays). I show my photographs in exhibitions. I have had an intense contemplative spiritual practice for ten years. I thought that in order to give all these other pursuits the attention they deserved, I needed to leave the lab. I tested this theory for one year, and found it to completely and utterly false. My “outside” interests inform my research, making it better, and the converse is also true. The theme underlying all these diverse passions is the same: a tremendous, unwavering fascination with both minds in general and my own mind in particular.

I want to understand how people perceive the world, think, and narrate their experiences. I am fascinated by the questions of how language influences seeing and vice versa. I want to know the relationship between language and memory – how the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and what our past histories have been constrain how we see and interpret our present surroundings and situations.

I’m currently working on a paper, “Reading pictures” (Tillman & Pelli, in prep), which presents evidence that reading and object recognition, two tasks traditionally studied separately by language and vision researchers, are in fact remarkably similar, perhaps relying on the same cognitive processes. In my graduate work, I hope to continue in this vein, combining my interests in perception and language.

Moreover, I want to ask the big questions in cognitive psychology. I don’t want to be another cog in the research machine churning out papers documenting tiny advances in obscure topics that only matter to a tiny group of expert specialists and will never be heard of by ordinary people. I want to be a scientist, psychologist, scholar, academic, and professor in the highest sense of those words: a fearless and unapologetic intellectual whose work is devoted to the cause of pursuing knowledge and understanding for the benefit of everyone. It’s a lofty and idealistic goal, I know, but I am sure that the next step is to begin working toward a doctoral degree.

Almost exactly one year ago, I wrote about the pitfalls of happiness. I had just graduated from NYU, and left the job I’d had for many years, and packed up and moved across the country from New York to Portland, OR. I was in a new romantic relationship with someone I had already known for 8 years, and it seemed like our passionate (if unlikely) reunion was somehow destined by God, and I was so excited about the future, and so happy. It was July, I was falling in love, and I had a million things I wanted to do, and I was confident I could do them all. I woke up every day smiling and ready.

I recognize this pattern of life as the July syndrome, because I’m in it again now. Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, it is as if my life is going well on almost every front. In a matter of two weeks in New York, I gained enough momentum to find a job for the next year, find an amazing housing situation in Brooklyn, take the GRE (which I’d been talking about doing since LAST July), reconnect with practically all of my New York friends, meet several awesome new people, cut my hair, open up new romantic possibilities, etc. This was after yet another long, difficult winter in which I was sure that my life was a complete disaster, that I was never going to get it together again, would be miserable forever, had ruined all my chances…

It is easy to say that the only lesson here is that my mood/energy is profoundly influenced by light levels, that I should really invest in a good lightbox before winter comes again, or move somewhere with a climate more like the one in which I grew up (bright and hot almost all year). But Mitsu reminds me not to overreact when things seem to be going well.

Last year, I barely even made it until the end of the summer before things “all fell apart.” My relationship crumbled, which in retrospect was largely inevitable, but was certainly exacerbated by the completely unrealistic hopes I placed on it after I decided it was “going well.” I got overconfident in myself and my beliefs, and said some things that caused a great deal of damage to some of my most cherished friendships. Life in Portland turned out not to be as fantastic as I had hoped, once I realized how difficult it truly was to find work there (a problem which had seemed easy to overcome in the midst of the July syndrome). By October, I was so depressed I barely left my room for months, got none of the things done that I had planned to do that Fall, and, because nothing was happening in my life, I took that as confirmation that I was doomed. Then I came out to PA to help my mother, who broke her ankle, and the nature of the situation combined with my own sureness that everyone was disappointed in me and no one wanted to hear from me ensured that I became very isolated, and again, because nothing seemed to be happening, I was sure that my life was an unfixable disaster.

That idea seems completely ridiculous now. In the brightness of July it is obvious that all it takes for things to “happen” in my life is for me to go out there and live it — to talk to people, make contact, do things. “Good fortune” seems to be an ordinary biproduct of living fully, and the world seems to be magical, full of coincidences and beauty and love. But how can I feel that without getting attached to an idea that it will last forever, that it ought to last forever, that it is indicative of some sort of personal charm that belongs to me rather than just being a reflection of the way that things really are, which also includes the darkness of winter, and suffering, and loss?

