{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

[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.