{because it's 2am}

[kaberett]

At the moment I'm talking a fair bit with quartzpebble about how disorienting and terrifying executive dysfunction can be. We've both been offered PhD places at prestigious institutions, we're clearly both capable of doing very good work within the context of the academy, and yet some days we not only can't even begin but we can't reliably sleep schedule or feed ourselves. Finding diagnoses that explain it - ways that other people have spotted patterns that match our behaviour, that mean it's not an individualised problem of laziness or whatever - is an immensely big deal, and nonetheless I just keep on coming back to Onsind when they sing I only wish that I could find a way to accurately describe the effect that this has on me.

Internalised ableism, I suspect, is playing a role here; to large extent I've learned that feelings of shocked betrayal aren't a terribly useful response to one of my legs refusing to bear weight, and that neuropathy affecting my lower limb function isn't actually a moral failing on my part. I can even do this about obvious depression-related symptoms. But just the executive dysfunction...? Not so much.

I have no idea how to make this work with my job. I love doing my PhD and I love being in academia and I'm very, very scared about the extent to which being an independent PhD student, "not needing hand-holding" (or, less disparagingly, "being self-directed"), is valued -- because of all the ways in which I can't be self-directed.

Which brings us on to the stranger on the bus a month or two ago who decided that the wheelchair-using young lady was appropriate cripspiration and started telling me about how amazing it was I was leaving my house, etc etc, along with cheerfully recounting for me the story about how her father always said that "can't" is spelled w-o-n-t.

Over and over again (I only wish...) I come back to "can't" and "won't", to the difference between "this is not a thing I am capable of" (and, again, I find this easier to handle in terms of physical impairments) and "I am not willing to make the necessary trade-offs to do this thing", to learning to trust myself in setting and defending those boundaries, to being able to believe that just because I can pay a price doesn't mean I must. "Won't" is allowed. "Won't" is permitted. This thing, too, I may have.

Comments

[kaberett]

(Hah, this post was going to be about other things - about the accuracy of my self-assessment in terms of how scared to be about things, about the thing that worries me most about oral presentations is exactly the same as the thing that worries me most about interviews, and so on and so forth - but it looks like I'm currently perseverating on the topic of executive dysfunction, sooo.)

[recessional]

I haaaaaate executive dysfunction. It's like I HAVE ACTUALLY DECIDED TO DO THE THING. I WISH THE THING TO BE DONE. WHY AM I STILL IN THIS CHAIR. (guess who is having problems with this right now?)

[kaberett]

yeeep. I am currently having an essay crisis because it is only Impending Deadline that is managing to get me through the block of planning how to do the thing.

[redbird]

I'm so sorry you have to deal with clueless gits on the bus (and elsewhere). With snarky remarks from here about how such gits clearly can't keep their rude thoughts to themselves.

[kaberett]

Hah. Thank you. :-)

[shehasathree]

Love love love this post and ♥ you.

[kaberett]

<3

[sidheag]

"Self directed" means different things at undergraduate and at PhD level. Tbh it sounds to me as though you have plenty of the kind people are usually talking about in a PhD context - witness, you understand the big picture of what you're doing well enough to have original ideas about what else should be investigated - even though you may be struggling with the undergraduate kind! So actually, though I can readily believe that coping at all is hard, provided you can find a way to cope with whatever support you can find, I wouldn't worry *too* much about what people will think of you as a PhD student; the ways in which you're strong may well be more salient (because more unusual) than the ways in which you're weak. Also, your self-awareness and experience of trying things to scaffold yourself will be very useful in dealing with ug students, many of whom struggle just through never really having thought about how to do better.

[kaberett]

I think the core of my concern about the PhD-stuff is that I'm astonishingly bad at self-directed reading and synthesis/writing - given small tasks ("write a two-page summary of $topic") I'm mostly fine, and I can even suggest the topic, but I think I need to work out how to scaffold doing that (in finite time) for myself :-/

[quartzpebble]

Yeah. When I was working/studying as a chemist, I knew I needed to be reading to keep up with the field, but I wouldn't usually do that without some form of explicit prompting (by myself or, more likely, by someone else). But when I was researching something in particular I would go on an absolute reading tear (download all the possibly-related papers, skim/quick-read everything, go into the interesting ones more deeply, and generally go through 20-50 papers in a day or two).

It's difficult to ask for help on the scaffolding and planning part of research, because that's often assumed to be pretty similar to "needing to be supervised". Just because you have a grasp at the larger structure of your research and where you want it to be going doesn't mean that you are able to make a map of ways to get there or (more of the issue for me) stick to the map, especially when things in your life are demanding your focus.

[sidheag]

One pattern to try might be, faced with an impossible writing task, factor it:

A) write one-page high-level bulleted list type outline of what would need to be in Thing (don't be put off by having no idea how to do some of the bullets);

B) for each bullet, write one to two page sub-Thing.

Many students can do B but need A done for them - but I bet you can do A, provided you can limit yourself to a page and just do that.

[sidheag]

Re reading: secret, most academics read only a) things they have to review b) things they have to cite. So if you do those two things, anything else is a bonus. Say Yes to reviewing. Allow yourself to read things that you come across and feel like reading, even if they're irrelevant, provided the habit doesn't get out of hand. Go to seminars. Look up things you don't understand from their abstracts in Wikipedia in advance. Ignore me and do what works :-)

[liv]

OK, now you're actually strategizing / self-relecting. This is potentially a real weakness in your PhD skills, not just flailing at argh, can't. I remind you that you're not expected to be able do everything an academic can do at the start of your PhD, it's supposed to be a training programme, the whole point is to learn to do the stuff you currently don't have the experience in.

