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{because it's 2am}
At the moment I'm talking a fair bit with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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finite time, how does it work?
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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.
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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!
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... 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.
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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..."
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(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...)
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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!
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