Still here

Still at it. Still haven't quit. Still not writing anything. Still sitting here, waiting for a miracle to happen, writing little notes to myself every day, trying to keep going. 

What is going on with me? …  The PhD is dead. I can’t seem to write a thing. I have made the decision not to quit and to keep going, even though in my brain there is a little voice that says move on…. Move on! It doesn’t have to be called ‘quitting’. It could be called ‘moving on…’ I have decided not to quit, least of all because I don’t want to have to explain to siblings, grannies, and the Lover, that, after all this time, I have given up. But at the same time, I am not writing anything useful.

Let’s look at some of the problems:

-       I am bored. I think  it may have been Picasso who once said that, if you know exactly what you are going to do, then why would you bother doing it? That’s exactly how I feel about planning: once you have planned the chapter and you roughly know where to put what, there is no interest in writing it all down. I know I can do it; I just can’t muster up the enthusiasm to do it. It doesn’t help that my RSI has flared up, and my hand hurts. (it’s my fault, really; all those years spent showing off how good I am at opening jars and vodka bottles are now coming back to haunt me.)

-       I DON’T WANT TO. I keep sitting down to work. Then I remember: I don’t like my work. And then I stare into space for a while.

-       My mind keeps wandering off to other things. I have agreed to teach a course, for money, on a thing I know very little about. (this is not entirely my fault, by the way. I did initially refuse, but they kept pestering me, telling me how much they need me, how much they would appreciate it if I did this; they kept sweet-talking me, and in the end I caved in, if only for the money and for the dubious prestige of having ‘something on my CV’ other than ‘wrote a PhD, for about fifty years’.

-       I’m scared. What is there to look forward to, once I finish this PhD?... by then, surely I will need money so badly that I will be grateful for any job that comes along. Therefore, I am writing this PhD, for what exactly? So that, after this horrible job, I can (if I am lucky), walk straight into…. Another horrible job?... I am scared of several things, therefore: that I will never do a good PhD anyway, because I am not clever, so why bother; that there is no point in finishing it, because … it won’t give me anything; and that I should somehow be using this time to get some sort of work experience, so that I have a hope in hell of getting a job afterwards that I might actually like.

-       There is a pile of stuff in front of me which needs doing. The examination entry form to be sent to the exams office (aaargh). The pile of receipts from conferences that I never claimed for, and which now I am frankly ashamed to send in, because they are so out of date; the train tickets that I must get a refund for, because they overcharged me; the savings account that needs updating. The invoice for the last job I did. The handbook for that bloody course I agreed to teach. There is a million things, real-world type things, that I need to get around to doing. Every time I start to do them, I think, no, I have to concentrate on this bit of PhD. But as I can’t actually put them out of my mind, neither one nor the other really gets done.

-       My birthday. Birthday month is upon me. This means only one thing: birthday. I would quite like to enjoy the last few weeks of my twenties. I would quite like to spend some time with a few nice people, without either me or them feeling like this is a massive imposition on my time. I would like to spend this month enjoying myself, enjoying being me, doing things that make me ‘me’, and not crying because I have an impossible thing to do. (the fact that it’s my birthday month is not a problem as such, mind. It’s just another thing which I know will cut into my time, and there is nothing I can do about it, except enjoy it. but how, how can you enjoy birthday when there is all this…)

-       Somewhere in my inbox there is an email from my supervisor, short and succinct and elegantly phrased, and it goes something like this: I hope you are surging ahead with your thesis. We should set up a meeting. Help…

Plan for this afternoon, therefore:

-       after I have peeled myself off this floor, will attempt to write 200 words of this chapter (something which I have been trying, and failing, to do all morning.

-       Whether I have achieved this or not: I will go into town and buy printer ink, run a couple of Important Errands, and therefore be ready for phase 2, which will be:

-       Print off the claims form for those bloody receipts on my desk. Put them in an envelope, ready to send off tomorrow. (likewise: get exams form ready; anything that needs sending off, put it in a nice envelope and write the address on it.

-       Email the people from the course and set the ball rolling: ask questions,, sort things out.

So, in short: I feel like I am drowning in stuff. I wish the real world could just… go away. I wish I could run off and go live in a hotel for a week, living off croissants stolen at breakfast, seeing no-one, doing nothing. Thinking about nothing but my thesis. I can’t juggle this life/thesis thing any more. 