This is something I'm reasonably good at and something I have some experience in teaching, so if you would like me to help you with this specific thing I would be glad to. Probably not here and now in this comment discussion, because apart from anything else I need to pack and leave for Worldcon in the next few hours! But the offer stands for any time you feel daunted by a self-directed literature absorbing task, and you're also in a place when you feel like some guidance / brainstorming of strategies might help.

[shehasathree]

*whimpers in recognition*
finite time, how does it work?

[kaberett]

... in which I staggeringly failed to say "thank you", but: thank you for all of this, esp the point that I might actually be able to use this stuff to help my undergrads.

[liv]

I think that "independent" and "self-directed" in the context of a PhD aren't exactly the things you're talking about here. I don't at all want to minimize that having executive function issues is going to make it harder for you to get through the sheer amount of work that it takes to do a PhD in natural sciences. But being self-directed means things like you finding something novel you think should be looked and putting a case together so that your supervisor can apply for funding so you can do the thing you're interested in as well as the stuff she's interested in. That's the thing that lots of people who are good at passing exams in undergraduate never make the leap to being able to do, and you clearly can.

It's also a little bit to do with figuring out how you can reshape your life to make it possible to do put in the hundreds of hours of labwork you need. And later, how you can make yourself put it altogether in a novel-length thesis, finding a way to get enough writing done even with very little in the way of external rewards, encouragement or feedback. The fact that you break down tasks into small steps is an advantage, not a problem, for being a "self-directed" PhD student: you're good at planning your own experiments, including working out how to make the timing of something that needs lots of timepoints fit in with the rest of your life.

"Independent" in this context doesn't, certainly shouldn't, mean that you do all this without any support from your friends and from professionals if need be. Independent means you're making decisions about your research, both detail level decisions like what time should I start this experiment so the samples are ready when the instrument is free, and high level decisions like what's the best experiment to find out why there's an anomaly in this data. I get the impression that you're really quite independent in those ways, even if you need help with getting out of bed and dressed and into the lab so you can in fact start your timecourse at the time you decided would work for you.

[highlyeccentric]

I second this comment. I think some of the friction I had with my supervisor early this year came because I fessed up about special!brains affecting my supplies of cope & ability to balance things - and flagged that that does sometimes affect my ability to turn out work, especially over summer.

I think she jumped to conclusion that because failing at basic functional stuff I was going to be *worse* with graduate level research tasks. This is not so!

[kaberett]

HAH. Yes. The job is what keeps me sane-ish and massively regulates everything else.

... uh. I haven't made it into work during standard working hours since Thursday last week. This is a sign that Shit's Going Wrong, isn't it. Whoops.

[kaberett]

I've expanded a bit on the specifics of what I'm concerned about -- but thank you lots, especially for the reassurance about support being okay. (Part of my issue is that my transfer examiner made a pretty off-hand comment about one of her students who just Goes Off And Gets Shit Done, which is completely at odds with my self-image, so... insecurity.)

[raze]

I so sympathize with the fears about independence and appreciate you speaking frankly about them. It has increasingly come to my attention that, left to my own devices, I can't sustain my own health because basic things like eat/drink/sleep/medicate are forgotten. A weekend alone with no one to moderate my activities usually equals about a week of recovery.

And: sorry about the cripspiration asshat. I agree: won't is okay. It isn't weak to say, "I could do this, but the cost is too high, and it's not a cost I want to take even if I'm technically able to." I'm struggling with this right now as I'm being asked for a lot of transport help in a week where it's not quite that I absolutely can't, but doing so would put me out massively, and between gas money, car condition, and my own physical and mental health, the cost is too high. But in the back of my mind, an insidious little voice is whispering, "Yeah, but technically, you COULD..."

[fyreharper]

That little "but technically I COULD..." voice is so very the opposite of helpful, yes >.< :listens to it more than is probably good for me:

[kaberett]

<3

[fyreharper]

<3

(It is especially hard to not do the things when I WANT to do each of them them, and there are people involved, and I could (or I mostly could), and yet if I try to do all of them I will be a dysfunctional thing later...)

[highlyeccentric]

Interestingly, I wonder if this level of (dis)functionality problems is something that would be lessened in the context of old-fashioned collegiate university life (not typically the most accessible of institutions - did i mention my undergrad college's wheelchair shower was only accessible DOWN A SPIRAL CEMENT STAIRWELL?). i know it took me quite a while to adjust to having to plan my own lunchtimes once I got into the real world - although I'd grown up in many ways at uni, college had carried straight on where school and mother left off in providing regulated mealtimes.

I suspect dining rights at St Johns College (USyd) are part of what kept my undergrad supervisor vaaaaguely functional for so many years. The medievalist crazyfolk gossip line says medical assistance is now improving the situtation, but still. I also know my dear boyfriend, who hates to think he might have Problems, only got dressed before midday the whole time he was in oxford because he could claim free lunch if he showed up at college by one.

That doesn't help you at all, but it might be comforting to think that there are some places where academic success does not require the ability to schedule one's own meals!

[fyreharper]

spiral. cement. stairwell. :boggles: that's missing the whole concept of wheelchair-accessible a bit, ey...

[silveradept]

"Won't" keeps you from chasing every rabbit down its hole, regardless of whether it's relevant to your doctoral work. Which then hopefully provides en9ugh executive function for "will" - and I'll bet that your advisor and others can build a support network with you on some of those tasks that shade into "can't."

[kaberett]

Yeah. <3