This is me trying (or, on not being there for nearly a year)

I was torn between waiting until it had “officially” been a year of me doing this PhD to write a post, but also feeling the immediate and unrelenting itch under my skin to emote about it right now.

Sorry I’ve been slacking, it’s been a lot. Funny how your desire to write and read shrivels and dies when you you have the knowledge hanging just behind you like a wraith that every word and second and keystroke counts and will be judged and proofed and tweaked ten times over. Such a fun and cool thing that I get to feel for six more years. At least this doesn’t count toward anything, I can make all the typos and use all the colloquial language I want, no one can stop me. asddfltbsaryadkgh.

Speaking of shrivelling and dying, it’s coming up to the first year of my PhD being over, which is a weirdly confronting feeling, especially when I am the only person in my cohort studying part-time. I have adored seeing all my friends pass their confirmation reviews, but I have adored slightly less the gnawing and impending dread at the concept of mine approaching because I am nowhere near ready. Nor should I be. I have another eight months until I have to do that. Does that matter to me and my brain? Of course not. It’s almost impossible not to feel left behind, and that is a feeling I am not very good at managing. I’ve always been someone who wants to be GREAT at something IMMEDIATELY, which is of course a mindset that sets you up for a battle right from the off. PhDs are marathons, not sprints, and I need to remember that or I might keel over sooner rather than later, but I just can’t help but define myself in opposition to everyone’s achievements because I’m the only one who’s not there yet.

Working full time doesn’t help with this feeling. I miss out on the chats people have while they are writing and working together in the department, I don’t go to events, I don’t get to have the serendipitous conversations in passing in the corridors or cafes because I’m just not there. After work I need to crawl into my anti-masking silence hole, and the weekends are taken up with actually doing the PhD, laundry, hoovering, and y’know, enjoying my life if and when I can snatch an hour. I know, I know, the exhaustion hell is one of my own making, but that isn’t what I am lamenting right now (much). It’s the fact the community I know I am part of still feels just out of reach, the fact that I feel peripheral, secondary, and not there...and also really fucking tired all the time.

All this woe is me hooting and hollering is all to say that this first year has been…interesting. There have been highlights, of course there have – I have spoken at conferences, I won an academic poster competition, I have made great friends, I get to call myself a PhD researcher. The actual PhD though? The actual process of the admin, the research, the meetings, the supervisions, the hoops, the networking, the culture…that has been far harder. Trying to do all of this and be meaningfully engaged in the research culture while I am at my desk at work is heart-breaking and a relief in equal measure. I know myself, I know I’m not the best at people and networking and mingling and being an open book so the pre-built option to avoid that isn’t entirely unwelcome…but for what feels like the first time in my life I would love the chance to try it, just a little bit. The events I have managed to attend have been great, full of likeminded people and great conversations. This want in me is new, and I feel like I keep doing it a disservice. Sending a draft to my supervisor and seeing it come back bleeding Google Doc comments feels like it would shake me less if I could commit time, like, really commit time to making it better, not just snatched moments at lunches or Saturday mornings, and if I could chat about it around a watercooler or at a desk cluster with coffee and biscuits with people that get it.

The hardest bit, though, is this – the admitting that it has been hard.

This PhD is the thing I have always wanted to do, this is the thing that I thought I was meant for…and me finding it hard doesn’t mean that is not true, but the voices get loud, sometimes. There are good days and there are bad days, and that is life. It’s a comforting feeling knowing that my passion still keeps me going, and the thrill of weaving together connections and lines of argument from obscure sources still hits like crack (probably), but I think that having an honest conversation, or whatever this is, about the difficulties is important. I’m canonically fucking terrible at sharing my feelings (the assessors and medical professionals put that down to my “emotional and communicative barriers”, which is nice, isn’t it?), so even thinking about writing down the concept of the feeling of the idea that this whole PhD thing is a bit tough has me feeling like someone is trying to pull out my liver. But here I am, committing those liver-wrenching words to the internet.

Aren’t I brave?

Anyway, back to the grind – at least I’m trying.