It’s been a rough week on a personal level, with death, natural(-ish) disaster, and disintegration affecting my circle of family and friends. Meanwhile, COVID19 cases are rising again in the UK, so it looks as if our brief illusion of relative freedom may be over for a while longer. Sometimes stress shuts me down on the work front, especially if I feel I need to do something about a problem. With the above, I’m powerless and I know it.
There has been some disruption. It’s been one of those weeks where it’s hard to find the 20 hours I’m supposed to be putting in. On the other hand, I’ve found that focusing on my dissertation takes my mind off other things. At this point, I have an explicit, day-by-day plan to get to the finishing line. Even that was a bit tough this week, because I finally had to address some issues of referencing and word-count that arise because of the particular structure of my project. Theoretically, I don’t have much official and appropriate academic support at the moment, so I’m mostly winging it. I suspect some of my solutions could lose me marks if they fall under the eyes of the unsympathetic, but they’re the best compromise I could come up with.
However, I’ve also been agitating a bit. It’s one of those situations where it’s hard to decide when to leave people alone when I know they must be overwhelmed, and when I really, really need to call in the support I’m supposed to be getting anyway. I think some kind and overworked people may have just become the ‘victims’ of me displacing my powerlessness from the other disasters into something I might actually be able to get some control over! Basically, after leaving my institution and its staff alone for six whole months and quietly getting on with my work by myself, I sent out a flurry of emails: to my academic advisor, to my probable future supervisor, to my course convenor, to the only other PhD student I currently know…
I’m glad I did. My academic advisor is lovely and talking to her really helped. My course convenor is Superwoman incarnate, and answered my word-count question about 3.5 minutes after I posed it. I still don’t know my future PhD supervisor really, but I will get to meet with him next week. I had the personal assurance of the institution’s admin that I’ll be getting an enrolment email by the end of the week. That didn’t happen (what a surprise!) but they did persuade me to believe that it might eventually.