Today I am trying something new. I’ve been reading a book about writing the dissertation, and one of the things Joan Bolker recommends in establishing a writing routine is doing continuous writing, starting with 10 minutes, every day. So I’m going to try, when I post here, to make it part of my writing for the day, to really focus on living into the writing process through the tidbits I put here.
One thing I’m thinking a lot about this afternoon is how feelings about graduate study, about the person I’m becoming as a result of my work, can be as pressing to attend to as the work itself. Talking with my friends who started the same year I did, I felt for the first time like maybe some of the doubts about advising, and mentorship, that I’ve been having aren’t just my problems. It is really obvious when I put it down in writing, but it helps a lot to not feel alone in the process. Every time we’ve done that, confided in each other about our real feelings about how things are going, it’s felt more surmountable to me. Why do graduate students end up feeling so alone, so isolated in what they’re doing? Is this a rite of passage, a necessary part of the experience? Or is it just bad organizations and lack of mentorship? I didn’t feel it as much when I was at Stanford in the Master’s program, but then that was also a shorter program.
The wild thing too is the feeling of personal and professional uncertainty converging, when relationships start mixing together and it’s hard to know which emotions to pay attention to. My own wry humor thinks–time to bury my head in a book or take a walk in the fresh air when that happens, because I start feeling like I’ve lost all perspective.
Those are my ten minutes for today, a smorgasboard of emotional confusion about who I am in this academic world, how to be good at what I do, how to balance hard conversations with my mom and friend with hard feelings about my work, trying hard to do the right thing in every area in every area of my life. Not amazing writing, but then, a blog, and a writing habit, are about putting it out there, trying to make sense of thoughts and feelings by putting words to a page. At least at first, according to Joan.