The Dissertation Rollercoaster (Part 1)
Hi! I’ve not checked in for awhile. Dare I say that there hasn’t been time? I did want to be one of those “regular posters”— but I know that the point of this blog (what it’s starting to morph into) is not to push out “content”, but to chronicle my personal journey. Who knows, maybe forever, as I plan on being a Slow Scholar for the long haul. It is my ideal lifestyle, my wished-for vocation–I just have to make it work.
Happily, I cannot remember the final weeks of May very well. I was mired in a general Anxiety with no particular cause (this just happens sometimes, once in awhile I have a week where it’s just Existential Dread Week, no matter what I do) but it passes. (I have to remember that it always passes). Does this happen to other people? Maybe I should mark it on the calendar to keep track. Is it physiological, or the madness of the moon? Or just the regular, cyclical Doubt derived from being a human with one short life?
The thing is, life is going so unabashedly well right now, my usual state is happiness and all my external circumstances are fine (indeed fortunate). This helped me to remember, in the midst of the plaguing Uncertainty, that this unexplained Unease, would in time, lift.
And it did. Thankfully.
Looking back, I can be much more cool about it (as I am removed from it) and I can provide a short summary of what was actually happening (all anguish extracted). I had two set-backs during the last little while, if I’m totally honest, the feelings of Malaise actually happened before the setbacks. If I can give any advice from this, it is that we may not know why we feel a bit miserable sometimes—so during this time it’s best not to act. When something less than ideal actually happens however, something concrete and objective, then is the time to assess, do your best, and act.
Setback #1, which hit in the beginning of June, was that I realized that I had had a piece of data-collection work for my thesis done twice–and that I had PAID for it to be done twice. Ugh I cried to the heavens! I don’t have resources to burn like this! And there is still SO MUCH data that needs collection!
Sometimes, when money is so tight and I am trying to do my best to manage it, and unexpected expenses crop up when you are trying so hard, I like to say a personal nonsense verse to myself to calm me: “It’s fine—I will get it back 800-fold.” (Why “800”—no one knows). But it helps calm me down. Because there is always the potential money is lost, what can you do? You have to let it go and look to the future. In this case, I realized that I have a lot of irons in the fire, that this was bound to happen eventually if I didn’t step up my organizational game (which I have now done, with lists of tablets in Dropbox, on paper, AND in my phone). In this way, life grew me.
Setback #2 is still sitting on the fence, deciding if it is truly a “setback” or not. Possibly the source of the Malaise, I was feeling suddenly Overwhelmed in the beginning of June (more so than normal). After much suffering, I realized that I was constantly wondering whether my PhD project is too big, on some lower-level of consciousness. Finally, I realized, that if I just “think” my project is too big, I’m just idling in Uncertainty. I have to do the actual calculations!
As W. Edwards Deming said:
“Without data you are just another person with an opinion.”
Too true. Eventually I realized that I had to go back to my original (read: WAY TOO OVERZEALOUS) time-frame, and actually realistically estimate the ACTUAL time everything is going to take, by counting the blocks of texts on individual tablets (I study ancient Sumerian clay tablets if I haven’t said before), starting from the very real standpoint of early June (now, and not an imaginary ideal point in the past). This only too 40 minutes to do (but until I did it I was living in an unhappy daze) and I came up with some startling figures.
You see, for my thesis I intended to study 138 ancient clay tablets in depth. (Originally this total was over 800—so melts snow in the sun). I had told myself that 138 is fine, I will do 8 per month and finish by the middle of next year (2020). There are 2 problems with this plan: one is that not all tablets are tablets the same, some have 20 columns of written text on them, some have 2, and the second is that so far this year I have been engaged on one of the most difficult (um, in the world) tablets, so that my monthly accomplishments hang around 2 tablets studied, not 8.
In fact, to do my whole study as it stands now, assuming no Setbacks (but also no assistants) it will take 3 years 2 months from June of this year (just to get all the data!!!) And, if I cut about 45 tablets out (25%-ish of the corpus) it will still take 2 years 4 months. Being confronted with reality in this way was indeed necessary, but it did give me a couple worried nights.
But, when you are IN it, when this is what you’ve chosen, freiwillig as the Germans say–this is your life! I can do it, I’ll find a way.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post wherein I describe the 2.5 new Good Things that have developed over the last little while.
Ciao!