How an "all or nothing" approach nearly broke me...and what I learned.

I used to be very relaxed and go with the flow about life. I used to think I was pretty lazy, and if it required extra effort it probably wasn’t going to get done. I skated through high school and my undergrad—well, except for math and science classes lol. I was a good student and loved the arts and humanities subjects. I fell in love with drama and theatre in high school and pursued it in my undergrad and graduated with a 3.9 GPA because my final projects during my Bachelors were things like performing a monologue or designing and constructing a mock up for a pattern of a Renaissance gown. Not easy, but not rocket science. Don’t get me wrong, it took time and dedication to earn my Bachelors, and I worked hard for it. But nothing compared to the level of work I’ve done in grad school. 

Switching from a Costume Design MFA to a Media Arts/TV & Film Studies MA degree was a massive culture shock. I’d always felt like I had strong research and writing skills, but being in a program where academic research and writing was the main focus and requirement for the degree was rough. I felt like I’d been thrown into the deep end of the pool and I couldn’t figure out which way was up. Panic attacks went from being a rare event to a regular occurrence. Over the course of my two years doing that MA I went from being relaxed about life and school, and feeling like it came easily, to being incredibly Type A and neurotic. I was scared all the time. Of not being smart enough. Not being good enough. Not being academic enough…whatever that meant. I was constantly seeking approval from my professors and constantly coming up short and feeling disappointed. I was the theatre kid pretending to be a scholar. It was a rough experience and when I finished that degree I was in no hurry to keep going with my academic career.

Reading, reading, and more reading. It never stops.

Fast forward a few years, and suffering through a major recession where full time teaching jobs were hard to come by, I was back in grad school and old demons were hard to fight back. I was even more of a Type A perfectionist, constantly comparing myself to my classmates and constantly coming up short. I didn’t always believe in my research and I definitely didn’t believe in myself. Imposter Syndrome became a major issue and by the time I started my Phd I was a wreck. Just one semester in even my close friends were like, “we’re worried about you.” I wasn’t coping well under the pressure. Any graduate program is high pressure to begin with, especially a PhD. But when you add personal pressure on top of it, eventually it’s going to break you down. So I took the scary step of going to the campus counseling center, and I’ve been seeing someone off and on ever since.

As nice as it may sound, spending day after day in bed is
actually pretty soul crushing. I'm happier now that my bed
is once more a sanctuary and not a prison.

One of my big issues is I tend to see things in terms of black and white, all or nothing. Either I’m working on my dissertation all day everyday and cranking out the chapters or I’m lying in bed watching Netflix all day. I push and push and push to be super productive until I crack and then have a day where I literally can’t get out of bed until 1pm. Being diagnosed with Fibromyalgia halfway through my PhD journey was a real low point. I had been struggling with increasing pain and fatigue for a couple years prior to my diagnosis but around the few months prior to my diagnosis it was at a real crisis point. My third year of my PhD was almost wasted, I got so little work done outside of my teaching responsibilities. It was devastating. My pain levels were horrible and I spent half my days bed bound. 

Thankfully, I’ve managed to bounce back a bit. I’ve found a bit more balance in my life and have a little more structure to my days that helps me be more productive, though I still feel like I’m not doing enough. And that little voice telling me that I should be doing more is so damaging. If I have a day where I oversleep, it’s so easy to tell myself, “you’ve already lost the morning, you won’t accomplish anything in just a few hours in the afternoon, just skip it, you’ve already failed.” And if I have a day where I have energy and am at my desk before noon and have a really productive writing session I’ll tell myself at 5pm, “You’ve done so much! Just think what you could do if you keep working for another couple hours!”. 7pm rolls around and I’m feeling dead at my desk, eat dinner too late, go to bed too late, and then oversleep the next morning. It’s a vicious cycle sometimes. 

My all or nothing mindset is one of my biggest problems, and something my therapist and I talk about a lot. My tendency to see my work in black and white terms where I am either not productive at all or functioning at a super high level that I can’t sustain for more than a day or two is constantly holding me back. I used to struggle to send things to my professors unless I thought it was near perfect because I was afraid of feedback. I was horrible at giving my students anything less than 100% even though I knew teaching wasn’t my primary responsibility. Black and white, all or nothing. And so it continued. 

An example of what Additive Color Theory
looks like. You see how the white light only
occurs when all the colors mix together.

The other week in therapy I had a bit of an “ah ha!” moment. We’d been talking about how I needed to see things more in shades of grey, instead of always black and white. I’m not a huge fan of grey though, so that analogy was never that appealing. (Fyi, I love analogies and am always coming up with them in therapy to help me work through things). Thinking back to my theatre days, I remembered in the basic Elements of Design course I took, that when we talked about lighting design, black and white have different meanings. In lighting theory, it’s totally different. According to Additive Color Theory with RBG (red, blue, green) lights, white is the presence of all colored light at once, whereas black is the absence of all light. But when you play with different lighting combinations in between you can see the whole rainbow. Pretty cool.

