" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

A few months back I started a blog about get­ting the dis­ser­ta­tion done called Fuck Yeah Dis­ser­ta­tion!. Rather than leav­ing it to mum­mify on the inter-webs, I’m going to repost some entries here from time to time.

When faced with the pres­sures of dead­lines it’s easy to slip into the warm, jit­tery embrace of panic. For me, it’s about time and fail­ure. I panic when I haven’t done enough work: “I should have 50 pages by now.” I panic when I think about how much work I have left to do: “I have no idea how much more work there is left, but I know it’s too much to get done.” And then I panic that I’m pan­ick­ing and not actu­ally working.

These panic moments man­i­fest when I feel like I’m los­ing con­trol of my project. Con­trol is an ass­hole: it makes you think that life has order, but you just haven’t fig­ured out how that order oper­ates. And Con­trol lies: it makes you think that if you dwell on the past or the future, that your present will equi­li­brate to a nat­ural order. But Con­trol is an illu­sion: we actu­ally have no con­trol over any­thing that hap­pens in our lives, ever. That doesn’t mean we don’t have agency, it sim­ply means that at any moment you might hear good news about a fel­low­ship, or get a paper­cut, or the sun could go supernova.

So, I remind myself that right now, in this moment, I’m actu­ally okay. To do that, I write it all out, usu­ally in the form of a con­ver­sa­tion. If I put all my crazy fears on paper, I can actu­ally address them and calm them down. And if I type them up, I some­times go back and read other con­ver­sa­tions I’ve had with myself.

Crazy? Sure, but I’m a grad­u­ate stu­dent in a shitty econ­omy within a pri­va­tiz­ing cor­po­rate edu­ca­tion sys­tem — we’re all fuck­ing crazy.