‘Lascia ch'io pianga’

A visit to my Mum this weekend. She and I were briefly reminiscing over my PhD days. She remembers, in particular, how I used to wonder around the house complaining about my PhD, but in a silly, jokey way, interspersed with comedy wailing noises (my trademark was a sort of whingey, nasal ‘Waaaaaah!’… sound, obviously exaggerated, to let off steam.) (If you’re going to have a whinge, you might as well do it properly, with good sound effects.)

Anyway, she remembers one weekend in particular, when I was home, and she thought she could suddenly hear the whingeing noise, the ‘Waaaaaah!...’, issuing in one loud and continuous blast from somewhere in the house. She remembers thinking, oh God, if she hates it this much then maybe she should just stop this PhD!... Then she realized it was actually a car alarm that had gone off in the street.

My mum also remembers how I took my complaining to new levels: at one point, I was wandering about the house singing bits of the aria ‘Lascia ch'io pianga’ (my own, operatic/disco version, obvs). The words go

‘Lascia ch’io pianga mia cruda sorte/ E che sospiri la libertà.’

(Let me weep over my cruel fate/ And let me sigh for my freedom…’) (Appropriate, no?...)

It is a great song which I dedicate to all of you who are struggling with (or hating) your PhD thesis today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw1A5TQVwvQ

Happy writing! X

The Ghosts of Decisions Past

I was reading a beautiful thing the other day, which talked about how it feels to not yet know what you want to do in life, and to be unsure about the life choices you’ve made so far.

(For those of you who read this blog regularly, and who might have wondered how I got on the other day: by the way, I did not get the job. The interview wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t great, either; I’m just… not that good at research, and in interviews it shows. Applying for that job was a bit of a waste of time. I should just tattoo across my face: ‘DO NOT APPLY for academic jobs because YOU DO NOT LIKE THEM’, and every time I am tempted, I could run to the mirror and read it, over and over again. … Maybe I should just put a note on the mirror instead…)

Anyway, the thing I liked said this:

‘We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… We live everything as it comes, without warning.’

And

‘All the while, we walk forward accompanied by the specters of versions of ourselves we failed to or chose not to become.'

The ghosts which walk beside me. A beautiful and eloquent metaphor for indecision, the kind of life-indecision which often plagues me, if ever there was one. The PhD, and several of the life choices that led me to it, sometimes feel like a total waste of time; no career, no income, no job security, no maternity leave. (While I know that material wealth isn’t the only form of ‘capital’ there is, still, it’s a bit rubbish that things are still so touch-and-go...) Sometimes I can’t help but wonder where I might be in life now, had I only been ‘braver’ and had had the guts to leap into something more interesting. It’s at those time that those spectres of what-could-have-been sidle up to me and whisper in my ear: you could have been ME…

Some of these spectres look like this:

- There’s Corporate Cloud Nine (I went to a good university, I got a good degree; occasionally I run across an old classmate on LinkedIn, with a job title like ‘Director of Cool Programmes at the BBC’, or ‘Partner in Huge Law Firm’, or just generally something big and important.) This Cloud Nine, clad in an expensive suit, says ‘You could have gotten something done in this world and made enough money by now to be able to retire soon… Wouldn’t that be nice?’ (Occasionally she reappears as Diplomat Cloud Nine, who thinks I could be having adventures in foreign countries while getting paid properly for it.)

- There’s Arty Cloud Nine. This one pops up frequently, and asks ‘You sure it is too late to get started?... In a year or two, you’ll wonder why you never did…’ (This one is still mad at me for not letting her go to drama school when we were both eighteen. She’s convinced my life would have been a breeze if I hadn’t chickened out.)

- And now, Academic Cloud Nine has joined the throng. ‘But what if you did just apply for that job that’s come up at [The Nice University] – what if you did just work your ass off for a few years, staying up til 3 a.m. writing lectures? So what if you hate it, and it leaves you tired?... Isn’t this the best-paid job you can realistically get?...’

(And there’s a bunch of others, of more transient Cloud Nines; from other jobs I’ve had and not wanted to commit to, and also from other, more trivial decisions I’ve more recently made. ‘You should have had fish and chips for dinner; why did you order that crappy salad?...’ Or: ‘You’re wasting your time sitting here writing/ daydreaming; you’re on holiday! Shouldn’t you go to a museum?’ And, if I choose the latter, ‘Why are you going to a museum? Isn’t that a waste of time and money? Go sit in a coffee shop and write!’… )

So they walk beside me, these Ghosts of (In)Decisions Past, and I can’t seem to evade their company; maybe because the present Cloud Nine doesn’t have a strong enough sense of self, a strong enough outline, to make the others fade away? – so they keep coming up to me and whispering: ‘Are you sure it’s not me?...’ Thing is, the reason I don’t just tell them to go away is because they’re right about one thing: I’m not completely happy where I am in life, and I don’t always know where to go. I need to pick a ghost.