‘Simply like a dress’

So many things to say, so little time. There are so many things I want to put on this blog, but so little time to sit down and type them all out. I keep running across little scraps of paper in my handbag, in my rucksack, or in my coat pocket, scraps on which I have noted down my little thoughts and ‘witticisms’ that I would like to share on here but just never got around to posting. But it’s nice to run across them, and to remember.

Today’s ‘note-to-self’ (inspired by Fashion Week, by a quick browse on a few shopping sites this morning -  and also a little note to self which I found amongst my papers the other day) will be about clothes.

I heard something cool one day, and I wrote it down and recently found it again, and here it is: apparently, what Proust said of his massive novel In Search of Lost Time, is that he does not want his work to be ‘like a cathedral’ (a massive thing you enter into, look around, ponder, and then leave; a thing you remain separate from, it does not mark you or affect you), but that he wants the reader to ‘wear’ it, ‘simply, like a dress’ (tout simplement comme une robe); the reading of the book should become part of you, it should be something you enjoy ‘wearing’, it should change you somehow, for the better, and it should ‘suit’ you (I think this is a brilliant analogy; what you read does indeed affect you, and stay with you, and become a part of you).

I have a lot of dresses. A LOT. I have often thought of the analogy between the things we dress up in, things that suit us/ don’t suit us, the various horrors in the wardrobe which we bought because they looked good on a younger sister, the things we’re holding on to because we think ‘ah but if I had it altered/ if I were slimmer/ had longer legs/ bigger boobs/ etc, it might fit’ – and between the things we do, the activities we go for, the jobs and lifestyles they choose. The ones that fit and make us look at ourselves with pleasure, and the ones that don’t quite fit and make us look uncomfortable/ want to hide away/ wish we could run home and change. The ones we bought into because they looked good on someone else. With the jobs and the lifestyles, it’s the same as with clothes, really; you try something on to see if it fits, you have a moment of madness and buy it and take it home, and you might eventually find yourself wondering what was I thinking?...

Here is what I wrote down on that piece of paper:

My PhD is like an ill-fitting grey dress I bought because it looked good on someone else.

More about this soon.

‘To Weep, or Not To Weep’

"To weep is to make less the depth of grief" (William Shakespeare).

“I have full cause of weeping, but this heart shall break into a hundred thousand flaws or ere I'll weep” (ibid.).

Recently, I have tried to follow instructions from a fantastic book, called ‘Writing your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day’, by Joan Bolker. (I will write more about this book soon. It doesn’t actually do what it says on the tin, of course, ie. help you write your dissertation by only working for 15 minutes a day, but one of the things it suggests is that if you are completely stuck, then writing for even ten minutes a day – about anything – can help you get started. If you are unable to write anything at all, then writing for ten minutes a day is, as Bolker suggests, an infinite improvement. So anyway, recently, I have tried to fit in ten minutes of ‘writing’ – free writing, writing a bit of thesis, writing a note to myself about what I am doing. It’s kind of what I already did anyway, you might say. Except this time I try to make sure that days don’t go by in which there is no writing at all, and I’m pretty sure it makes a difference. And I have gathered quite a collection of little notes-to-self.)

Today’s note-to self will be about crying. To cry or not to cry? More specifically, should one cry in front of one’s PhD supervisor, or should one not?

Here is why: say you have recognized that you struggle with your PhD a lot, and that perhaps some of this is due to feeling low/ unconfident/ depressed/ whatever. Say you also realise that, of course, your supervisor has no inkling of this. You might have noticed your supervisor saying things like ‘well, at least now you’re not totally ignoring [his/ her earlier advice and suggestions], but now try and [implement them more]’. You might realize that when you are completely at a loss as to how to complete a particular assignment, your supervisor may not know that this is because you have found something difficult or impossible to do, but may think that you’re being lazy or just ignoring useful instructions and advice. You might think that you’ve been doing the right thing by going into your meetings armed with positive thoughts only and determined to find solutions, rather than offload problems – joyful smile plastered resolutely onto face, in place of habitual tearful scowl. You might even have congratulated yourself on how well you’ve been hiding your uselessness. It's OK; he/she will never know. But now you’re wondering if this was a good idea, and if maybe honesty (full-blown, red-faced, and weeping) might not have been the better (if much scarier) policy, from the word go.