I noticed this in action when I attended the P!nk concert in Phoenix at the beginning of the month. The same lights were giving off all different colors, and sometimes pure white light, throughout the show. And when the lights were turned off, the arena was plunged into darkness. 

If you're not following @phd_comics on
Instagram, you should be. This one was
a little too accurate lol.

This fits my life so well right now. Either my lights are full on white, with me attempting to do everything all at once. Or I’m in total darkness, stuck in bed, not able to do anything. I’m trying to learn that sometimes it’s ok to have a red day, or a blue day, or a green day, or to mix a couple colors and have an yellow, or purple, or pink day. Days where I do a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but nothing in extreme. A day where I oversleep because my fibro is acting up and I need extra rest but I still do a bit of writing in the afternoon and fit in a 20 minute walk before dinner.

Grad school is often a black and white atmosphere. Where everyone compares themselves to everyone else and no one wants to appear to be the “slacker” who isn’t “dedicated enough.” *Shudder* No one wants to have that reputation. We’re always pushing ourselves to get another conference acceptance or publication or committee position. To do more more more. To be better. To push ourselves harder. Until we break. And we always break. I don’t know a single person in my program who hasn’t hit a wall in terms of their mental, emotional, and/or physical health. So many of my classmates have some sort of physical condition or chronic illness and anxiety and depression is rampant. And my program/university is not unique. Every grad school forum, website, social media account I see talks about this. We’re all always either completely ON or absolutely OFF. Either full on white light or pitch black darkness. We don’t know how to see the rainbow of colors available in between.

I’ve tried to fight this mentality in other ways. I think that’s why I’ve traveled so much over the last several years. London is my happy place. It’s where I try to run away to every year or so to recharge my batteries and get excited about things again. Ok, yeah, and also to escape the desert heat, but that’s another blog post entirely. I also have continued my hobbies, I post on this blog (sporadically but I’m working on that) and make my YouTube videos. But when it comes to my PhD work, I hang on to this black and white approach with an iron grip. Like, if I’m not being the best, most perfect, model PhD student then I’m just a failure wasting my time. And that’s just a heartbreaking way to live. No one deserves to feel that way. 

So, even though I only have a couple months left to my PhD journey, I’m trying to incorporate some changes now. Better late then never right?

Sometimes you really do have to stop
 and smell the flowers.

No more black or white.

No more days of darkness, where I completely surrender to the pain and fatigue and just stay in bed. Even if all I can manage is a five minute walk around my apartment building and to read a few pages or address a couple feedback comments on a chapter draft to shed a little bit of colored light on to my day that’s good enough for me. 

And no more days of blinding white light, where I attempt to do everything at once. Drowning in emails and chapter comments and household chores and running from one appointment to another and doing class prep or grading only to end the day frantically editing a video or writing a blog post in an attempt to look like someone who has enough time on her hands to have a blog or a YouTube channel. 

My iCal is color coded by type of task/appointment. Red is for deadlines, turquoise is for PhD stuff, lime green is for teaching tasks, bright pink is YouTube and blogging, meetings and appointments are a light blue/purple, personal tasks like going to lunch with my mom are light pink. I try not to have more than three colors on a day. Obviously I always have to have the turquoise for PhD stuff. And with Session B starting this week, green, for teaching, is going to be present a couple days a week. So, for example on Wednesdays I have a standing appointment (light blue), my PhD work (turquoise), and teaching (lime green). That’s it. I’m not allowing myself to put anything else on Wednesdays. No going out with friends (fun but exhausting), no blogging or editing (requires a lot of mental focus), and no working at all once I get home at 6pm. Just dinner and relax. Because when you let one color shine too brightly it can still be overwhelming. 

Leave a light on too long and it will eventually burn out.

Change is never easy. It takes time and practice. But if I have learned one thing in my 9+ years of grad school, especially the last nearly 5 years of my PhD, it’s the crucial need for balance. No matter what anyone tries to tell you, you CANNOT do everything all the time. You have to pick and choose. You must find some amount of balance between your work life and your personal life. You will never be the mythical “perfect student.” It doesn’t exist. All you can do is your personal best and believe that that is more than good enough. Surround yourself with good people who support you, push you to be the best you can be, and give you constructive criticism in the areas you need it. Especially surround yourself with these types of people when it comes to choosing your dissertation committee. 

Don’t wait until your final year to finally learn these lessons. Don’t spend years of feeling miserable and unworthy because you’re chasing the wrong things. I’ve made that mistake, and I seriously don’t recommend that path. Don’t live your grad school years jumping from pitch black darkness into the blinding light with an all or nothing mentality. It will break you eventually. Learn to see the colors and light up your life with them.

This post has been written with other grad students in mind, but it totally applies to everyone else. If you relate to my experience let me know in the comments. Please! Don’t let me feel alone here lol. And if you enjoyed this post and think others you know might like it as well, please do share it on your socials, I’d really appreciate it. :)

Andrea xo