I've found that I've been drifting for a while. Or perhaps stuck in a rut. It's hard to get myself motivated to make forward progress with my reading and my work, beyond the day-to-day scrambles. For the longest time, I didn't know what was wrong with me.
But then that lovely Styleygeek went ahead and finished her PhD. (!) That's when it struck me: oh, right. I'm working toward an end point!
The end was constantly in sight when I was working on my MA. It was constantly bearing down on me, as I was determined to finish before I got married. A year of classes, a year of writing, and then I was done. I got married and moved across the country.
But now, it's not so simple as that. I was reading through my journal today and found something that I'd written on New Year's Day of 2006: "I don't know that I've thought this far. All of my plans only went so far as 2005: finish the MA, get married, move, start the PhD. Okay, so that's done. Now what? [...] I've only fathomed the beginnings of major life choices, and none of the follow-through."
And the funny thing is that I'm still there. Well, I'm much further along than I was then. I'm approaching the end of this comps reading process, but I've completely lost sight of everything in that process. And have gotten so frightened of the comprehensive exams themselves that I've kind of gone into hiding.
And so now I have to get myself back on track. I need to spend my weekend finishing my World War One books and updating my latest funding application. That way, I can make some real forward progress (and read books on Weimar Germany!) next week.
Even if the end is still far away, this is a process that has an end. And I need to remember that.
3 comments:
Yay! I'm helpful!
Maybe it would help to start making plans for after you finish comps. Once you have that to look ahead to, you might feel that you are on the move.
That actually sounds like a fabulous idea. I'm going to figure out what I want to do immediately after finishing comps.
Keep in mind that these plans can be academic or otherwise.
Academic: "I can't wait to start the dissertation! It'll be great to be so focused on a topic that I'm really interested in!"
Otherwise: "As soon as my comps are over, I am going to sleep for a week/rent a cabin on the edge of the water and have a vacation/read several non-intellectual books, possibly children's books or romance novels, without feeling guilty/have a dinner party/etc."
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