Burn baby, Burn

45 Weeks left
2 Pounds lost (17 total)
16(ish) months until the wedding

Oh how I missed writing this last week (I've been traveling and GASP! without the Internet!)

Last week was the first week since this little endeavor began that I did not post something during the course of the week. It actually brought me sadness. On occasion, I found myself looking longingly across the room at my little netbook… The shiny red one that I travel with every weekend...my trusty companion… the one I use to pen these little weekly musings. (Given such an attachment, I feel like I should name her, this netbook. Like a pet. Or a houseplant. Other people name their plants, right?) I’ve discovered that I find great comfort in the writing of this blog. It’s familiar. It’s cathartic. It fills the days. (A lot like a pet, actually, just without the feeding or the poop.)

It’s not surprising to me that I didn’t get anything written this last week, though. It’s a pattern I have noticed my whole life: the times when I’m stressed and feel like I really need to be writing (to get the ugh out) are generally the same times I’m soo (note use of two o’s) busy with other things that I don’t have time to write. A vicious cycle, indeed. And so (one o), with special thanks to an insane schedule and *ridiculous* guidelines for final grade submissions, this week I was, in fact, a hot mess. I was so frazzled. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t exercise. And I consumed more caffeinated beverages than I (or anyone) probably should (I could kill a small farm animal with the sheer volume of aspartame I ingest on a daily basis, just generally. But last week? Seriously, a woman at work actually referred to the unit of measure for my Diet Pepsi as a “drum”. I was drinking a drum of Diet Pepsi. I wish I could say that that was an overstatement.)

At any rate, it was a really crummy week.

On top of grading projects, writing the final exam, administering the final exam, grading the final exam and calculating final semester grades (pant…pant…) there was crazy employment drama, some job insecurity, and very unexpected potential life upheaval thrown into the mix (man, I missed J this week.) Suddenly, at work, it was like I had fallen (was pushed) down the rabbit hole, and everything was topsy-turvy. What I thought I knew, I didn’t. What I held to be true, I questioned. I had doubts and insecurities; bouts of stubbornness and incredulity coupled with the abandon of care. Feeling sure of myself, and more insecure than I had in a long time: Valued and ignored simultaneously. In essence, I had a week that harkened back to the excruciating time I spent in the throes of Doctoral Inferno.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, Doctoral Inferno is the graduate school equivalent of Dante’s Inferno. And it kicks in long about the time you decide you’re ready to defend your dissertation proposal. Just like Dante’s, there are nine circles of this hell, too. Each is distinctive in its own way, yet all of them share the following characteristics:

1) They are scary, dark places without sunshine (whether it be from a self-imposed cave at your home or a library carrel in a windowless nook in the building undergrads merely use as a landmark on the path in the drunken stumble home, in either, you’re still not seeing the sun for the duration of your stay);

2) You’re required to wear something each day with a stain on it and a pair of sweatpants (not a different pair of sweatpants each day, the same ones…every day, though the sweatpants can in fact be the aforementioned stained article of clothing. I liked to mix it up with a ratty coffee- stained sweatshirt every once in awhile...or a pair of horrible old, ratty sweats that I referred to as my "knowledge pants" so I didn't feel as bad each day putting on the same pants again. Clearly, I HAD to wear the knowledge pants every day lest I lose said knowledge.);

3) You bathe on a “only when I need to” basis (which is basically only when you leave the house…which is really only about every 56-ish hours or so…in a good week);

4) You are forced to subject yourself to regular acts of technology related torture (e.g. how many times can you survive the near death experience of “I-just-wrote-an-entire-chapter-and-it-didn’t-save-before-my-battery-died”?)

It’s true. I lived in this Inferno for almost a year. (A year of my life that I am never getting back…)

Now the one important difference between Doctoral Inferno and Dante’s is that while the circles are do, in fact get progressively worse as you descend (as measured by your appearance, your demeanor, your attitude, your will to live, etc.), you are neither confined to one particular Circle, nor is there a particular limit to the number of times you can come and go from each Circle. For example, you can spend three weeks in Circle One, and then plummet to Circle Five without warning. The next day, you might start the day at Circle Two, and end the day in the sheer, utterly bottomless pit of Circle Nine. The good news is that each day, when you wake up (if you slept that night), you have the opportunity to start fresh at whatever Circle you can muster the courage for on that particular day.

The nine Circles of Doctoral Inferno, for your information, are as follows:

Limbo- The place for those who wait. You wait for a good idea. You submit writing; you wait for edits. You hope you’re good; you wait to hear you aren’t. You write, you think you’ve developed a point. And then you question everything and start over again. You defend, and then you wait to hear the results. This is the place where you spend most of your time whilst in Doctoral Inferno… If you’re lucky.

