A post about PhDs, change and snow shovels.

It’s early afternoon and I am writing from home (third coffee in hand). Really what I am trying to do is find some energy to at least do something with the day. This post is a little more about the PhD than I had planned, but I’ve gone with it. I seem to be doing that thing this weekend where it’s cold outside and I'm embracing the inside being very warm and relaxing. So I’ve been out to the shop to buy all the soup ingredients and am ready now to take on the world by bulk-making green soup for the week (OK that doesn’t really work, but soup seems to be my thing at the moment). I’ve been on the sofa for most of the weekend so far with the heating on full blast, just getting re-adjusted to being back at home, being in January and being in the new term. Sort of preparing myself for the next batch of teaching prep and marking whilst knowing there’s a lot of PhD work to do. The PhD isn't just the ‘doing’, but it's the processing and decision making and battling with the ‘Tanya you don’t know what you’re doing, you are doing everything wrong, you are letting people down’ type of thoughts. Quite sure this is pretty normal, you just need to follow phdchat hashtag or be part of academic social media groups to know that this is the norm. So it’s OK. I am adjusting to all of this, from the very warm indoors.

I don’t even want to look at my ever-expanding to-do list to tell me how to spend the day. I know it’s full of marking and writing and teaching prep and admin. But I did look at my actual diary which seems to have ‘PhD’ scheduled in *all* day. (I really have written that in, you know, in case I forget that I have a PhD to do). I did say this was a bit more about PhD than planned… I had it scheduled in all day yesterday too, but instead I wrote a lecture on sibling relationships and the sociology of childhood and then Face Timed my sister for about seven hours. I remember at the start of summer last year I said to a friend and my supervisor that I wouldn’t ever want to do a full time PhD, because that’s not the way I work best. It’s not how my life has ever been. I explained that I really like having a bunch of things on the go at once, and I don’t feel like I need to rush my PhD. If I knew how I would feel fast forwarding to now, I would not have said that. I do feel a bit more of a sense that I don’t want to take my time with it now. I want it done – partly because I know you’re not really taken seriously in academia without it, and that’s a real thing of mine. But also because I think it’s a thing that you fall in and out of ‘liking’, and that’s quite a process when you have to keep doing it, regardless. I sometimes wish I had a PhD to do, and that was it. OK, I wouldn’t have a job and wouldn’t be able to pay for my flat and my car or to buy food, but… essentials aside (and the fact that I actually do enjoy my jobs very much), I’m realising this can’t be done in the random couple of evenings or weekends when you have what’s left of your energy after it’s all been spent on all the other things. So, despite the fact I’ve attempted to cut down my work to create more space for PhD, I think it’s still back to the drawing board I go.

This wasn’t really intended to be a big PhD rant, but I think also what I hadn’t realised, is the way in which PhDs are really weird things where yes there are other PhD students but really it’s quite an isolating thing. Very few people know what you’re doing or why. So it’s just you and your work, which can sometimes feel like it’s you and a great mess. And sometimes *you* feel like the mess. I sat down to write this and remembered what I wrote last month. I wrote about why I usually use numbers to justify how I feel, and why this is really weird because I am not a numbers person. I am a qualitative researcher and I strongly dislike quantifying client outcomes in my counselling practice. Mainly because voices and stories are powerful tools and my sense is that numbers mask a lot, including emotion and experience. They mask the very story that we want them to convey. We are made of more than numbers, but somehow I have a weird fascination with calculating miles travelled and hours spent here and there, sometimes with measurements and weight but that really is a different kind of thing. I could have written a post which introduces the past few weeks in numbers yet again. I’ve made three trips to Harrogate, one to Durham and one to Stirling and back. My miles have shot up on my car. So let’s not think about the upcoming trips to Bath, London, Scotland and Manchester just yet. One week at a time.

I think the fact that I could write about all of that really means that I want to document everything – but that’s it, it’s filled with *everything*. So much that there’s nowhere to start and also it hasn’t finished. I could write about Christmas, I could write about wrapping up last term and starting a new one, I could write about all the small moments that have happened that I love to write about like when men tell you how to do your job or how to be a woman or when they hang out in your office unannounced, tell you that you look ‘young’ to be a lecturer and then refuse to leave your office when requested (yes they left eventually). I could also write about Scotland and how beautiful it is and how fortunate I think I am that I somehow have a wonderful supervisor and a new supervision team that I feel really good about. Really because of all the above, I value this more than most things.

So, change. Change usually does require a sense of ‘A’ to ‘B’ – usually with ‘A’ being the home and ‘B’ being the new place. So I suppose thinking and writing about travelling makes sense. Maybe this is why my PhD is at the front of my mind, because that’s what has changed. Somehow I have a situation where most of my friends are dispersed across the country, my work is all based in Northampton, my family are in Yorkshire and my PhD is now in Scotland. I love most of these things, but they are all so far away from each other. Whilst that’s fine, I do now have to get used to this change whilst not letting anything drop. Newness is fine, change is fine and not knowing what is next needs to also be fine. It’s quite funny that I don’t know how to finish that point – I genuinely don’t know what is next. I think what I’m writing about is that ‘A’ to ‘B’ isn’t quite linear and isn’t the straight path that others have already cleared for you so that it’s smooth to walk on. Somehow you have to clear it yourself. Hand me the snow shovels and the gritters and all of the things that will help to clear this thing. I think it is needed. Oh, and the gin and caffeine and books about smashing the patriarchy. It’s all needed.