A Letter I did send.

2009 September 2
1 Comment
by MJD
Dear Person in the Department

I am sorry I was unable to attend yesterdays PhD meeting, I had a prior appointment over in XXX with precluded my presence.

I wanted to add my 2 cents worth, as it were. Of course I am only going on what I understood to be the main theme of the meeting (building a better PhD “community”), so if my comments end up a little left of field or were already covered then my apologies.

This issue of community is a vexing one. I think perhaps before anything is considered we should ask ourselves why we value this notion of a community at all, over and above alternatives. To be clear, my argument is not that this notion of community is wrong per se. Nor is it even that I would not prefer ideally to have such a community. Rather I suggest that it may not in fact be possible given the size of the department, and attempts to create it rather misrepresent what we should be concerned with.

There is much mileage in rather than this quest for a community instead focusing on a collegial atmosphere, where a degree of professionalism characterises the relationship both between staff and PhDs as well as between PhDs themselves, where people respect each other and follow the guidelines lain down. This respect does not automatically have to come in the form of friendship, which seems often to be the underpinning of this community notion. Indeed I believe that it is impossible to expect, or seek to promote, anything more than professional relationships between students. It is natural that various people construct friendships between them, and not between others. This is not a reflection on the worth of the department or of any failings on its part, it is the natural consequence of social interaction and should be accepted.

Of course, this does not mean that there should be no department wide activities. That would go against the notion of the collegial enterprise. Such an endeavour would definitely be bolstered, in my opinion, by a revitalised roundtable process. I strongly advocate opening up the round tables to masters students. Inclusivity works vertically as well as horizontally, and in such a light, I also suggest that staff again participate in them, whether that be through attendance or presentation of work not yet suited for a more formal seminar context. Attendance at departmental seminars (by both staff and students) should also be promoted, and I hold my hand up here as one of the offenders. Whilst I have my reasons, it is of course the case that reasons are not necessarily correct, and in hindsight I regret my actions.

Another important component of building a collegial environment, I believe is already occurring and could be maximized even further. There are many of us who, I truly believe, contribute a great deal to this department behind the scenes. Whether this be through tutoring the various teaching programmes, or helping out (and in turn being helped by) various other PhD and masters students with their work and other issues. This is as valuable a way of building a collegial environment as attending afternoon tea but, I feel, tends to be overlooked. I believe that these are positive trends in our PhD atmosphere that should be encouraged.

Another way of moving forward might be looking at how PhD bodies are managed in other departments to see if there are lessons that can be learnt. I hear regularly, although I cannot of course personally vouch as to the validity of, reports that XXX has a very successful PhD body much along the lines that perhaps we here would want.

Personally speaking, I have gained most from this department not through its attempts to be, or become, a community, but through being dealt with in a fair and professional manner by people within it. I believe that there are definite improvements that need to be made to both the PhD and staff side of the equation. I also suggest that solutions to these issues be constructed holistically. We cannot seek to address issues such as declining PhD admissions, the nature and problems of the PhD body as a whole, or the opinions of staff and students, in isolation from each other. An honest look at the many successes, and the failings, of the department as a whole stands the best chance of making this place the sort of place I hoped I was coming to when I applied, and believe it can indeed become in the future.

I hope that these comments are helpful and I am happy to discuss them further should that prove of use.



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Lay down your burdens

2009 August 15
1 Comment
by MJD

I don’t know what to write

I want to explain what I have tried to explain before, what I have become and the spaces within me where I used to feel. Now I just echo with past absence

I used to be, if not a happy person, than a person that could make others happy. I could smile and joke and just be normal. Sometimes I would be sad, I would be like this, but those were moments of punctuations in longer sentences of normality.

Now I have nothing but this. I have a contiguous space where I used to be. I don’t have sentences and verses, stanzas and paragraphs. I live my life in parentheses, filled only with semi colons and muted exclamation marks.  Nathan asks what is wrong, and the thing is, I don’t think anything is wrong. I am not cross, and nothing is the matter. I am just this. The closest word I have to describe it is sad, but this is to sad as Uluru is to sand.

I am sad because all I dreamt this should have been, my PhD and my “academic” “department”, has turned into an endless nightmare. No one read my work, no one cared to do their job. I tried so hard, I tried with all I had, and I end up here, now, a pariah to other people’s vanity. I turn up every day, and sometimes I even smile. I could cope with being angry, what worries me is that I am nothing anymore.

I am sad because someone I loved, well love, hurt me so very deeply. In a way that I thought I could deal with, and instead has just tunnelled into me and corrodes me as endless rains do to concrete.