Do you cry in front of people, or do you not? I, for one, must confess that I find the thought of crying in front of other people fills me with horror. To let yourself be seen at your most vulnerable – well, let’s not even go there. Only once or twice in my adult life (my childhood, we shall not mention) did I do this, and the looks on my friends’ faces when I did it were so horrified that I knew it had not been a good idea. Crying makes my face look hideous (I wish I could pull off that attractive dewy-eyed, pink-cheeked look, which actresses seem to be able to do, but with me it’s more a case of tomato-red face and blubbering lips; my face just seems to sprawl in all directions when I cry, and my voice goes all over the place, too; thick, uncontrollable gasps and sobs). And the trouble is, once those floodgates open, there is no going back. So I try not to cry in public; and if I ever do, I disguise it immediately (loose, long hair is great for hiding behind; and pretending to stare thoughtfully out of the window – face turned away from companion, pose thoughtful and serene – also does the trick.)

Would I ever, therefore, impose any of this horror on my poor, lovely supervisor? Of course not. This person is not my therapist, for goodness’ sake. Nor, I tell myself, did this person directly make me cry. Yet when I posed the question to fellow- and ex- students and postgraduates, the response was overwhelmingly pro-weeping. The confessions ranged from the mildly surprising -  ‘yeah, I’ve cried in front of my tutor now and again’ – to the frankly astonishing: ‘oh my God, go for it!... I cry in front of my supervisor all the time – I’ve even cried in research project meetings, with lots of other people there.’ I would never have guessed. Apparently, it’s a thing, and everyone is doing it.

‘How are you getting along with your supervisor?’ asked the nice middle-aged lady counsellor with the clipboard. (yes, I have finally done it; I have typed the words ‘student counselling services’ into the search engine, and I have emailed them and asked for an appointment. I have somehow found words to describe how bad I sometimes feel, and I have typed those words nicely into the relevant bit of the self-referral form. I have finally got it into my head that you can do this.)

‘Fine’, I said, and I described, more or less truthfully, how we are getting along; but somewhere along the way, my brain must have registered the alternative ending: she means, are you able to talk to your supervisor about this stuff? And the answer would be – no, there is no way I would ever risk my voice getting wobbly in front of my supervisor, the way it just wobbled unsteadily throughout the 50-minute appointment with you.

Anyway, I went into my latest supervision armed with chocolate (by way of a gift), a bit of a chapter I had written, and a bold resolve: today, I will tell my supervisor how it’s really been going, and how I really feel. Spurred on by my friend who cries in meetings with loads of people, I was determined to let myself go. But – and here is the annoying thing – I didn’t cry. I didn’t even feel low. I did talk about how shitty I feel sometimes, and my supervisor did listen and respond, but we basically had a very productive supervision, with positive things happening. And the chocolate was definitely a good idea.

Turns out, you don’t have to weep in front of your PhD supervisor. Surprisingly, just talking to other people about this, and laughing about it – ‘oh my God, do it!’ ‘OK! I will!’ – kind of helps the problem.

Have you ever cried in front of your supervisor, and if not, would you?... Send us your comments below.

Reading Balzac, taking Prozac

A writer whose work I quite like once wrote something clever about … well, about writing, and creating, and about the pleasures of conception as opposed to the blinding, awful pain of the ‘giving birth’ part. He says that creating your work of art – making a statue, writing your book, or completing your PhD thesis* – requires the same kind of unflappable devotion that a mother gives to her baby; while the conception of it was great fun, afterwards you have to be prepared to go through the painful childbirth, not to mention the bit where you look after it, day after day, night after night, putting it to bed full of milk every evening and taking care of it every single day of your life for a very long time. If you don’t do that, the ‘baby’ (statue, book, PhD thesis) dies.

Read it; it’s great stuff. It made me think, however, that having an actual baby as opposed to a PhD thesis must have at least one big advantage – in that babies are adorable, and people usually want to take them off your hands now and again, for an hour or so. If you are very lucky, you might even have in-laws, who, if they are normal people, will probably be dying to be allowed to have it for a day or so. You might, if you play your cards right, even get them to take it and look after it for you for a weekend. A whole weekend, and someone else does the 'putting it to bed full of milk' for you!... At the very least, you might be able to get someone to hold on to it for an evening – your husband, or boyfriend, or best friend, or Mum – while you go have a shower and go sit in a dark room for a while, or go get your hair done, or whatever. Babies are adorable. People WANT to get them to cuddle for a while. People ask, 'may I please hold him?' If anything, you have to put them off, to stop them putting their grubby hands all over your baby for a while.**

Now, my PhD thesis is quite a different kettle of fish. Does anyone ever want to ‘hold’ it? No. Want to have a look? ... No. Anyone fancy a bit of a cuddle?... DIDN'T THINK SO. If I ever utter the words ‘Do you want to read it?’ – people’s eyes either glaze over, or else start darting around in a panicked way from side to side, scouting out the nearest exit. Forget about getting someone to actually help you rephrase a bit of it, or helping you edit a bit of it; only the most hardcore of friends and lovers (and supervisors) would even go near all that stuff. My PhD is like a really ugly, smelly baby, which throws up on you. I have to clean up its mess alone.

