Jasna Hodžić, PhD

“If people were silent about the things that had happened to them, was something not being betrayed, even if only the version of themselves that had experienced them?”  – Rachel Cusk

FEBRUARY 2024
ARIZONA
Virgin River Gorge (VRG)

There’s a specific bend on the trail where, if you know to look up, you’ll catch the tallest point of the Blasphemy Wall. A few more steps, and its entirety rises suddenly from the ground, like a challenge. I always stop here, just for a moment.

By now, I’ve honed a routine: music on, stick-clip the second bolt, walk out to the slab that juts over the highway below. From there, I look at the route. I take my hands out of my jacket, let the cold air harden my skin. Sometimes, I mime a move or two.

The crux of Atonement came early for me—move eight. A lock-off from a right-hand microcrimp that chews into my skin and a left-hand “emotional support hold”: nothing more than an indentation in the wall, but just enough to get my hips where they need to be. Then, a deadpoint to a left-hand sidepull—body tension at its finest, a razor-thin margin between too taut and too loose. When I’m on form, my right foot holds, and my left cuts. When I’m not, I sag too far from the wall before I latch the hold, and I’m off.

For the last few sessions in a row, I couldn’t stick this move—not from the ground, not even in isolation. I’d climb from the very next move to the top on autopilot, but that didn’t mean much if I couldn’t hit the crux.

It’s the worst case of the “VRG lifecycle” I’ve experienced. You make quick progress. Then, you slowly start regressing. Some combination of thin skin, finicky conditions, and a defeated morale all combine to take you from “Next go for sure,” to “not my best day,” to “fuck this place.” Like some complex insect, you have to molt through dozens of near-deaths to finally emerge as the beautiful, sendy butterfly. Mostly, it’s demoralizing. But if you can catch that moment–if you can climb with the kind of focus it demands–I’ve not quite found anything like it.

December moved to January. Then February. The sun was inching toward the wall, ready to shut the season down.

After a few minutes, I walk from the slabs to the base of the route and tie in.
Shoes on, jacket off, music paused.

I go for it.
I don’t stick it.

I lower and sit at the base, still tied in. I’ll go again in five minutes.
My shoes half on, the heels sticking out for air.

I am proud to announce that I, with the major support of several colleagues, have published a paper in the journal Ecology that summarizes a large part of my doctoral work. In the paper, we summarize our analysis of a large-scale vegetation dataset collected by the National Park Service. Our results suggest that hemiparasitic plants are associated with greater community evenness across North America, a finding which has implications for our understanding of the mechanisms promoting and sustaining biological diversity.

The room was dimly lit, with teal linoleum chairs, a grumbling AC, and late Nevadan light penetrating even the darkest of curtains. It was large, meant for meetings or  presentations for an audience. The woman I had just met, who led me into the room, told me that I was welcome to use the kitchenette, and I wondered where she came from, considering how comical it was that this woman was a critical part of a day I had been planning for years.

I chose a chair and placed it against the most unadorned part of the beige wall. I filled the cup I had brought with water from the kitchenette. I took out a few snacks from my small backpack and placed them neatly near me, just in case I got hungry.  

Three hours later, I closed my laptop and leaned back uncomfortably against my chair. The whine of the AC suddenly grew louder as it started another cycle. For the first time, I heard the footsteps of the guests milling about on the other side of the wall. Doors closing, muffled conversations fading away.

It felt strange being a newly minted Dr. Hodzic alone in this hotel conference room in Nevada. Having attended many defenses during my time in Seattle, I knew the drill: you hope to get Douglass hall, because it is the nicest room, with large windows revealing the vibrant greenery of the botanic gardens. But, you will settle if you have to go to Bloedel. Everyone in your lab brings snacks. You socialize during the 5 minutes you have to breathe after your defense and before your private deliberation with your committee. Then, you throw a party at a house, at a brewery, wherever; all that mattered was that you let go of everything. I craved the same celebration for myself.

In that moment, the air was mute, numb, unsaturated, unpalpable, disappointing.

At the end of May, I successfully completed my PhD. Commonly, the research chapters of a dissertation are written and submitted as manuscripts to academic journals. However, other parts of the text (synthesis, introduction, etc.) mostly go unread except by the committee.

In an effort to give a proper and more public expression of gratitude to those whose help and support I was fortunate enough to receive, I share my acknowledgements page below.

The final stage of a PhD—communicating the answers to my research questions—was, not, in my opinion, the hard part. The hard part was the beginning: trying to find interesting and different questions to make my doctoral work matter. I struggled with the niche nature of a PhD, fearful of the idea that it would ultimately only serve to make me an expert in a very narrow subject field. I have come to realize that the opposite is true. Over the past four and a half years, I have been tasked with learning what the right questions to ask are and discovering how to best seek out their answers. This is a skill which I will never fully master—one that takes as much creativity as it does knowledge, and which will only serve to enrich and enhance my life.

This was originally written for Gnarly Nutrition

No matter what I did, the heel hook would not stick.

I tried to use different pairs of shoes. I showed up when it was crisp.  I recorded myself to see if there was a difference in my hip position between when I stuck the move and when I did not. I meticulously focused on comparing each potential body position – was it better if my left foot smeared as I pulled with the right heel, or if I used it as a back-flag?

Yet, whether or not my heel-hook would stay on – allowing me to pull with it and reach the final hold of the problem – seemed more related to luck and cosmic forces rather than skill or technique. This bothered me. For days, I walked away frustrated, but also intrigued. What was so mystical about this heel hook that made it so difficult? The grade of the boulder was hard for me, but not novel. Every other move was difficult but consistently repeatable.

I considered changing my beta, using the more typical left heel hook that would be harder to reach for my short frame, yet, once established, easier to move off of. There was a chance that if I committed to the left outro, the time invested in the new method would lead to a quicker tick than if I kept trudging forward with my beta.

But I was stubborn.

“It was as if, because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged. And I sensed, without fully understanding why or how, that unless I could stitch my life together and situate myself along some firm axis, I might end up in some basic way living my life alone.”

Barack Obama, A Promised Land

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break

William Shakespeare

For my parents , with immense gratitude

For a few weeks afterwards, I often lied awake and wondered what finally lead me to my tipping point.

Just before I was to leave Seattle, on a gray December afternoon, I walked into my advisor’s office.

With five words I released what demons had been haunting me for the last year, as I moved apathetically through a Ph.D. program.

“I can’t do this anymore.”