Feeling stupid and jealous

Stuck in my work. Short reflections from October and December

Note: This first section of the blog was written sometime in early October. I forgot about it and was about to sit here and write about the same feelings because so much has changed in the last 60 days and not much at all.

Let’s Start in October:

I wake up at 6am every day now and it hasn’t made me feel any better of a person. My kitten Nova is eleven weeks old and declares when our morning begins with a chomp on the fleshy part of my wrist, or her favorite spot: my big toe. I’ve begrudgingly seen the sun rise almost every day for the past two weeks. This is what brings me to writing this blog this morning. I should say: I do like the quiet hum of people going to work early and the birds outside my window are more comforting than annoying (how I used to think when I started getting settled in this apartment a couple months ago.) When I’m feeling a bit detached from feeling like a person, little moments like this bring me back to earth.

One of these moments happened the other day when I was feeling anxious and antsy— probably because I’d had a matcha too late in the day and not enough water (rookie mistake), and I sent a text to a few of my friends at home saying I was feeling so impossible and itchy. I’m in the part of my degree where all the more tedious milestones are coming up and will soon be over. Like, the train is coming at me full speed, but I also know it will pass really soon. (Does that metaphor work??) My coursework is almost finished, my thesis is almost fully written and will soon be ready to defend, my qualifying exams (for which I’ll have to do an insane amount of reading in a relatively short time) will be in a few months, and then… things open up for me in new ways. My residency requirement will end and I get to decide if I want to move somewhere that might be better for conducting my dissertation research or, just like, better for my happiness. My needs as a student will be very different and my day-to-day will also change. It’s hard trying to think about what I want now and what I might want in the future.

Here’s my most recent big dilemma that I “like” to ruminate on:

I’m playing around with the idea of moving home. Mostly because at present my research is local to my hometown and I am imagining a longer-winded project there. It’s not because it’s convenient. I’d argue that desiring a research project in South Carolina is actually very inconvenient these days. And, as I told my friends in my anxious rant, even the thought about how difficult it would be to get my birth control every month makes me want to strike moving home from possibility. I do hear all the rhetoric, like, “Well, they want all of us progressive folk to abandon the South and if we do,,,,” I know, I know, I know. My concern is rooted in privilege. South Carolina is not an easy place to live and it will likely only get harder for those of us who are people of color, women, LGBTQ+, immigrants, etc especially over these next few years. And I am in the position to get to weigh opportunities and burdens. The opportunities would mean getting to be in community with folks who I care deeply about (including my family who I hate being so far away from) and being extra intimate with the questions, concerns, and landscape that have been on my mind since I was a teenager trying to change the name of my confederate-monument-high-school. But the burdens might be a sense of isolation from an academic community and FOMO.

So, I was three paragraphs deep into a rant to the Greenville Girlies (Karen, MB, and Hali) when MB (Yes, of my favorite, miss b’s school for girls !!!!!!!!!!!!!) was like, “Sorry for my late response, I had to deal with a student who was looking up, ‘hot woman shaking ass’ on their Chromebook.’” First of all, I died. Second, that was just what I needed to snap myself out of my haze and remind myself that the world is bigger than this moment of existential dread.

I catch myself trying to live in the future too often. The sense that planning meticulously can ease uncertainty and, maybe even, fear is usually misplaced. I think I’m learning that only time can really ease uncertainty and moving forward in that uncertainty is the only real way to address fear. I have been in a planning mood, not only because I sense the end of the year is coming and have the desire to 180 my life, but because in this “light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel” part of the PhD, I’m also dragging my legs through knee-deep mud. Planning, or really, daydreaming in this case is a form of procrastination. It’s good for the creative spirit— I wrote a while back about how I was working on my daydreaming skill— but in a time like this, I know I’m using it as a crutch to not deal with what’s really causing my anxious itchiness.

I feel stupid a lot. This is normal (yada yada yada) in the PhD, and especially at this stage. I’ve been in post-grad for three years and still haven’t managed to develop routines that meet all my needs. I haven’t figured out how to stay on top of “reading the field” and feel super dumb when I realize I am still unfamiliar with the contours of debate in my areas. I can celebrate the win of conducting the interviews and collecting the data for my thesis this summer, and even writing a first draft, but I feel stuck, all small and stupid, trying to tinker on it and knowing the distance between where it is now and where it needs to be by the end of the summer. I’m working on this big fellowship application that I probably won’t get, but still feel hope about. It feels impossible right now because I just think about the stakes and what it could mean for me. I have been through a really tough fellowship process and been knocked off my feet when I somehow was chosen for it and still all the rejections of the past few years make me feel scared and small to be hopeful and excited. It also takes a lot to be optimistic and steely about your own work and promise at this stage. Imposter syndrome is both real and fake in the sense that I may feel like an imposter, but the reality is that I am holding myself up to a measure that ultimately I define, and it does not have to match what is popularly set. Especially when popularly set measures and definitions of effort and success do not take into account the challenges faced by people at the margins. (Not that I am at the margins most of the time these days. I am lucky to be adjacent by identity and class most of the time.) And, maybe most ridiculously contributing to this sense of no-thought-head-empty: I’m on that damn phone!

Unfortunately, I love the phone. But I also hate the phone. Every other blog on my newsletter-meets-blog and this whole platform is about how the phone is all of our worst situationship, so I won’t get further into it. But it is a serious concern of mine: how are Gen Z scholars and our work going to be different because our attention spans and our digital consumption is so widely different than those before us? I’m not going to get into the whole AI-debate right now. That’s genuinely another blog for another day. (Spoiler: I’m solidly anti-AI in academic and creative settings.)

