softacademia

[softacademia]

[softacademia]

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One of the reasons I am not planning on pursuing an academic career (at least in the traditional sense): freedom.

I know academics love to tell you that freedom is a massive benefit to staying in academia but one thing I have really thought a lot about in the last few weeks since submitting my PhD is that it is not the type I want the most.

Freedom in academia has historically meant time to read and write and work whatever hours suit your writing and research, but the truth is, the academia that I entered into is full of meetings and emails and bureaucracy in ways that didn’t actually feel like freedom at all to me.

And that while there were seasons of my time in academia that allowed for uninterrupted hours of reading and writing, I actually didn’t have that much freedom in terms of topic or format or editing or the ways I could actually spend my day.

Yes, I may have had weeks and months to work on a paper, and I do realize and appreciate the privilege in that type of freedom, and yet I realized how much I crave freedom in terms of pivoting across projects more.

It doesn’t actually feel freeing to me to have to slog through bureaucratic practices on the same paper for over a year. Or that in order to get through writing the dissertation, I had to follow a formula (opening sentence, summary of chapter, key findings, paper disclaimer, etc.).

Those feel like the opposite of freedom to me.

What these past few weeks have shown me, is that the freedom that I feel the most creative in is when I am able to choose which project to work on.

The freedom to choose for these couple hours: am I in a writing mood or an outreach mood, do I build out my freelance portfolio today or do I apply for jobs that build skills I am looking to gain, etc.

Do I want to spend my day thinking about trauma, play, creativity, mental health care, psychedelics, AI, etc. (all projects I have my hands in right now, more details as we move into the autumn!)

I just have found such a levity in the last few weeks of having a different sort of freedom and I know it cannot be sustained in academia so I must go.

[softacademia]

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Excerpts from a recent blog post I wrote for Voices of Academia (a platform for academics to talk about mental health)

“There is often talk in the media about healing your inner child, but far less talk about healing your inner teenager. When it comes to my time in academia as a doctoral student, I have found attending to the wounds of my inner teenager has allowed me to experience something else that is seldom spoken about: healing during a PhD.

For me, my teenage years were the years that solidified some painful stories I told about my self-worth and value, particularly around education. I often felt like I needed to provide ‘value’ to my peers by doing the most work on group assignments; I thought it would mean more people would like me or want to be my friend. I realised consciously about that time that the adults in my world were only interested in what I accomplished, what my grades were, and the topics I was learning about; I began internalising that what I was doing was more important than who I was being as what I was curious about or confused about. My entire interior world, including my mental health and wellbeing, was less of a topic of conversation than school. Grades mattered, and because I was encouraged for ‘my best’ to be the same as ‘the best’ (as in the actual highest score), I felt like I failed other people for not being the smartest or the top-performing student in the room. 

My teenage years were not years of fostering self-confidence or self-esteem that was solid; rather there was praise for accomplishments and achievements in education that built a shaky foundation for my self-identity. I felt insecure, unconfident, and constantly seeking external validation to ‘reduce’ those feelings.

People often consider healing to be a solitary or internal experience, but the healing here for me has happened in my ability to interact and respond differently. I get to heal, in small choices and big choices, the harmful narratives that came from education systems. Finally, I can support my teenage self in the way I wasn’t able to at the time.”

[softacademia]

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Before I accepted the offer for my PhD, I sat on my bedroom floor in Seattle and wrote down my non-negotiables for my PhD.

These were for myself, things I could not neglect, or actions I could not return to because I wanted to keep the ground I had managed to make when it came to my own healing.

And asking for help was one of the things.

I told myself I could not accept my PhD offer if I was going to be stubborn in asking for help or if I was going to slip back into hyper-independence instead of deepening my practice of relying on other people.

I could not have been more fortunate for my research centre and my colleagues turned friends who made that non-negotiable so incredibly easy.

So easy in fact that when I returned from my holiday to no feedback on my draft, I knew I had options. I knew I could ask people for their help to read my work.

I want you to know that I know that is a GIFT.

