PhD and FOMO

Story time: a few weeks ago, one of my best friends from university came to visit. It was the first time she's visited since I started the PhD, and we had a fantastic time. There was only one thing that made the weekend less than perfect. From time to time I would get a pang of jealousy. Not a malicious one. But the sort of pang where you think, 'god I wish my life was more like that.' And I felt awful about it.

Let me tell you about said friend. She's talented. She works hard. She lives in a city she loves and owns her own home. After a few years of hard work and low pay, she's now established in an industry she loves. And, knowing what she's like, I know that she must be amazing at what she does.

And yet. Knowing all this - how talented she is, how hard working - didn't stop me comparing our lives. Unfavorably, of course. And even though I love doing my PhD, I recognise that it's the root of a lot of my comparisons.

Even though I enjoyed that weekend, I've been thinking about this Fear of Missing Out ever since. I don't know how other people cope with FOMO, but I'm trying to focus on gaining perspective. Here's how.

__________________

Most people focus on the positive.

When we meet up with people, want to be positive. We all do this: we talk about a successful conference paper we gave, not the rude question that followed it. We'll mention our new job, and focus less on our tiring commute. We'll talk about our new home, not about the cost of replacing the kitchen.

This makes sense. Most people want to spend time talking about what makes them happy and fulfilled. Most people don't want to come across as ungrateful for their successes. When you meet up with people, they're offering to share the best of what's going on with you. And that's something to be celebrated.
 

Success and fulfillment aren't limited commodities.

This is so obvious I feel silly typing it. But, success and happiness aren't limited commodities. Someone's career success doesn't mean everyone else is going to languish. Someone's new puppy doesn't mean there are fewer dogs out there to adopt.

This truth - while obvious - is important. Acknowledging it frees you up to be genuinely happy for the people you care about, instead of quietly resentful.

Be realistic

I find I often  like the idea of what other people have: important jobs, fancy houses. But if I'm honest? I'm less keen on the practicalities of these ideas. While I wish I could do lots of international travel, I'm quite happy not having to pack my bags every week or two. While I'd love to be able to decorate my home, I'm grateful that when my washing machine broke, I could just call my landlord.

Every success has some sacrifice involved in it. And my friend doesn't live with the idea, she lives with the sacrifices too.

Remember that this isn't a race.

I feel ancient by PhD standards. I've just started my second year and I'm 26. I won't finish until I'm at least 30. It's likely to take several years after that to land a permanent job. Whatever age you are, your friends outside of academia may well be reaching milestones that you aren't.

But this isn't a race. The age of 26 is not the finish line. Not is the age of 30. Or 40. Or 50.  There is plenty of time to buy a car, or a house, or have children, or run that marathon.

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Do you get this feeling sometimes? How do you cope with a fear of missing out on the rest of life?

Serious PhD

Hark a Vagrant 332

This is a confession.

I am not a serious PhD student. That is to say, I love the irreverent, the flippant, the funny and the absurd elements of my research. 

It's very rare that I read a new primary text without the little irreverent voice piping up in my mind. Are pilgrimage narratives a little like asking your insufferable travelbug friend about their trip to Thailand? Maybe.* Would Lybeaus Desconus be a good basis for a magic-based RPG that satirises the idea of the hero by having 'fair Elaine' actually defeat each enemy without Lybeaus realising? I think so.**

I have another confession. 

I don't tell many people about these absurd little asides. And, increasingly, I realise that this is partly out of an awareness that there are enough reasons for others to consider me not a 'serious' academic. I'm part-time. I'm self-funded. I study popular culture for goodness' sake. Very often, I feel as though my credibility doesn't need yet another blow.

But as funding opportunities dry up, and as I see academics bringing their research to less 'serious' (read, less overtly academic) spaces, the more I want to interrogate this idea I have about what constitutes a 'serious' academic. Particularly, the ideas of funding and popular culture.

Let's start with self-funding. Funding opportunities are few and far between. Given the changes that are being made to the structure and funding of HE, I don't believe that it's very long before PhD loans become a reality. But unless the application process is academically rigorous, can anyone taking on additional debt be considered as having secured funding? And does this lack of funding directly dictate the quality of their research? (Short answer: no.)


