For 16 months, I devoted an average of 4 hours a day to working on Geraldine. I took most weekends and major holidays off from my research, but continued to work faithfully up through the final submission to Indi at the end of March. After deciding to delay my defense, I took a break from my daily routine and have since struggled incessantly with forcing myself to reestablish a daily research routine.
One of the problems with being an academic is there are no longer have deadlines. There are no syllabi stating due dates for research proposals, abstracts, rough drafts, presentations or final copies. Although my 3.5 years of graduate coursework certainly prepared me to work on a similar schedule, I'm finding that it becomes increasingly more difficult to discipline myself now that I do not have weekly meetings (classes) with others (professors) who expect me to produce scholarly work (term papers). At first I wondered how some of the smartest people I studied with hadn't started their doctoral research, writing chapters, or had even dropped out of school. I'd read accounts of people who finished their dissertations and just never submitted them to the graduate school. Before I couldn't understand how this was possible, but nowadays I feel like I could live the rest of my life without ever feeling an urge to read another linguistics paper. Suddenly, I understand why so many people progress so far into a PhD program only to never finish.
Sometimes I am surprised that I even wrote a dissertation. In the last month and a half, I think two or three people have asked me about my dissertation research. Each time this happens, I quickly explain my research questions, methodology and results. Those asking about my work seem interested and impressed with the amount of effort required for my research, yet whenever these conversations occur, I feel like I am having an out of body experience. I see and hear myself explaining my research but feel like I am observing myself from across the room. Who is that smart person who conducted that work? I could never do that! And then it occurs to me that I am the person talking, I did the research, and it's not that big of a deal. I certainly don't feel any smarter than I was at any other time in my life. Even talking about my accomplishments makes me feel like I'm violating unspoken modesty rules.I feel very unaccomplished until I force myself back into the world of academia and 5+ years of training kicks in. Someone asks my opinion about linguistics in pop media and I automatically critique the claims. I hear someone talk and subconsciously start to analyze the speaker's regional roots, contact with other languages and socioeconomic status. I read a research paper and find myself forming an opinion before I even finish the abstract. Even if I've become lazy and temporarily detached from my research, my intellect will still get the best of me once activated. Sometimes I'd rather have a super power, like being able to teleport, but I guess being an academic isn't that bad (most of the time).
A week ago I made a summer research to-do list and have been forcing myself to check off tasks. It seems ridiculous to have to include "e-mail X and ask about Y" on my list, but checking it off motivates me to do more work. I remember hearing somewhere that it takes 28 days to break or make a habit. I guess taking more than 28 days off broke my habit of daily research and it will take at least another 28 days to reestablish it and feel motivated to do so. I have no idea when I'll have more than a month at a time to do research again, but in the meantime I'll keep chipping away at my to-do list and hope that some sort of divine light beam of brilliant motivation with strike my intellect and it will make a difference in my academic career.
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