It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post. It’s been difficult, if not outright impossible, to do so. On the one hand, I’d like to say that there is so much going on in my life right now but in reality, there is really only one thing that has dominated my entire existence for the past few months and will continue to do so for months to come: the PhD thesis.

I’ve started writing the long anticipated document. I have about a fifth of the 100,000 words required. It’s been a slow slog getting here but at least, I think I am moving in the right direction. Writing is harder than I thought it would be. A lot of effort and reading goes into every word that is produced and just when you think you might finally have a grasp on things, you discover that there is yet more to do. There is always more and more you could, and need, to do… It’s exasperating. It’s sometimes demoralising. It’s always tiring.

In between all this, I got a job teaching in the Department’s masters programme. The experience has been invaluable. Not only will it come in handy as something to cite when I start applying for academic jobs - if and when I finish this God-damn PhD - but I’ve also learned a lot, in a more conscious manner, about what makes for good academic writing, which comes in handy in writing my own thesis. This comes at a price of course. Time spent teaching is time that could have been used for my own PhD-related work. But that, of course, assumes that I would have used that time wisely rather than fritter it away on non-PhD-related activities…

Which brings me, trying to have a balanced life when you’re in the last leg of a PhD is a near impossible feat. Nevermind keeping up with my gym routine, or finding time to have coffee and catch up with mates, it’s been a chore trying to squeeze time of out my days just to do grocery shopping. It’s an effort and one that I forcibly make for fear of starving to death. Thus, the fact that I even manage to keep a mid-distance relationship going is an achievement in itself. Or perhaps, it’s a reflection of priorities that I hold dear.

But this is the glossy summary of the state of my life.

In truth, it’s hard to really talk about my life right now. All kinds of thoughts are swimming in my head that it’s impossible to get any clarity on anything other than what’s most urgent. I worry constantly about whether I would ever finish the thesis. I worry whether it would be any good, if I did complete it. There’s an ever growing list of things that need to be done in that regard and another list of things I wish I could get around to but I know I never will. At the same time, I’ve started to think about life after the PhD: what opportunities would be open to me, jobs I would get, where I would live. The fear and uncertainties sometimes paralyse me, and explains the silence on my blog. That I manage to focus on the thesis and the teaching is an achievement in itself and even then, I know I’m not always doing very well…

Matt wrote a blog post a week back that conveyed the sense of this paralysis best:

I worry massively that its not good enough. I worry that I am so tired of the topic that I will never reach the end of the process. … I feel resigned that its never going to finish. I feel angry that it has taken me this long to produce something so clearly “mediocre”, and I feel exhausted every time I look at it. I don’t have the words to explain to people who haven’t done this just how all consuming it has become to my life, to my sense of enjoyment and my ability to do anything other than sit here with it. This isn’t to say that it is in some way an experience that is “better” or “more severe” than others experience, I don’t have the baseline of assessment to state that. But it is, to me, the beginning of my day and the end of it. I wake up and think about it, I go to sleep and dream of it. It populates every one of the 24 hours, and it has done so for longer than I remember. I don’t have space for me in this, I may be able to carve out 24 hours outside of the office, or 2 hours to watch Big Brother, but I can’t carve out 1 second where the work isn’t with me as a voice in my head. It’s like having multiple personalities and they all say the same thing. I resent that its eaten my life, even as I realise I can never live the life I want to without it. It is as if I have poured my hopes and fears and ability and weaknesses into 289 pages and that now my soul resides on the page, not in my body. It is apotheosis and nadir in uneasy cohabitation.

I live in a bubble that’s about to implode. Talking is just not high on the list of things I could and should do right now.

Posted on May 21st, 2008 by jl
Filed under: Life!, Uncategorized, work