In a house rental in Virginia wine country, my friend and colleague Tamera said something that caught my attention. She talked about documenting each moment of the PhD student experience. I couldn’t remember exactly what she said, so I texted her a couple of days later.
She texted back: “Yes!! I was saying to document every moment of your experience like orientation, first day of classes for each semester.”
That’s what this blog post is: reflecting on the first 31 days since my first day of classes* in my PhD program. I’ll break it into three parts: (1) controlling time, (2) undoing and feeling, and (3) reading and memory
*I took a summer class in May and June but this Fall really felt like my first day of classes. I took the summer class as a way of getting back into “school mode”.
Controlling Time:
Sometime after coming back from Virginia, I created a weekly calendar where I blocked out times. Time for waking up, going to the gym, eating, commuting to work and to class, class time, homework, etc. and etc. I want to name the emotions that emerged from this:
PRIDE | I went into this activity NOT planning hour-by-hour. I know myself: if I slipped and the 6am-7am block of time for breakfast went into the 7am-730am time for getting ready I would feel guilty and immediately start telling myself I could not do it, it was too difficult, I was a fool for underestimating my time, and then I would just not do it the next time. Instead, I carved out blocks of 2-4 hours and thought about what I would like to get done. Blocking 2-4 hours at a time was helpful, it gave me flexibility and didn’t confine tasks (capitalistic word, I know) to a rigid amount of time (necessarily). I was also proud of myself because I set Sunday as a day of intention, I wanted one day that wasn’t driven by blocks of time and Sunday was going to be a day where yes I got things done but it was not confined to time.
WORRY | In the syllabus for one of my classes it said we should be spending 9-12 hours per week outside of class on the class itself. Because I had two classes, I quickly figured out I would be spending 18-24 hours outside of class on my class work. I went into a slight panic. I had already completed a version of my weekly calendar and having to change it brought up thoughts of “how am I going to fit this all in?” How was I going to balance the time devoted to working a full-time job, showing up as a partner, being a content creator, working as a freelance writer, serving on boards, working on writing projects? That doesn’t even account for eating, sleeping, movement, yoga, etc? I went back to the drawing board. Remember that Sunday block? Yeah, that was gone. Large blocks of time for homework, I figured, would help me the most so Saturdays and Sundays became my homework days.
What has come of this weekly planner and blocking off time? Well, I’ll tell you. I still have yet to follow it to the letter. The first two weeks I felt angry at myself and perhaps guilty. I put in the work to think through and plan, why wasn’t I able to just do it? I wondered.
The answer? Life. Life happens. A moment where I thought I would have 45 minutes to read this article might actually be focused on taking care of another thing. Also, I got tired of checking my weekly calendar multiple times of day to figure out “where I should be.” What if I want to spend time with my cat or spend time just being? Was I not going to do it just because it wasn’t on my planner? No.
At this moment I cannot tell you where that weekly planner is. It might be under a pile of books. I’m okay with that.
Undoing and Feeling:
On the first day of class, we went around and introduced ourselves but were invited to practice embodiment with a sound and movement centered on feeling.
Now let me say this straight away: I do not do well with my own (and that’s key) feelings. I am often detached from my feelings. I make space for my logical self. My therapist has gently pushed me to name emotions and I do feel I am making growth.
This invitation to practice embodiment was different. Outside of my theater training and days as a college orientation leader, I was not asked to connect sound and movement to introducing myself. It’s usually one’s name, pronouns, your title, and for fun: a question about your week, your summer, favorite something or another. The invitation to connect with how I was feeling was not the norm in my classroom experiences.
The feeling of “different” was also connected to how there were very few spaces that I felt I could be honest with my emotions and that was therapy. To be honest, this tripped me up a little.
I call this section undoing because this class is pushing back on and unraveling my ways of thinking of myself as a student. For example, for two weeks the assignment was to write five responses to the phrase “why I write.” After my first week, the professors invited me to approach my answers to that question differently. Their feedback: where does writing land on your body? How can you tap into senses?