Production- Annnnnnd you’re writing. You get up, you write. You go to sleep, and you’re writing in your head...and in your dreams. You start to finish a point, you re-read it, and you end up erasing 16 pages because it’s all crap. There is nothing else in your life when you are in the Production Circle. You start wondering things like “Can I quantify that photograph with a statistic?” and “I wonder how I document conversations that I have with myself using APA?” Your relationships suffer. You eat bad food (when you remember to eat at all.) Showering and sleeping and all manner of personal hygiene issues slide down to about 82nd on your priority list. Your friends/ family who are not involved in the process start to not “get you.” And that’s not them, by the way. That’s you…becoming crazy.

Minutiae- Minutiae finds you facing conversations with yourself that go something like this: The period goes after the parenthesis. Or wait, no, before the parenthesis. Right? What is the difference between a table and a graph and an illustration? Table 1.3 or Illustration 1.2? Did I miss a page number? Oh dear lord, I have two page 17s. That means that the 214 pages after that are all numbered wrong...and I just hit print. Has there been a more recent edition of the source I used? Wait, did I spell that author’s name three different ways in the text? Why do I have more sources in the Reference section than I had in the paper? What size is my margin? What’s a margin? This is the Circle that will actually make you crazy. Literally, the minutiae will kill you. (I would also include dealing with the permissions related to the IRB and ORP [Institutional Review Board and Office of Research Protections] in this Circle.) (Period, THEN parenthesis.)

Forced humility- In this circle, you get used to feeling completely and utterly worthless. Basically, you suck. Get used to it. That brilliant idea you had? Not original. Four other people had it first…and then 693 people wrote papers on how it was false anyway. So don’t even try. That amazing “scholarship” you just did? All crap. Unsubstantiated. False. Terrible Idea. Re-write it. Re-write it again. And then just throw it away and start over.

Stubbornness- Here, you attempt taking a stand. You try to convince everyone (anyone?) that *they* are wrong. This is your brilliant idea. Dammit. And clearly if they don’t think it’s right, then it’s because they don’t have the kind of forward-thinking vision and insight that you do. You are not going to change that paragraph. You are NOT going to include that other stupid idea. You ARE NOT going to be forced or bullied into adding even ONE MORE sentence to your unmovable brilliance!!

Surrender- Yeah, eventually, your gonna change the sentence. And add the idea. Because it’s just not worth it. You will include whatever “they” would like. You have no principles. Your chair wants to be cited? Sure. If that makes it end. Whatever it takes to just have it be over. At this point, you quit trying to be smart. You quit trying to be innovative. You quit trying. You basically just quit.

Reality- In this Circle, somewhere, way in the back of your head, you suddenly develop a keen awareness for deadlines and real life and everything you’ve been blowing off whilst in Doctoral Inferno. Calendars, calendars...hmmm...Did you remember that you really only have a month left before the submission deadline? Annnnd your boyfriend’s birthday was last week? And it's possible you missed Christmas? And assuming that a miracle does occur, and you actually graduate, you realize you’re going to have to find job. And rewrite you vitae. (And there are no jobs, by the way.) But you’d better go out and start interviewing soon. And oh yeah—sad news for you. You know that dissertation that you *loathe* with every fiber of your being right now- the one that you never want to see again after you turn in? Yup, that’s what those job talks are gonna have to be about. Get in there, friend. Fall in love with it all over again.

Nothingness- This the Circle of the Inferno in which everything just stops. You sit in a room with friends, and realize that no one has said anything for over ten minutes. You take a break, turn on your television, and realize that you’ve officially stared at the wall (not the blaring tv) for 30 minutes straight. You go to bed at night, and can’t sleep, but also can’t shut your brain off, so you look at the cracks in the ceiling above your bed and start to play connect the dot games and draw ceiling-cloud animals. You get up in the morning, sit down in front of your computer screen to type and you realize that you literally have nothing to say. And the blank screen stares back at you. But your head is empty. You have nothing left. And you don’t even care.

Debauchery- This deepest, darkest Circle of Doctoral Inferno comes as you try to escape, just for a minute, the world of all of the above Circles. And everything becomes *way* too much as a means of coping or forgetting. You order a pizza (because you’ve EARNED it!) and realize you accidentally ate the entire thing. You put the computer away for just a minute...which turns into three days...so that you can watch the first five seasons of the Cosby Show in one sitting, hoping for life advice from the Huxtables (because you NEED it!) You pop open a bottle of wine as a means of relaxing (because you DESERVE it!) and realize the next morning (by way of a pounding headache) that you definitely downed the entire bottle. This, my friends, is the low point.

I’m happy to say that unlike Dante’s Inferno though, there is hope here. The good news in Doctoral Inferno is that eventually, eventually, most people do come out on the other side...finally. And as horrible an experience as it was, for me, this particular week, I was really glad that I had been through it before. Because it’s exactly how I felt in my job. I think I flashed through all 9 Circles in the time span of about 72 hours. I was glad to have been there before, because I recognized the landmarks, and knew when to turn back.

But I did realize this…just in case you were curious… taking a job after graduation at an institution that subjects other well-intentioned people unwittingly to Doctoral Inferno actually equals Purgatory: where you find yourself constantly praying for your past, Inferno sins, trying desperately to work off your transgressions, and relentlessly hoping that someday you will be able to finally get to a better place.