For some reason, this is the week that the powers that be had set aside for us to consider the deeper questions of life such as ‘What is history?’ and ‘Why do we do it?’ Personally, I like to take a little more than a week for this kind of reflection. I had planned to spend quite a long time on it over the summer, as a kind of under-current to whatever series of adventures I decided to go on. Unfortunately, as we know, the only entity that got to have adventures this summer was the COVID-19 virus. It was hard on my family because we’re multi-national to the core and find ourselves cut off from our social networks and cultural spaces. It was hard because it exacerbated the fragility of the institutions we depend on, leaving us in precarious and stressful situations at times. And for me, it was hard because it meant six grinding months of isolation without solitude, conducted with a personality type and line of work that demand the opposite.
The point I’m working around to is that instead of spending the week casting a shallow glance over why I was doing history, I crashed and burned, starting on about Thursday morning. Seen in relevant context, this is not as early in the scheme of things as it might appear. I find it mildly amusing to read books about starting a PhD. They chatter on quaintly about getting set up, looking around and organising things before you actually start. In reality, this business of ‘starting a PhD’ strikes me as very similar to the experience of motherhood. You don’t suddenly arrive at it feeling as fresh as a primrose. Far from it. It’s very much the continuation of a more or less gruelling nine months of pregnancy followed by some hours of more or less gruelling labour.
The pregnancy part of my PhD process was not an easy one. I had budgeted for morning sickness (the rounds of form-filling and proposal writing which I did not really have time for). I expected to miscarry by default, then learned to my astonishment that there was hope of a viable outcome, but nevertheless spent the next five months in a state of terrifying uncertainty (due to administrative failures). In the eighth month of the process, its original co-instigator – I’m dropping the pregnancy metaphor for a moment, lest it get weird – at any rate, the original co-instigator, that is to say my ex-future-supervisor, disappeared suddenly. I found out by accident, and was naturally a little stunned. Nevertheless, the culture I currently inhabit does what many others do to preserve social stability in this kind of circumstance: it assigns a substitute more or less at random. This could have gone terribly wrong, so I count myself lucky. Regarding the person I have been assigned, I have some confidence that we can work together. I have rather less confidence in the outcome should anything happen to him.
So much for the pregnancy. The birth was not very pleasant either. In fact, it was humiliating, degrading, and exhausting. It is understood that there are hoops to jump through and criteria to meet during a PhD application process, especially if funding is involved. Once that victory was won, I had not expected to have to beg, plead, and rally patrons to intercede in my favour at every single step of the enrolment process. It does not make me feel the least bit better to observe that the culture I currently inhabit seems to consider this a regular rite of passage, or to recognise that some students are faring worse than I did (though some fared better). Instead, it makes me feel nauseous to observe my peers still struggling with administrative mayhem, like flies trying to swim in spider-web soup.
Still, here I am, holding the ‘baby’, having reached safe haven just last week. What I would really like to do now is take a couple of weeks off (or perhaps four). As those of us who have experienced motherhood know, that’s simply not on the cards. The baby is here and its presence brooks no ignoring. Given these circumstances, what I would like to do is take a couple of weeks (or four) to spend time just getting to know this ‘baby’. Unfortunately, the culture I currently inhabit seems to fear that if it leaves us alone too much we will vanish in a lack of structure. That, I suppose, is why it starts us off with a round of readings and seminars. For many reasons, the online format of seminars this year is much, much easier for me to access. I am very grateful (in a strange way) to be doing this in a year when everything is online. The real problem is that the readings for the seminars are a) of very variable interest, and b) time-consuming enough to interfere with the PhD-related work I want to be doing. The underlying problem is that I am a part-time student, and they are meant to take a up a reasonable chunk of a full-time student’s timetable. Even worse, the tacit assumption that a part-time student will put in a nice, steady 20 hours of PhD-ing a week falls apart in my case. Sometimes I can study full-time and sometimes I must work full-time. The hours balance out over the course of a year rather than a week or month. As it happens, my busy time of year in the non-PhD world begins around the 15th of October and ends in early January. It started this week, then, just after the last set of crises and stressors ended.
Hence the crash-and-burn. I haven’t quite decided what to do about this yet. It’s a question of priorities. My instinct says the PhD should win, but some other part of me says to take the eight hours over the next couple of weeks to clear the ‘busy-work’ that’s been sent my way and then start. We shall see…