Letter to my father and step-mother I will never send

Hello Papa and [step-mother],

I thought, since I have been exchanging messages with the girls via WhatsApp, that I would also send you an update on myself. I don’t know if it’s of any interest, but you might like to know.

This week is the end of my penultimate semester in a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Illinois. I expect to complete the program by the end of this fall semester. This is a professional degree, without a thesis, a choice forced on me by the particulars of the bridge program I completed between my bachelor’s and this program.

The career prospects are not good, and I have wasted the last two summers in educational opportunities (last summer I was an instructor at computer camp, an experience not unlike [half-sister]’s space camp from the sound of it, though surely less rigorous), and this summer I was a teaching assistant in an undergraduate course. Since I have not availed myself of the internship opportunities available to me, and made the idiotic decision to remain in Chicago since I believed that I would not be able to complete the program on my desired time line if I moved to the main campus in Urbana-Champaign (a lie told to me by the advising department) I have wasted the last three years with nothing to show for it but a master’s degree, a 4.0 GPA, several teaching experiences, some new hobbies, and a deceased mother. I have also been sorely isolated from all of the friends and well-wishers I had encountered in Europe and have no particular social or interpersonal connections to the Chicago area. I moved here to be close to my mother in the early stages of her Alzheimer’s disease, and she died less than a month after I moved back with her. Life is not fair, but I have been extraordinarily privileged and so have nothing to complain about.

I am presently preparing applications for doctoral programs in the intersection of English literature, philosophy, and cultural studies; I plan to study the reception of artificial intelligence in the light of horror fiction, focusing particularly on the work of HP Lovecraft and the use of his monsters as metaphors. I doubt that I will be funded, and I doubt that this will advance me in any clear direction. I am unemployable, with no real skills of any value acquired in the term of my program, and my exposure to the industry has convinced me that I have no interest in entering into the field as a programmer or software engineer. I would like to pursue higher research in computer science proper, but the particular program I made the error of subscribing to did not prepare me at all for that path.

I feel a distinct sense of failure and have become convinced that my entire life up to this moment has been a series of catastrophic errors for which I have nothing to show; besides applying to doctoral programs, my only plans for the future are suicide or idiotic wastes of my potential like traveling, training as a yoga teacher, cultivating my fiction, technical journalism, and remaining in contact with my dispersed friends and family.

I apologize for the length of this email and the infrequency with which we are in contact. It is obvious that you have no interest or availability to see me or incorporate me in your life, evidence for which I adduce from not having been informed of your presence on the North American continent, nor from any contact whatsoever in the intervening time. You did not even do me the honor of declining my invitation to my undergraduate graduation, a degree which I know you held in the highest contempt as a waste of time and resources.

I apologize for not being able to schedule a call with you, father, and for not living up to the expectations or standards you have set, [step-mother]. You both know to what I am referring, and I apologize to you both for the grievousness of my transgressions. I understand why you do not want me present in the lives of your children or families.

Love,

Preston