I just feel like even my life in grad school is so different than what I imagined and what I hear my faculty mentors say about their grad school lives. I just haven’t had to hunker down and grind to make my academic ends meet in the ways you see/hear popularly represented. But then I wonder, am I not doing enough? Am I not doing grad school the right way? Should I be suffering more? If I was suffering more would I feel smarter? Would I have more of my shit together?

I don’t know if throwing my phone into a ravine would make me feel like a better grad student or actually help my workflow. I’m probably misattributing the cause of my silliness. I think the answer is what I already know, and what I said above: the only way out is through. The only way to deal with anxiety and fear is to move forward in it.

So, I guess that’s where I’m at. Accepting that I feel fish-brained, but at some point I won’t anymore. At some point I’ll be done with the thesis and I’ll be knee-deep in studying for qualifying exams and I’ll feel the same kind of itchy anxiety and then I won’t anymore because I will have more forward until I am past it.

Am I writing the same lesson over and over again on this blog? I think so. How do I always seem to forget and have to relearn the same lesson on self-grace and patience and resilience?

*Enter December*:

I was organizing my files on my laptop and came across an unknown pdf. It opened to handwritten line edits and comments from Karen on my personal statement for my grad applications last spring. I’d forgotten she had taken the time to give my work so much care and the (re)discovery touched me. At the bottom of the page she’d written, “You’re doing so great! Send a postcard if you can. Sending all my love.” Just what I needed— even a year later. Karen and my other friends from home have this strange special ability to check in with me and give me the sweetest pick-me-up’s right when I really need it.

I’ve been feeling super stuck recently. I felt like I made so much progress on my thesis in the summer and was so proud of myself, but in the past 15 weeks have felt like I’ve been just barely able to keep my head above water each week. In the age of AI— where you can take a serious thinking shortcut instead of letting yourself flounder in ideas and constructions that just don’t work or aren’t quite right— there’s a lot more talk about how important it is to struggle through the work and allow yourself to appreciate the struggle from development to draft to final product. I agree with this wholeheartedly, and feel better knowing all my intellectual and creative property is truly my own, but it doesn’t make it easier to be in the thick of it.

I’ve been a lot busier this semester than others. I got a part-time job because I didn’t end up getting any of the semester fellowships I’d applied for and couldn’t find a research assistantship. There’s pretty strict rules on work outside the university (which is both fair and unfair depending on individual context), but I went for it anyway because I needed extra money and had spent my other semesters feeling like I had plenty of free-time. It quickly became difficult to balance as the semester set in with more intensive deadlines, and as the weeks went by I felt more behind little by little even as I was still meeting deadlines. I learned a lot about time-management and the serious value of my time and energy, but the accumulation of stress over the weeks because my time was much more constrained just couldn’t be balanced by the little extra money I was making.

I’ve been using my phone to cope with my anxieties about my thesis in my tired free-time after my part-time job. I’ve been TikTok clean for years now, but the Instagram Reels (which are literally the same thing) really get me. I love watching other people’s fast-paced vertical vlogs about the marathon they just ran or the crochet project they’re working on or an apartment tour in 7 parts. Recently I started noticing I’ve been feeling what I can only pinpoint as twinges of jealousy when I watch stuff like this. I usually like to watch long-form vlogs of my favorite Youtube girlies while I eat my dinner and I couldn’t get 5 minutes into one from a girl I’ve been watching for years about her San Fransisco “dream apartment hunt.” I literally felt sick— I wish I had the money to live somewhere like SF. I wish I could move into a gorgeous apartment without worrying about money. I wish I had a partner who I was ready to move in with and begin a life. All these kinds of things were bubbling inside me.

I would not usually identify with jealousy and it is an unusual feeling to me. I can frequently admire things about others’ strengths and things they have going for them in their lives without feeling down on myself. But I think the combination of feeling so stuck in my work, being dead halfway in the long journey of my PhD, and feeling uncertain about even the near future made it easy for envy to creep in.

I’ve heard it said plenty of times that jealousy is just a sign of what you truly want. It might not be the actual *thing* you’re looking at, but maybe the feeling you associate with having or achieving something. I’ve been feeling like I’m not meeting my own expectations across the board for things in my life: school/work, sports, reading, writing, etc. I have to give myself credit, though. All things considered, I am still doing very well, I’ve made tons of progress in my sports this year (another blog I’ll write soon, I’m sure), and I won’t make my reading goal for this year, but I’ve still read plenty more leisure books than the average American.

I think I probably need to set more realistic measures of success for myself and celebrate smaller wins so I don’t feel like I’m not moving forward despite making plenty of progress. I’m trying to be inspired by my jealousy and let myself be moved to keep chipping away at the goals I’ve set, or be clearer about what I want for myself versus what I think will look good on me in the eyes of others.

This is a good time for that— we’re, like, a week and a half away from true goal-setting season. I still don’t have answers about plans for moving home and what I might gain or lose with that decision, I still feel dumb literally all the time, and my phone addiction is still raging, but every day gets me a little closer to break, to finishing my thesis, to moving forward and into more certainty. I have to remember what Karen said though. I’m doing as good, if not more good than I was this time last year. My challenges are all just a tiny bit different. And maybe what I really need is just to send a few postcards.

Itchy and hopeful. I guess I should really get back to grading end-of-semester exams and writing my final statistics paper. Big sigh. Talk soon!