Notes from the Dissertation Desk #2
I thought it was probably time for the second edition of this series. There’s been some progress and a few new things learned along the way. So here’s what’s been going on since the last time I checked in with you all about my dissertation…
In the first edition of this series I talked about reaching out to my chair for help when I didn’t know where to start with the dissertation back in June (after spending a month between my colloquy and when I knew I needed to start writing). Well, that help got me through my first chapter and part way into my second chapter. And then I got stuck again. I should have reached out to my chair a second time, but I was too worried that I was doing something wrong and that I needed to work it out on my own. But I just happened to set up a “catch up” coffee meeting with one of my committee members. I really only intended to ask a couple questions and then spend the rest of our time actually catching up, but we ended up spending the two hours hammering out details on my dissertation and how I would do the analyses. We ended up completely restructuring my case studies and I came away with 4.5 handwritten notes (thanks to my committee member who wrote down all the random—and not so random—thoughts, arguments, ideas, etc, that came flying out of my mouth during our meeting. Two hours later I was exhausted and mentally drained, but I actually felt like I knew what I needed to write. So this leads me to my first tip for this post (and fourth tip for this series)…
Tip #4 - (related to Tip #1 from the first post), don’t be afraid to keep asking for help.
I’d probably still be beating my head against my desk, about 1000 words into chapter 3 and not knowing how do my analysis if I hadn’t admitted during that meeting that I really didn’t know what I was doing and I felt stuck. Asking for help in the beginning, back when I met with my chair, wasn’t enough. I was having trouble again, and I needed to ask for help again. That night I went home and typed up the handwritten notes my committee member had taken and given to me at the end of the meeting. The next day I sat down and turned those notes into over 1,000 words of coherent text, much of which will help form the basis of my first chapter, the introduction. I was also able to restructure the chapter I was working on, the first case study which was on Jacqueline Kennedy. I think I made more progress the first day after that meeting than I had in the previous two weeks combined. It was a good great feeling!
So, I spent the next week or so working, and making some good progress but soon felt myself getting stuck again. I was really worried that I wasn’t fully articulating the evidence and theory I was relying on. I tend to get stuck in my head and go down a rabbit hole with my descriptions and analysis but then don’t bring into enough theory to help me make my arguments. I started going back and forth in my head about if I was actually doing what I was supposed to do and it was starting to make me feel like I was losing my mind. Self-doubt and imposter syndrome was starting to set in fast. So, I took a deep breath, fought back the fear, and emailed my chair to set up a meeting, our first since June. I was so nervous, I knew I needed help and needed to ask what felt like a stupid, rookie question. The kind of question I should have known the answer to before they even let me into a PhD program. I mean, who gets to their dissertation and asks their chair “how do I make sure I’m theorizing enough?” Ugh. But I did it anyway, so here’s the next tip…
Tip #5 - Admit when you don’t know something or don’t know how to do something, even if it feels like the most basic grad school principle that you should have learned (and mastered) five billion years ago.
I tell my students, “there’s no such thing as a stupid question,” and I wouldn’t have picked the professor I did to be my chair if I thought she was coming from an opposite standpoint to that. So I went in, got her caught up on the new direction I wanted to go with my case studies, let her know where things were at since we last talked and the progress I was making, and asked the questions I had. The result?…The answers I needed to move forward, validation that I was doing just fine up to then, and encouragement to keep moving forward. She clarified a lot of things for me and we also decided to split my last case study chapter into two separate chapters, making my diss outline now 7 chapters total. Yikes. But it also meant that each of my four icons would get their own chapter, with analyses for two outfits each, so that made me very excited. I was on a bit of a high when I walked out of her office an hour and a half later. I am constantly reminded how lucky I am to have people on my committee who are so dedicated to helping me succeed. I don’t think I’d have gotten this far if I didn’t have such a great committee. Generally I don’t need someone to pat me on the head and tell me “good job!” But this is tough work we do as PhD students/candidates, so every now and then it’s amazing when your professors and mentors tell you that you ARE doing good and that you’re on the right track.
So, after that meeting I was able to go home, this was on a Wednesday, and by Friday night I had Chapter 3 finally finished. It had taken me about two months. But that troublemaker was done! I edited and proofread it over the weekend and then submitted it to my chair on Monday. Then moved on to Chapter 4, which would be on Princess Diana. I got started on that, and in the beginning it wasn’t too challenging. I had to write of a brief biographical background and sketch out descriptions of the two outfits being analyzed. I basically got started with the “easy” stuff. It really wasn’t stressing me out. But the job market was. Why can’t life just be easy sometimes? If it’s not one thing making me freak out, it’s another. So, just as my dissertation feels like it’s not completely impossible, the stress of the job market rears it’s ugly head. Plus all my usual stressors.