That academia does not automatically look like this for most people, that there are some people who don’t feel comfortable sending unpublished work to colleagues in fear of scooping (aka taking that work or ideas as their own), that others don’t feel in community with the people in their labs, or otherwise have hurtful relationships with senior academics.

I too though want to acknowledge, and celebrate, how far I have come in this realm of asking for help.

In one of my first personal therapy sessions, seven years ago, I told my therapist that sometimes I have a hard time pulling a bus chord to indicate my stop because I don’t like the idea of inconveniencing other people ‘like what if no one else was getting off and it was just for me’.

I haven’t been her for a long time now, but it feels remarkable to have asked no less than six people to help me edit my thesis in these last few weeks and have not has the same type of thoughts.

It does not mean of course that I forget that it means something to ask people for help, a sacrifice of time and energy and rest.

But it does indicate to me that I did choose to do a PhD when I was ready. When I was able to manage my mental health, wellbeing, and connection with others.

[softacademia]

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“As if Cambridge and a whole new life were waiting for you”

I read this in 2017 during my MA.

Tagged it in a book that introduced me to play therapy and didn’t really think anything of it; I just liked the hope in the middle of a scene where a therapist was in session with another therapist.

My master’s degree in existential phenomenological psychology broke me open.

It reorganized my world in the interior and exterior sense. It deconstructed how I thought about being a therapist, it changed my relationship to words like self-less, dis-ease, helper.

Some of the shifts within me were immediate and other shifts have taken their time settling into my bones and language and relationships but I still feel it.

And because of that I had been avoiding one type of qualitative research analysis: interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).

The two years of my master’s program, coupled with two years of weekly therapy, left me so vulnerable and tender. Sometimes I look back on days and weeks of that time and realize in some ways I was drowning; a death and rebirth process of self.

And so I didn’t want to go back into those philosophers, I didn’t want to dig up my notes.

I didn’t want to go back to memories of a high school class where a teacher introduced me to the mix of psychology and philosophy during an independent study. How I found out the news that the teacher who connected me to this path died by suicide during my second or third week of my masters hours before our first class on suicide.

So many other things about this PhD is hard and so I didn’t want do this analysis because I didn’t want to open old wounds.

But I’ve thought a lot about limits the last few months, and growth edges, and where did this fit. Was I actually in a space where I shouldn’t be opening this again and it would derail my PhD? Or was this toes on the edge of a cliff fear in a way that brings about importance changes?

My conclusion was that it was the latter.

So I came to the ocean, to wide open spaces, to energies of new places because it’s the gentlest and most beautiful way I can bring this project into the light and do it the justice it deserves.

[softacademia]

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As the end of my PhD is nearing - mid July submission - I’ve hit a very problematic attitude toward productivity, especially noticeable in these last two weeks.

And that is that if I’m not completing my an entire article - either a full draft of my last one or completing my supervisors’ returned edits or submitting to a journal - OR I have not completed my entire dissertation draft, that somehow I am not being productive.

That I have not accomplished enough that day to be proud of myself.

Even some thoughts have come back every once in awhile that I have not earned rest or time away from work with how ‘little’ I am achieving.

Now this is all relative to my PhD submission timeline because at no other point during my PhD have I considered 700 words in a day to not be productive. I’ve worked really hard to not beat myself up over 200 words and instead find the joy in moving forward and making progress.

I’ve also struggled to feel okay stepping away from the computer for the day if the words aren’t following or the citations aren’t formatting properly in the disaster that is laptop to iPad transition sometimes.

I cried at Word after a formatting error, and instead of stepping away, I agitatedly attempted to fix it through the stream of tears.

First year Sydney would have listened to that as a signal of overwhelm and stepped away for the afternoon for however it felt important to care for herself. But all of that progress oriented compassion has gone dormant, become illusive, as my deadline gets closer.

All of the knowing that breaks matter and emotional & bodily cues are important information, have started to become a fight to remember instead of just easily enactable knowing.

This is venturing into all-or-nothing thinking that can be pretty characteristic of stressful times. It also has an impressive foothold in mental health impacts - sleep schedules, self-talk, joyful activities, consistent eating, feeling proud and conifedent, energy to respond to messages.