Secondly, popular culture. Poor, poor popular culture. We are increasingly moving away from scholarship which dismisses the vast majority of what actual Late Medieval people were reading as 'minor' poetry. Yet. So many chapters on romances, ballads, comic pieces and lyrics are at pains to stress that the author is only studying this inferior tripe because people actually read and enjoyed it. There's a real sense of distaste that pervades a lot of this writing and which - in my opinion - can weaken the arguments that are made.

Rarely, there is an acknowledgement that even something that isn't poetically brilliant might have constructed meaning for its audience. Even more rarely, an attempt might be made to unpack these meanings.  For me, it seems obvious: if people were reading these works, they had a relationship with them; they took meaning from them; they engaged with them. And how exactly that relationship worked can tell us a lot about a given context.

Perhaps, at heart, the very method and subject of my studies is linked to my love of the flippant, the absurd. For starters, the absurd is in my subject matter: popular culture is of its time, and can sometimes translate as [un]intentionally amusing. Secondly, I have to have a lot of love for my subject to approach it the way I am (see funding, above). And this, fundamentally, is why I wanted to write this post. Because I find my subject deeply, deeply interesting. And I love it. I doubt very much that 'loving' your subject is enough to get a PhD. But I ultimately have to believe that even the most serious academic is driven by a love (or a passion, or an interest) in their subject. Otherwise, what's the point?



* More than maybe. Both accounts will be slightly breathless, overlong, and probably contain some sort of spiritual epithany which you sort of had to be there for.
** This could honestly be a blog post in itself. I have a plot worked out.

On Balance (or off it)

This week will be the first week since the start of June that I've been able to divide my time equally between my PhD and all the other commitments I've racked up. And to be frank, the lack of balance has been throwing me off recently.

This isn't really a complaint: I've done amazing things since the start of June that I never would have thought would be achievable in the next three years, let alone within four weeks. (If you're wondering how the Aspire conference went - it was amazing. I've actually not blogged about it yet because I want to do it justice.) But the lack of balance has been worrying me: suddenly my PhD seemed a remote idea; something quaint and loose and not pressing; something removed from my everyday life.

As a part-time PhD student and sufferer of imposter syndrome (you too? Wow! Great! We should talk.) this had been really worrying me over the last two weeks. If I can go a month doing barely any PhD work and not really minding, does that mean I care enough? Should I even be doing this? Who was I kidding, I'm not made for PhDing - I love public speaking and coaching and innovation...maybe this is a sign. Maybe I'm wasting my time!

And so on.

But, I also know that I need to be forgiving. I need to make the same allowances of myself that I do of everyone else. And I need to remember that having other elements to your identity, to your life, doesn't invalidate your identity as a researcher. (Even if the consistent noise on twitter about wordcounts and editing progress make me think every other PhD student doesn't sleep.) This isn't because I'm a special snowflake: even the most dedicated stay-in-the-lab-till-midnight PhD student is more than just that.

I suppose that for a part-timer, you have to prioritise all those other bits at the very least because otherwise you don't have money for food. But the last few weeks have done more than that: rather than seeing my enthusiasm for other times as a weakness, I'm trying to remind myself that I LOVE enthusiasm. I love it in others, and I love it in myself. And having more of that, for more things, surely can't be bad?

And speaking of enthusiasm, guess what?

I can't WAIT to get back to research later this week. 

The Dreaded Question

Right now, there is one question that I really struggle to answer. Every time someone asks, my mind goes blank. So far, I've babbled for a bit until they get bored. But I still dread the simple question

So what is your PhD actually about?

I dread this question because, at this early stage, I don't really know. I don't have an abstract, an argument or any findings whatsoever. But I can tell you what motivated me to do this project.

I am really interested in gender, and how it's taught and how it's performed. (SPOILER - I've been a femininst since before I knew what the word was.) By the time I found out what the word was and what it meant, I was an awkward teenager who felt awful because she wasn't very 'good' at being a woman. So a lot of my early self-centred feminist thought was about what being 'good' at being a woman meant. And while my horizons have broadened since then, I'm still interested in what it means to 'do' gender, for men and for women. (If this is sounding like a poorly-phrased echo of Judith Butler, that's probably because it is.)

More importantly, I'm interested in how people learn to 'do' gender - modern sources are easy to pinpoint and analyse because there are so many (film, television, school, parents, magazines, blogs, music, music videos, peers, adverts). So I wanted to know more about the sources that were available to late medieval people.