Hold up. What?! This disoriented me again. For one, I expected the feedback to be about what I could do better or needed to improve on. My first initial response to their feedback was: what is this meta ish? This felt too “out there” for me. Now, of course, I realize these initial feelings was my body responding to different. When asked: Where does writing land on my body? I don’t know: was my response. I just do it. I just do it because I have to.
But when I grounded myself in that question and really thought about where writing lands on my body, I was amazed to discover which emotions surfaced The unboundless joy I had as a teen writing stories on my Blackberry. The joy I had when I wrote something that evoked emotions from people. In there, too, was a feeling of safety. For me, writing is where I feel the most safe and protected. For me writing is freedom from the judgment of others but really the judgment of myself. When I write, I do “just do it” but I hadn’t examined the emotions underneath. As I type this, what is coming up is a moment of curiosity: are emotions always present when I write? What are they? Why don’t I always feel them?
Over the last 31 days other emotions have come up. I will admit that no less than 50 times I have thought about quitting this program thinking “it is too much” or asking “how am I going to balance all of this?” There have been moments of stress where I feel like I am failing or not smart enough. There are moments where I am frustrated because I cannot successfully juggle all the things. But what does successfully juggling even look like?
Reading and Memory:
Growing up I was an avid reader. In some ways for escapism but also to learn new words and grow in my vocabulary. As someone who grew up with English as their second language, reading gave me access to the English language.
When Covid-19 lockdown happened in March 2020, I continued my (then) annual tradition of meeting GoodReads challenges. However, as summer rolled into fall, I read less and less. I could not concentrate while reading, could not seem to find ways to stay engaged or wanting to read.
With this PhD program, I am coming back to reading. One part out of necessity (because homework) but also because I am genuinely curious about the subject matter. At the moment, I am reading ‘Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America” by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva.
I was nervous to start reading this book not because of the subject but because I had not sat down anywhere besides my desk to read articles and book chapters. For homework, I had to read half of the book so I knew I couldn’t spend the several and several hours reading at my desk. My poor shoulders and back!
So, I found my way to the couch in my living room and sat with my feet on the ground and my right side of my body against the right side of the couch. I grabbed a pillow, laid it on my lap, and placed the book on top of the pillow I opened up the book and started to read. When I started to feel my mind wander, I gave myself 25 minute sprints of reading. I knew that if I told myself to read for one hour straight my mind would not respond well. Breaking down the task into smaller chunks was useful.
Prior to writing this section, I noted that I had probably read close to 400 pages of articles and book chapters in my first 31 days of my program. This was before I had to read close to 150 more pages across 14 scholarly articles for a literature review assignment.
In truth, the amount of concepts and themes covered over the readings is overwhelming. Listen, I knew a doctorate degree meant a significant amount of reading. But also, after 10 years in the student affairs and higher education administration world, this program is covering different (albeit it connected) subject matters.
There were (and still are) moments where I cannot easily recall concepts and themes from prior weeks’ readings and in those moments I feel unintelligent. As I dug into why this is, I realized that in much of my schooling experience I view memorization and recall as intelligent. In the first week of classes, I feared getting called on. You remember the scene in Legally Blonde when Elle gets called on by Professor Stromwell and didn’t know the answer? Then the professor asks her to leave?
Y’all, I thought that would happen to me. I truly imagined a scenario where a professor would call on me to define a term, I would have to answer it right then and there, I wouldn’t be able to because I could not recall the term, and then I would be asked to leave. Just like Elle.
Even now (in October) two months I am still waiting to be called on, not know the answer, be kicked out of class, and seen as unintelligent.
Concluding
The above is just a small view into the first month of program. Writing this has been beneficial as a way of documenting a part of my experiences and related feelings in my first 31 days. I want to continue to write and use this website as a digital space to capture these moments.
Also, I’ve been thinking about how to push back against perfectionism and writing something that is “right”. I want to free myself from this expectation and use blogging as a way of not necessarily focused on writing the “right” thing but using writing as a way of capturing and making sense in one way.
At the end of this chapter, I want to be able to look back on my time. This blog is one way to do this.