Mitsu says the only thing I can do is to try to stay grounded, be careful, to pay attention to the ways in which the seeds of future sadness and problems are being planted now, even as I feel happy and excited about the future. These days when things seem to be going well are the time to be more vigilant, not less.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” — Marianne Williamson

I have heard the above so many times, most often being read by a teacher while I was lying in savanasa at the end of a class at Tranquil Space in Washington, DC, where I practiced yoga and worked as Creative Director Kimberly Wilson‘s assistant from 2002 to 2003. I was moved to tears by it the first time I heard it, when I was 19, though I didn’t really understand why I was so upset.

This month, inspired by my friend Meggy Wang, I signed up for a community project called 21.5.800. The goal was to write 800 words a day and to practice yoga 5 days a week for 21 days. Since writing and yoga are both practices I’ve found fruitful but have neglected in recent years, this seemed perfect. I fell far short of 800 words a day and 5 yoga classes a week. But I filled an entire (small) notebook, rediscovered my headstand, started updating this blog again, and, thanks also to some intense conversations, I realized why that Marianne Williamson poem, general enough to almost be trite, inspired such a strong reaction in me.

I don’t know how to say this. I want very much to tell you this secret. It’s not a secret, but the secret is: whatever it is you’re most ashamed of, your deepest darkest fear, your worst flaw, your worst habit, the secret terrible thing about you that you’d rather die than see revealed, THAT thing, yes THAT, is going to save you. Look at it until your eyes bleed and you think your heart is going to combust, bring it out into the open, because the passageway is there. Dig a way out through the bottom to the ocean, Rumi says in my favorite poem.

Something lucky happened to me; someone caught me. Worst habits are not easy to mask, so of course this was not the first person to notice or to complain about mine, but this time was different. There was a suspended moment in which someone I love and respect was articulating my worst characteristic to me so clearly that there could be no mistaking the fact that he had seen it, that the full extent of my selfishness and self-absorption and hypocrisy had been uncovered and it was out there, plain as day. I was being called out, and the shock of it was so great that I was neither angry nor hurt but simply stunned. This wasn’t just some paranoid idea I had about myself. It was true. The nightmare was true. I had acted selfishly, I had hidden things about myself out of shame, I had considered only my own interests, my own feelings, and I had really hurt someone who loved me. (I had, in fact, hurt many people over the years.) I was horrified.

I know what guilt feels like, I have a lot of experience with guilt, and what I felt in this moment was something altogether different, something like a knife actually piercing my heart. Yes, I was crying, I was sorry, but true repentence isn’t an apology, or a confession, or a resolution to make it right, or anything having to do with words, or with fixing it, or with the past. It has to do with seeing.

I was sitting there, horrified, my heart out on a platter with it’s black snake writhing around in it, uncovered, being seen. But the strange thing was, as much as I was appalled, as soon as my friend, the one I had hurt, the one who called me out, was able to see my bad habit clearly enough, this bad habit I had so desperately wanted to hide, he could see not only what I had done, but the causes for what I had done. He could see that I was selfish because I thought I had nothing to give.  He could see that my harmful actions stemmed from a belief that I didn’t have enough power to cause any harm. That I withheld help because I thought I was incapable of helping. That I grasped and I begged and I pleaded and I took more than I reciprocated because I thought I was impoverished. That I conducted myself as if I were powerless, even though I already had the power. Power to help, power to hurt. I had power and I was terrified of it. And my bad habit, my selfishness, the thing that hurt him, and shamed me, was directly linked to my greatest treasure.  My worst habit stemmed from thinking that I needed to hide. My worst habit stemmed from was refusing to acknowledge my own worth, and the responsibility that comes along with it. My worst habit held its own solution within it. And, because it was seen, and I was seen, and because I saw too, I was already, in that very instant, forgiven.

In the place where I grew up, the deep South, shame and secrets are palpable, the land is saturated in them, and the land, the beautiful, blood-soaked land, is everything. In every family there are stories that everyone knows but no one is allowed to tell, and everyone longs for faded beauty and honor and dignity and glory. But that dignity, that special, unique, specific beauty is so tightly intermingled with, even sustained by, a past filled with such unspeakable abomination and cruelty, a past which is still present. We learn to take good care of the skeletons in our closets, to polish them by hand. We pay more attention to our skeletons than to other people. We become quiet and ashamed.

The structure is intricate, there are many hidden chambers, the past layered on the present layered on the future, the beauty layered on the horror. The habit layered on the cliche layered on the true insight. I don’t know how to say this, but please, please, look. Look at that snake that you think you are, the one you want to cut up into a million tiny pieces and bury so deeply no one will ever find them. You don’t have to believe the story. You just have to see it. Right there, right in that urge you have to take the sword to the snake. Everything you need to know is right there.