#spring goals

what made last semester hard?

i expected to be coming into the new role with a lot more structure and support. i love my supervisor as a human being, but she was so busy with her own transition into a new role that she wasn’t really around much and couldn’t give a lot of feedback. i feel like i spent the first half of the semester feeling very unsure of myself, because I couldn’t tell how much I was in charge of various things and so felt nervous about making changes or deciding things without input from her. then when it became clear that i was pretty much on my own, i spent the second half of the semester feeling very adrift.

i am suffering from the lack of formal and informal feedback! i don’t really have anyone i am accountable to on a day-to-day basis. i don’t have regular performance reviews or even just check-in meetings with a supervisor. i am in a different building than the other people i work with, which has made it difficult to casually seek out advice or support (if i want to talk to someone i have to schedule a time to meet, and then it all feels unnecessarily formal, so i usually just.. don’t do it). without regular feedback i just slip back into that grad student mindset where i’m living in this miasma of guilt and fear that i’m going to be found out (found out for what?? unclear!!! the guilt is more stressful because you don’t even know what you’re meant to be feeling guilty for!).

i typically respond to feelings of guilt with avoidance and procrastination. which meant that over the course of the semester i would start getting in a little later in the mornings, just kinda dragging my feet getting up and out of the house. GOD i remember this feeling so clearly from my fellowship year!! where every morning i would just wake up and spend twenty minutes staring at the ceiling thinking What Is The Point of Anything, Why Even Get Up, Why Face the Day, I Cannot Bear the Awful Endless Emptiness of This Day, The Void Beckons. so my guilt makes me want to be late, but then coming in late makes me feel even guiltier, so when i finally get in i feel shitty already and spend most of the morning berating myself for being so lazy.

another source of guilt: all of my friends who are still here are working extremely long hours and are being compensated way below what they should be earning. that was me last year, but this year i am making a much better salary for so much less work, and the fact that i’m not on the job market means my life is even easier. and all of this makes me feel guilty and embarrassed, because i am squandering time that other people would kill to have right now.

i did not make substantial progress on any of my writing / research projects. i kept starting things, spending a couple weeks furiously researching and writing, and then abandoning them for reasons unclear. every time i do this it feels like it reinforces a learned pattern and makes it harder to break the habit. and i do this sooo often. 

okay. so what can I do to change some of these things? what alterations can i make to the structures of my daily work life? what perspective shifts can i adopt that might help me usefully reframe those feelings of guilt?

let’s start with that last one, because somehow it feels like it’ll be simultaneously the easiest and the hardest change to make.

first: i can forgive myself for not using my time as productively as i could have last semester. it is okay to take time to adjust to a new work situation. also: if i look at this past semester in the broader picture of my life, i can acknowledge that i was coming off an extremely intense period of work. i spent all of spring and the first part of summer 2018 working so hard on the dissertation - like nine to twelve-hour writing days, working all through my breaks, living in pretty intense isolation as i worked. i took some time off at the end of summer 2018, but then plunged straight into an intellectually and emotionally demanding full-time teaching job that required sooo much creativity and energy every day (designing new curriculum, researching and reading for new classes, spending endless weekends grading, etc etc). after that finished, i had a week and a half off before i started working full time at a tutoring job that sucked up sooooooo much of my energy and left me too drained to do anything when i got home. then when i switched into this job, i had to rapidly teach myself a lot of new content, map out a new seminar, and work on building lots of new social relationships, which kept me very busy for most of september.

when i think about last semester in that context, i can see that it might’ve actually been a blessing in disguise to have a couple months of low stress / moderate responsibility work. i know that those fallow periods where it feels like nothing is happening are really important to doing intellectual and creative work! like i know with my fellowship year (and a half), i wasted pretty much the whole first semester just hanging out with my puppy and reading in what felt like a very scattered way. i felt like i was just spinning my wheels, getting nowhere and accomplishing nothing. but then the next semester, when i actually had to sit down and start powering through the writing part, i discovered that a lot of the reading i’d been doing as procrastination could actually help me completely reshape my understanding of the project. and all the time i “wasted” reading about dog training and dog socialization (which felt like just a fun thing i was doing for/with Pip) ended up giving me a totally new conceptual framework for thinking about teaching and learning, which turned out to be so, SO useful for the postdoc teaching year.

okay wow!! writing through this is making me feel so much better. i am just going to choose to trust that the work will come. i did read a lot last semester, and i am sure i will continue doing that this semester. i think i also need to figure out how to remind myself of the writing i’ve done, because i tend to be very “out of sight out of mind” about my own work. like i wrote maybe 60 pages or more last semester of scholarly or scholarly-adjacent writing about fandom, teaching, course design, etc., which isn’t even counting all the journaling and personal writing i did towards the ‘girls i have been’ project. but often i do a lot of writing like that, then close the word doc and immediately forget that i did anything. and so then when i sit down to write again, i often end up reinventing the wheel, re-theorizing things i’ve already spent a lot of time unpacking.

so. i think one thing i could try this semester is to print everything i write and keep it in a place that is always visible - like clearly labeled folders that i keep on my desk or something. that way when i’m stuck, or when i am feeling like i’ve accomplished nothing, i can revisit the work i’ve done and refamiliarize myself with what i was thinking a week or a month ago. i am a very visual thinker, in the sense that i often can’t see the connections between the component pieces of an argument until i physically lay them out and move them around. something about that process of externalizing what’s in my head -- and then being able to physically manipulate the order of ideas and try out different constellations -- helps me make those big conceptual leaps to the next phase of a project.