A couple weeks ago I was starting to struggle. Big time. My fibro was getting bad. I honestly can’t remember I had a flare that bad. The pain was horrible. The fatigue was miserable. And oh the brain fog. Ugh. It started on a Friday, I suffered through the weekend, and by Monday I could hardly speak in complete sentences. Those who watch my YouTube channel know that I do weekly vlogs, so I was filming that day, just a clip for Monday’s section of the vlog, and omg, I could hardly speak more than five words in a row before my brain would just slam to a stop. I was also in a lot of pain. My stomach felt like someone was punching it and my back felt like it had been kicked in. I had to work in bed because I couldn’t sit up straight at my desk. By some miracle I managed to crank out 1,400 words in my diss that day, all random quotes and notes and ideas, but it was something. It would also be the only work I would get done in my diss for that whole week and the first two days of the following week. Tuesday was just bad. Like, really bad. I’ve kind of struck it from my memory. That Tuesday doesn’t exist for me anymore. Wednesday was nearly as bad. I got my hair done, so that was nice, but mostly Tuesday and Wednesday went by in a blur of fear, anxiety, depression, and an intense desire to just hide in bed under the covers. It was not a great week up to that point.
Thursday arrived, and I tried to focus on my diss again. It was the first day I had completely at home since Monday and I really wanted to focus. But I just couldn’t. It wasn’t my diss that was worrying me, I was excited to start talking about Diana. But I was so distracted by how bad I was still feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally. My eyes were still raw from all the crying I had done Tuesday and Wednesday. My head hurt. My back hurt. Heck, my whole body hurt. The tension and anxiety my body was holding in felt like it was going to break me from the inside. I could feel the panic starting to rise and the tears getting ready to fall. My heart was starting to race. And so at about noon on that Thursday I declared it the weekend and went back to bed with tea and a hot water bottle and wrapped myself in a cozy, snuggly blanket. And I stayed there like that for the rest of Thursday and all of Friday. This leads me to the last tip for this post…
Tip #6 - Take a break when you need one, whether that’s a 1 hour Netflix break between writing sessions or a 2 day self-care sabbatical. If you feel like you’re slipping, give yourself a break.
I hit my breaking point for that week. It had been really rough at the start and I just needed a reset. Part of my felt guilty for not working on Thursday or Friday, especially since I hadn’t worked on Tuesday or Wednesday that week, but a bigger part of me knew I wasn’t going to get any decent work done anyway. My brain needed a break. I needed to take care of myself. We tend to push ourselves until we break and I’m trying to get better about giving myself some rest before things get so tough. Self-care is something that’s sooooo easy to laugh off and not take seriously. But it’s so crucial. Critical really. You won’t survive your grad school program if you don’t take care of yourself. You need to be the priority. Your work comes second. I’m slowly learning how to do this on a regular basis so that I don’t hit another week where I crash and burn and lose a full week of productivity. I went through that second weekend and slowly started feeling better. That brings us up to this past week. I only worked a couple days, but I’m not going to feel guilty about that. I accomplished other things and I have faith in myself that I will finish the diss. Maybe not in time to meet my original (and very ambitious) schedule, but I will finish and I will graduate.
I’m being stricter about my morning and evening routines, and not working on the weekends. I’m being very careful about carving out time each day and each week for me. To nap. To read a novel. To watch Netflix. To edit my YouTube videos. To burn a candle, cook, play with my new makeup purchases, basically whatever I feel like doing. For me.
So that’s where we’re at now. I’m probably about 3/4 of the way through Chapter 4. I leave for London in about a month. I’m probably not going to get the remaining four chapters written before I go. At some point I have to put the diss on hold and start my conference paper. I’m not panicked right now. I probably will be as it gets closer, but for now I’m just taking it one day at a time. I’m trying to embrace the mess and the chaos of my research. I’m trying to remember why I chose this project and to fall back in love wth my topic. I’m excited to be working on the Diana chapter. I’m looking at her with fresh eyes and from a different perspective, and it’s making me very excited. And I can’t wait to get to Michelle and Catherine.
I have no idea what the next several months are going to bring and how this dissertation is going to continue to develop and change, but I’m starting to feel excited about it all again. And that feels fantastic.
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