This is going to be short and sweet. It’s just a thought that attacked me a few days ago and hasn’t let me go since. I speak to my parents every single day, and when I don’t, I feel horrible. It’s not that I feel that I have a responsibility to call my parents every day, but rather that I have an amazing relationship with my parents. I think about how best to be a daughter to them all the time, what I want their future to look like, how they will exist in the life I have planned for myself. I then started comparing this to other aspects of my life, especially to things I found “hard” to do. These things were not hard in the sense of being intellectually or physically challenging, it’s just that I had a particularly difficult time of actually convincing myself to do them. I considered many options then eventually settled on the most profound in my life.
My Thesis research. I’ve had a difficult time accepting that I could actually become a Ph.D. holder from the very beginning. When I got accepted with I asked myself if this was due to affirmative action (despite my 3.96 GPA, leadership history, research experience, publications, etc.). Once I made it through my classes I wondered if the professors felt sorry for me and just didn’t want to embarrass me with low grades. When I got an award for teaching, I thought it was because there were black people on the award committee. When my students told me I inspired them I assumed it was because they thought they could get higher grades for flattering me. You get the drift… and if you don’t, then check out my other piece on negative self-talk. That in mind, it should be pretty easy to imagine that as time went on, I found it harder and harder to get myself to even go to the lab to fulfill my research responsibilities. Whatever source of self-motivation had gotten me this far was clearly frozen over and I could barely access its contents anymore. Needless to say, every action required to get this degree felt like an unbearable chore, like a punishment, and I simply could not get myself to do them every single day, so much so that during my daily chats with my parents I simply asked them to stop asking me about school.
Well yesterday, after a particularly difficult week in corontine*, during which I barely got work done and broke down into a massive anxiety attack over my lack of productivity, I was forced to re-examine my relationship with my Ph.D. Did I want it? Did I care about it? Did I see space for it in my future life? Yes! I did and I do, but it’s a relationship that has been met with many trials from which it needs to be nurtured and healed before we (me and my pursuit of this degree) can figure out how to live harmoniously together again. That’s it! No inspiration this time. Just, what I hope is a relatable piece of easy reading.
* Now y’all know good and well that I know how to spell quarantine but combining Corona and quarantine tickles me so let me have it.