OK, I exaggerate a bit. But read the thing below: it’s good stuff. He goes on to distinguish between two types of ‘artists’: those who are great company and who can talk with great passion about their work (but don’t necessarily have the stamina and work ethic to actually get those things done), and then those who, instead of being all ‘interesting’ and fun to be with, sit down and get down to it, and actually get stuff done. I won’t tell you which one sounds more like me, but you can probably guess, especially if I tell you that, when I read this, I remained pensive for some time… (‘And the Marquise remained pensive’…)

I love it especially when he says that idleness is ‘the normal condition of all artists, since to them idleness is fully occupied.’

Read it. And then go work on your PhD again.

***

To muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful occupation. It is like smoking a magic cigar or leading the life of a courtesan who follows her own fancy. The work then floats in all the grace of infancy, in the mad joy of conception […].

The man who can sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking it clean, dressing it a hundred times in the richest garb only to be instantly destroyed; then never to be cast down at the convulsions of this headlong life till the living masterpiece is perfected […]! This is the task of execution. The hand must be ready at every instant to come forward and obey the brain. But the brain has no more a creative power at command than love has a perennial spring.

The habit of creativeness, the indefatigable love of motherhood which makes a mother […]—the maternity of the brain, in short, which is so difficult to develop, is lost with prodigious ease. Inspiration is the opportunity of genius. She does not indeed dance on the razor's edge, she is in the air and flies away with the suspicious swiftness of a crow; she wears no scarf by which the poet can clutch her; her hair is a flame; she vanishes like the lovely rose and white flamingo, the sportsman's despair. And work, again, is a weariful struggle, alike dreaded and delighted in by these lofty and powerful natures who are often broken by it. A great poet of our day has said in speaking of this overwhelming labor, "I sit down to it in despair, but I leave it with regret." Be it known to all who are ignorant! If the artist does not throw himself into his work as Curtius sprang into the gulf […]; if he contemplates the difficulties before him instead of conquering them one by one, like the lovers in fairy tales, who to win their princesses overcome ever new enchantments, the work remains incomplete; it perishes in the studio where creativeness becomes impossible, and the artist looks on at the suicide of his own talent.

[…]

Perpetual work is the law of art, as it is the law of life, for art is idealized creation. Hence great artists and perfect poets wait neither for commission nor for purchasers. They are constantly creating—to-day, to-morrow, always. The result is the habit of work, the unfailing apprehension of the difficulties which keep them in close intercourse with the Muse and her productive forces. […]

While Lisbeth kept Wenceslas Steinbock in thraldom in his garret, he was on the thorny road trodden by all these great men, which leads to the Alpine heights of glory. Then happiness, in the person of Hortense, had reduced the poet to idleness—the normal condition of all artists, since to them idleness is fully occupied. Their joy is such as that of the pasha of a seraglio; they revel with ideas, they get drunk at the founts of intellect. Great artists, […] wrapped in reverie, are rightly spoken of as dreamers. They, like opium-eaters, all sink into poverty, whereas if they had been kept up to the mark by the stern demands of life, they might have been great men.

At the same time, these half-artists are delightful; men like them and cram them with praise; they even seem superior to the true artists, who are taxed with conceit, unsociableness, contempt of the laws of society. This is why: Great men are the slaves of their work. Their indifference to outer things, their devotion to their work, make simpletons regard them as egotists […]. These artists, who are too rarely matched to meet their fellows, fall into habits of solitary exclusiveness; they are inexplicable to the majority, which, as we know, consists mostly of fools—of the envious, the ignorant, and the superficial.

*I added the bit about the PhD thesis. I would definitely file 'writer of a PhD thesis' under 'Artist/ Bard'. 

** about the babies: I don't actually have one, mind, and only time will tell whether or not one day I'll actually eat my words, and realise that having a baby is The Hardest Thing Ever, and my idea that 'people WANT to hold it!' is actually wrong. Until then, please let me believe that I am currently doing The Hardest Thing Ever. I'll worry about the other hard things in life when this one's done.