I think I should feel guilty this month, but I don't. It's the end of another month and usually I would panic at this point, but I'm not. Maybe it's the weekly acupuncture treatment, the extra herbal tea I drink now that it's cold outside, the daily workout, or the wonder-supplement flax seed oil I take with each meal. Or maybe I just have a grip on my dissertation for once. It's probably the having-a-grip bit, but I think the other proposals above contribute to my general sense of balance and well-being. The end of November hasn't sent me into moments of heightend anxiety and it's a great feeling.
In my last post, I wrote about taking time off. With a holiday weekend, I took advantage of time to myself for relaxation and hobbies. I spent hours spinning yarn (I have bags of sheep, alpaca and camel fiber in my attic) and have enjoyed relearning how to spin. It gives me a sensation of connection to hunter-gatherers and agricultural societies who have spun animal and plant fiber in this manner for centuries. I also spent some time knitting, cleaning, baking and canning (pickles and jam). I baked cookies for the first time in at least 6 months on Wednesday and have even been able to avoid eating them. I also played with bunnies, spent lots of time with Hubby and talked to friends. And last, but certainly not least, I worked on Geraldine (but more about that later). Perhaps the biggest change is I stayed home for 5 days in a row. I haven't done that in at least 6 months either. A few days ago I felt anxious about having to return to the office, but tonight it's no big deal. That sense of balance and well-being is key.
There are three more weeks of instruction until finals week for fall semester. When I realized this last week, I wondered how I would manage to finish everything. Yestserday I decided to take a friendly professor's advice and to challenge myself to work on Geraldine for 45 minutes every day. When I started dissertating, I worked on Geraldine for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. Now that I teach face-to-face again, I haven't come close to that amount of time on task working on Geraldine. Mondays and Wednesdays are teaching days, and I don't have time for Geraldine. I always take Sundays off, and Fridays tend to fill up with other tasks- reading groups, meetings, etc. If I push myself to work for 45 mintutes every day, I think I'll get a lot done, and feel a sense of accomplishment. It's working for me this weekend, and I think it will work for me until I go into ulitmate panic mode in mid-March.
The way I see it, there are 5 stages to being a dissertator. Stage 1 is preparing for the proposal. In this stage, it took 4 hours each day to collect materials, read and sort through it, and collect data from 160 languages. Stage 1 lasted 5 months. In general, I felt good about myself and confident about my progress. Stage 2 was recovering from my proposal defense. My committee asked me to change my theoretical framework and collect more data. Both came as a surprise, and I felt lousy about myself and my progress. Professor Jolly Green Giant told me that Stage 2 was the incubator phase of writing a dissertation, and it was normal to feel lost and confused after a proposal defense. I think Stage 2 lasted 4 months and it was the time to clean up all of my mistakes. I still managed to work every day, but I never felt like I was making progress. Eventually, I understood enough of the new theoretical framework to start talking about it, and I finished collecting data. Onto Stage 3! Stage 3 was organizing data and pre-writing chapters. Luckily, that only lasted 2 months and it was relatively easy. And now, I am in State 4: writing my chapters! I anticipate this lasting until mid-March, when (I think) Stage 5 will come: super-ultra-stay-up-late-every-night-and-have-no-time-to-do-anything-else-panic-mode (AKA proving to your committee chair that you`re ready to defend).
I thought that writing the chapters would be the hard part, but so far it`s not that bad. I write in blocks, then work on something else for a few days. I need time between writing and reading my work. If I have to write for more than 1 day in a row, I have to discipline myself not to read what I wrote before. If I start reading, I start editing, and then I don`t really accomplish anything. Therefore, I have to leave myself to-do lists for the next work day and outlines on what to work on next. So far, it`s working for me. I used to be scared about submitting chapters because that`s when others would start to critique my work. I also felt like that`s when Geraldine would stop being mine, but then I realized that was a stupid thought.
Today I took a day off from writing and worked on my database, which led to huge moments of dissertation enlightenment. The biggest realization is that the problems I thought I had to fix in my database aren`t problems at all. I just thought about the data the wrong way. For example, the computer already does things for me, so instead of trying to stop it from doing so, I just have to stop myself from doing the same work. (analogy: if you put a penny into a gumball machine and twist the lever, the gumball comes out. You don`t have to reach through the hole and try to extract a gumball by your own secret awesomeness). Also, I don`t need a graduate school margin friendly version of every report from my database queries. I`m the only one who actually needs to see my queries, because it would be stupid to have a chart appear in a chapter for every time the word for `hand`is the same for 'arm'. I just need a chart that lists 'hand is same as arm' and the number of times it occurs, and I can do that in Word, just like I have for every paper I've written in graduate school. Duh. There were many smaller moments of enlightenment today as well, so I decided to write them down in a log before I forgot about them. Ahhh, feelings of pure genius. I will relish in the moment because I know they will be replaces with feelings of failure in a day or two. :0)
As for the best feeling of enlightenment from today's epiphanies? All I have to do now is write. Finally!
No comments:
Post a Comment