I am sad because all I have every day is a travesty of the life I wanted. I could handle not getting it, but now I rotate around the emerging belief that I may not even deserve it.

I sat at a friends leaving dinner tonight. I should not have gone. I know well enough what this is like. I had no words. I had chronic embarrassment, but I had no words. I could not eat, even though I was hungry. I drank a glass of water. Small victories. The people on the next table were staring at me. I am sure I would have stared as well.

I want Nathan to come home and fall asleep in my arms. I want to feel his confidence in me in the darkness write poems in the air pregnant with happiness.

One day I hope this will be a memory. I just need to hang in there and, when it becomes possible, get out of here.  But, for now, for the record, I am no longer coping. I am merely dealing.

I am sad because, despite it all, I know exactly what to write.

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la terreur

2009 July 7
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by MJD

I am in blind unmitigated untrammelled limitless blackness. I am convinced something dire has happened with my PhD, absolutely convinced. I don’t sleep unless I have drunk large volumes of alcohol. I sit in the office and every email and person walking past the door evokes a shudder of incipient doom.

I am wholly consumed with self loathing, resignation, and an empty yet all encompassing terror that has dissolved every other emotion in its churning acidic fury. I was happier before I submitted, I was happier when I did not realise the magnitude of what confronts me and the cliff edge along which I teeter with ever riskier proximity.

I am robbed of the ability to think or feel. Nathan comes back next week, and the happiness is near overwhelmed with the bile of self doubt, corroding away all my other feelings. There is no escape from this, there is no denial of the totality of these days and this feeling. I am exhausted and I am scared and no matter how many people I talk to, drink and eat with, I am wholly alone with the coming revelation which, regardless of outcome, will in a rather definite way combust the last five years of my life.

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Badlands

2009 May 12
2 Comments
by MJD

Expectations are a funny thing to manage, especially when the reality falls so far short of the desire. The PhD, at least my efforts to submit it first time around, was in many ways a blessed gift of concentration. Nothing else mattered except finishing. It was wholly insignificant if I was lonely, or sad, or depressed. The only thing that mattered was it. It structured my days and it defined my time into neatly apportioned blocks. It did not matter if my supervisor did not read my work, and then accused me of things that were patently untrue. It did not matter that my boyfriend moved across the world and I entered a holding pattern. It did not matter as my life slowly condescend to a small grey office on the wrong side of the planet. I am, incidentally, infinitely proud of myself for those two months. I achieved on my own, that is if I have actually achieved it, what others have so much help for and in a situation that was objectively untenable. I owned myself for those months. I acted in a way that, regardless of outcome, I am happy with.

The refrain, no it was deeper than that, the mantra, that kept me going through all of this was that it would be worth it. That there would be if not a sunny upland, then at least a windy rise upon which I would alight at the close of it. It was not that I was unhappy, I was instead postponing happiness. I was investing myself in my future, in a future with someone and for something. It was a future that I should not have, although could not help but, plan, form and cherish in my mind as the practical drudgery of every passing day first exhausted, and then eroded, me.

It does not take a genius to realise that this was not the outcome that awaited me. My carefully guarded dreams were false prophets. I do not suggest that it is anyone’s fault except my own for listening to their calming whispers, but that in no way dismisses or diminishes the sense of loss and hurt and anger I feel at the revelation of their inaccuracy. It would appear that even my diminished notion of Elysium was built on little more than a flight of fancy. I find myself not lost, but painfully aware I am in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hurt more than I ever did before I finished, because now I have time to feel pain. Sorrow does not drip through a pinhole into my heart, it gushes in uncontrollable torrents. This is an interstitial moment, and I am caught once again between what I was and what I shall be. Between who I came to be and who I want to become. Questions from the existential to the merely pressing rain in upon me and each answer is so intertwined with every other one that I find myself powerless to choose because each act of choice is a whole picture of a future. Even where once there was unquestioned faith there is now only fealty to historical relics in the hope of return. As my futures unwind and recombine, so light and shadow reconfigure my past and present into more or less compelling narratives and previously sacrosanct hopes become tarnished with contingency.

I do not know what to do, and I have to “do” everything. There are no truths and there are no rights and wrong. There is only an unpalatable hegemony of choices constrained by expectation and hope and belief and love. There is the fear it will not work out, and the hope that it will. There is the love for others, in more forms and languages than I ever expected, and there is the darkness of being alone. There is the singing of my hopes, and the chorus of my doubts. Hymn sheets falling to the ground as new stanzas are written by hands not wholly my own, in notation I do not understand, for purposes lurking beyond my ability to discern.

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