And I have. I’ve picked the one I want to be, for now at least, and I want to give this one a proper chance. I don’t need the others coming up to me and distracting me right now. I want to become really good at one thing, and do it nicely.

 The PhD was basically an exercise in indecision. It wasn’t a sound career move as much as it was just me clinging desperately to the ‘stay in school’ option. I have thus faffed about for nearly a third of the century, too scared to commit to ‘the wrong thing’. (Read Barbara Sher’s chapter “Help! I’m Not Ready to be Born Yet” in her book I Could Do Anything […] if this sounds like you.)

So I’m liking this writer’s idea of the ‘spectres’ very comforting much now; I feel a bit better knowing that maybe I’m not the only one who goes through life terrified of making the wrong choice and unable to give up these ghosts – the ghosts of successes that could have been, but never were.

And today I came across something cool in a public library’s gift shop, which kind of tells me how to make the ghosts get lost. It’s funny how sometimes when you are mulling something over and need answers, the universe just sort of throws them your way.

I found the following advice in a book in the shop; this is advice to young creatives starting out, and it goes ‘Build best-case scenarios in your imagination’.

The writer says,

‘One of my favourite thought exercises is the projection of multiple futures. It’s about revisiting your personal past and constructing branches of five, six, or seven possible futures. What decisions have I made in my life that have led up to this moment? […] No matter what we choose, a future on the other side of the fork in the road happened. That reality exists; it is just not ours. There is no sense stewing in regret because your best hopes and wishes exist in that other world out there.

With this knowledge in mind, we can preemptively construct these plural paths. Is it possible to open an exhibition this year? Can I be friends with these people I admire? Will I move to a city of my liking, working in exactly the ways I would otherwise envy? The answer is always yes to every possible future. If you have the courage to build a best-case scenario timeline in your imagination, that reality is already as good as real.’

And he says

‘My advice is: write a few fake CVs for versions of your future selves – craft them, let your ambition run wild, project a few futures. […] I promise you, as you print them out and hold your plural futures in your hands, you will gain a deep sense of clarity about what you want to do and what you do not care to do.’

(from Don’t Get a Job, Make a Job: How to make it as a creative graduate, by Gem Barton.)

I read this and it cheered me up. And the ghosts – even the most persistent ghosts – backed off for a minute. And the contours of the real ‘me’ seem a bit stronger.

Believing and Performing

Is there anything more stressful and more horrifying (in our pampered, otherwise happy, comfortable Western lives) than a job interview?...

Yes, yes there is: it’s the academic job interview.

‘Candidates will be expected to give a 5-minute presentation outlining their research intentions over the next four years…’

Or, also scary: ‘Candidates will be asked to deliver a 5-minute presentation on the outline of a course they would like to propose to the Department, based on their research…’

That insignificant, small, perfectly doable-looking thing (5 minutes, no problem, I can do that easy) completely takes over your life for the next week or two, or however long it is that you’ve got until that interview. Maybe I’m just sensitive, or slow, or terrible at research; I don’t know, but planning that 5 minute speech opens up can after intellectual can of worms: I realise, to my horror, that I don’t know anything.

It’s that thing where a teaching job is advertised, and you can’t quite resist the lure of it; you hesitate, because the job advert makes clear that research will be expected of you, and you're not convinced that research is your friend (cf. the entire body of writings here on ‘I Hate My PhD’); some well-meaning colleagues urge you to apply, telling you the job has your name on it; finally, a compliment from a student about your nice teaching makes you decide to go for it; you wade bravely into the sea of uncertainty and confusion that is writing a research proposal; before you know it, you are miles from the shore and you feel like you’re drowning, but you carry on, telling yourself, like Macbeth, I am in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more / Returning were as tedious as go o’er… (cf blog post where ‘I wonder what would have been a good time to quit.’)

And you carry on (no, it's fine, I can do this), and you watch, in horror, as the clock ticks on, and the time available to you for all the other things you have to do – prepare answers to questions about your teaching, research the institution, and so on – shrinks and shrinks, because that bloody 5-minute presentation is just not ready. You’ve needed so much time, so many days, just to get to grips with that 5 minute bit that you’re now wondering, shit, what about the other 40 minutes of the interview??...