I am really interested in 'popular' culture and what 'normal' people were doing. Specifically, I'm interested in the overlap in consumption between 'high' and 'low' culture. Where we see several sources grouped together (as in household books), there are all sorts of texts thrown in there. How did people navigate them? Did they read in different modes for different texts? If similar ideas/concepts are contained in different types of texts, how does the presentation of these ideas differ? How did their response vary depending on which exact member of the household they were?

Again, this stems from my own interests today - I don't exclusively consume 'high' culture: I consume plenty of 'popular' culture too. (Although if watching RuPaul's Drag race is wrong, I don't want to be right.) 

Based on those two things, I am looking at a medieval miscellany aka. household book - Oxford Bodleian Library MS Codex Ashmole 61. It's a collection of 41 texts housed in a pretty unfancy manuscript. There aren't any illuminations, just a few choice illustrations of shields, flowers, and a grinning fish. No, seriously. The breadth and number of texts means that there is a lot of scope for reasearch. 

This brings up the second, lesser Dreaded Question: can this project contribute to scholarly knowledge? Well, yes. I think. Admittedly, a fair bit has been written about some of the texts in the MS, mainly the romances (The Erle of Tolous, Lybaeus Desconus) and the conduct texts. (How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter and How the Wise Man Taught His Son). So these aren't texts that have been totally overlooked by scholarship.

But there are two main ways that I think this PhD could contribue. Firstly, I'll be looking at some of the more studied texts in this specific context. There are quite significant varitions between some of the version in Codex Ashmole 61 and elsewhere. That'll be interesting, right? Secondly, not much work has been done on this manuscript as a whole: apart from one PhD thesis and two resulting articles from the mid nineties, I can't find anyone else who has written about this manuscript. 

So, if I were to offer you an 'elevator pitch' now, it would probably run as follows:

My PhD explores the reception and audience of Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 61. By studying the contents of this household book, I hope to develop our understanding of how gender identities were formed, enforced, and negotiated in the late medieval period.

On Going the Hard Way

Since starting my PhD, I’ve read a lot about what it takes to make it through. One of the most common pieces of advice is that you have to be willing to fail. Repeatedly, painfully, and constructively.

No-one says you should court failure; rather, you shouldn’t be surprised when it creeps up on you. Some people would argue that the way I’m doing this PhD is not just courting failure, but outright chasing it down. You see, friends, I have to confess: I am an unfunded PhD student. I am an unfunded part-time PhD student. I am an unfunded part-time PhD student who took a few years out of HE.

And while I’m glad I got those secrets out, I’ve got another big one: for me, none of those things are outright negatives. In fact, they’re positives. I know I’m flying in the face of all received wisdom here, but bear with me for a minute.

1) I’m unfunded. This means huge financial headaches (try saving several hundred pounds a month for the next few months and you’ll understand.) However, it means that if something does go wrong, if I do have to drop out, or suspend: I answer only to myself. My worry about the state of my funding won’t stop me leaving if this PhD thing doesn’t work out.

2) I’m part-time. More importantly, I’m part-time because I need to work to pay my fees. Again, this presents more financial challenges, and can cause time management issues. But, all those ‘transferable skills’ PhD students are supposed to be developing? I’m developing them right now. And those horrible periods when your PhD engulfs your life and you find yourself crying onto your keyboard at 3am on a Thursday morning because you just can’t see the end of it? 

Well, I can’t do that. My PhD can’t dominate my life because two and half days a week, I need to be focused on something else. A few days ‘off’ from my PhD means that I come back refreshed every week, ready for more.

3) I took a few years out. My MA was intense. By the end of it, I was exhausted and entirely doubtful of my ability (and my desire) to do a PhD. So I moved in with my boyfriend, and I got a third sector job that was exciting and frustrating and challenging and pushed me to develop professionally. But those two years away made me realise that this PhD is what I really want to do. I know that certainty isn't permanent, and that it won't get me through every hard moment. But, when it gets tough (and it will), I will know that I am doing this PhD because I want to, not because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

So, I may be chasing down failure by starting off this way. But, for me, I actually hoping I’m staving it off as best as I can.  And I’d be fascinated to know if anyone else is taking a ‘non-traditional’ PhD route, and how you’ve found it.

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