Yes, I’ve been lured into it again: another academic job application. For a teaching job that I would really, really like to have, teaching things that I would really like to teach. But they want research too. So I’m sitting here, preparing to give it to them. I sometimes question the sanity of my actions.

I could go on and on about the horrors of the academic interview; the words they use, the myriad of topics you must be ready to talk about, the almost surreal scenario where you have to hold your own in front of, like, five senior academics who are experts in their field and yours… I won’t go on, because I haven’t got time, and also because I want to convince myself that I am amazing. Because there’s no point going in there unless I am going to go in there feeling utterly certain that I am God’s gift to scholarship and learning. So I refuse to say anything negative about this interview. I am amazing. I am God’s gift. I’ll be great tomorrow.

Here is a nice quotation from our friend Nietzsche (from his work Human, All Too Human…) which I think goes rather well with interviews (and vivas!).

'If someone obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something it is in the end hard for him to be anything else.

[...] With all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence... In the actual act of deception, with all its preparations, its enthralling voice, expression, and gesture, in the midst of the scenery designed to give it effect, they are overcome by belief in themselves; it is this which then speaks so miraculously and compellingly to those who surround them. [...] Self-deception has to exist if a grand effect is to be produced. For men believe in the truth of that which is plainly strongly believed.'

Unblocking the creative artist

Today, as for the past many days, I have been correcting my book manuscript. My editor (I have an editor!... Eeeeek! And WOOHOOO!) has suggested many changes. I’ve been sitting here, starting each day with mantras and positivity and excitement; each day has pretty much descended into boredom, resentment and rage, me wanting to throw a heavy tome at someone’s head. (I hate some of the changes I’ve been asked to do, which seem pointless and are taking ages; and I hate, already in advance, the unseen judge who will write a review of my academic book – formerly The Thesis – and will probably slag it off, the way academics do: ‘I was not convinced by’, ‘It is not clear why the author has chosen’, and so on.)

When I am not editing/ weeping/ snarling quietly/ slamming doors and storming off, I dip in and out of a lovely book I’ve been reading – which is called ‘The Artist’s Way', by Julia Cameron. (I love this book.  It’s like carrying around a kind friend in your bag pocket. I discovered it only a couple of weeks ago. Like all the other great books, it has of course been around for years, and I am only now discovering it – annoying, but perhaps now is when I need it most.)

This morning (buoyed by a positive pep talk by a guru friend the night before, who said nice things and reminded me to be positive, and suggested that I start my day with a positive visualization of exactly how great I will feel when my book is finished), I opened my Kindle to have a glance at ‘The Artist’s Way’. The page which presented itself to my astonished eyes bore the sub-heading: ‘Blasting Through Blocks’.

‘In order to work freely on a project, an artist must be at least functionally free of resentment (anger) and resistance (fear). […] Any buried barriers must be aired before the work can proceed. The same holds true for any buried payoffs for not working. They are, instead, recognizable artistic defences against what is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a hostile environment.’

This is what ‘The Artist’s Way’ recommends for ‘Blasting through Blocks’.

-       1. Write down any resentments to do with this project (these might be, say, I resent the fact that I’m being asked to do extra work I’m not getting paid for; I resent this editor, she just nitpicks; I resent the fact that I can’t write whatever I want, but everything I write is policed by some academics…)

-       2. Write down your fears (for example, I’m afraid this work will be rubbish; I’m afraid they won’t like it; I’m afraid the reviewers will pick on all the things I did wrong, and not praise any of the good things that I worked so hard on; I’m afraid that, if I write something by myself and it hasn’t been checked by clever friends and supervisors, then it’s not good enough… I’m afraid that I’m not good enough…)

-       3. Have you written them all down? Any secret anger or resentment or fear? Write it down now. (reread resentments and fears; sure I can think of some more…)

-       4. What do I gain by not doing this piece of work? What's the payoff for not working? (mine might be: if I don't do this piece of work, I can go for coffee, piss about, do yoga, play guitar. Write to a friend. Be happy, be free. Do something creative. If I don't write it, no-one will be able to hate it. If I don't do it, no-one will ever need to know it was a bit rubbish... [But then, surely it's better to have a slightly rubbish book out, than have an imaginary perfect book in my head that no one can read?...])

-       5. Make a pact with the ‘Creator’, which goes like this: ‘Okay, Creative Force. You take care of the quality, I’ll take care of the quantity’.

And now I’m writing…