These things haven’t evaporated, but they require more energy to value they did at other points in my PhD. Healing is a practice; soft academia is a practice.

[softacademia]

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I have been thinking, since creating a @notionhq page to log my experiences that could be relevant to any job I apply to, about what a long road it has been to shift from self-worth as created by what I ‘do’ or what I accomplish, to self-worth as inherent.

The value shift of a more important measure of success related to ‘being’ instead of ‘doing’.

The first time I ever read Toni Morrison’s words: you are not the work you do, you are the person you are, I cried.

It has made me think back to what made me shift from doing things for the sake of resumes and college applications, and doing things because they are aligned with the person I am (the ‘being’).

I didn’t do the trauma-informed football coaching for my CV, I always felt confident it was something I was curious about and wanted to do because it’s putting into practice theories that I value. It aligned with the ‘being’.

I didn’t always feel that way growing up when I was volunteering, I often felt like I had to prove myself as a ‘good’ person or ‘worthy’ of attending a certain college.

As I think about the possibilities of interviewing in the future, I have had moments of ‘I didn’t DO enough during my PhD’.

Moments where I wonder if I presented enough at conferences, if I tried to disseminate my work enough, moments where I get scared that the nights I didn’t overwork & the weekends I took to play & read & cook are going to put me behind people that are on advisory boards and founded their own companies and became keynote speakers.

It’s unquantifiable, the choices I made to have coffee dates with friends rather than strategic networking meetings; the hours of sleep I got instead of an accumulation of service hours at the expense of my health; the writing I gave my energy to here (to be witnessed and seen) instead of attempting to build a freelance portfolio.

I didn’t regret it as it was happening, I didn’t even question (well, except for those no good very bad days) if I was making the choices that aligned with my values and allowed me to ‘be’ and reduce my ‘doing’; I knew I was.

But it feels so precarious right now, impossible to communicate the value of this shift over a cover letter or a CV.

[softacademia]

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I hate the relationship this period of life is creating with my email.

I have found a slight rhythm with job searching while not having internet at home (resentfully, exhausted, and annoyed) but I have been noticing how adverse I feel to opening my email.

It’s the place now of potential rejections of jobs, and a graveyard of rejections from journals. It’s where an email will likely come through to tell me that my viva will have to be in October or November and I will not get to close out the Cambridge chapter as ‘cleanly’ as I would like. It is a place where my searching brain will latch on to evidence that I am not good enough - I have not done enough to get this position, I am not savvy enough for whatever role I have applied to, that I exist outside the lines of job descriptions and AI screeners will disqualify my application.

I see the potential of a mindset shift here, that my email might also be a garden for possibilities & opportunities, but that’s not what it feels like in my body. I feel anxious checking it, like the lack of an enthused reply is a reflection on something more than just an absent email.

I feel worried about that because I know the job market as I’m entering it - I know people in my faculty who have applied for hundreds of roles, I know people ghosted by employers after multiple interviews, I know how few people get a genuine reply from their applications.

And there is nothing good down the road for my mental health if I continue this way, as though no replies or rejections mean something about the state of my career or a reflection of my abilities.

As hard as I am trying to fight against it, I also feel myself operating out of a scarcity mindset as my six weeks left in Cambridge quickly come to a close. I have resorted to some ‘easy apply’ button clicking on LinkedIn because it makes me feel good to have upped my number of applications that day. Not that I feel the most aligned or thrilled to pursue that role.

Taken together, I’m feeling way more afraid and uncertain and desperate than I imagined feeling at this time. These feelings are really trying to sink me back into patterns I have tried to become less familiar with.

#softacademia #oxbridge #cambridgeuniversity #universityofcambridge #mentalhealth #wellbeing #academia #student #gradschool

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Confidence on the job market is something I have been thinking a lot about, particularly in two areas.

(1) Video applications (or rather pieces of applications that require video, like a video response to questions or a video CV)

Why is the job market favoring those with the confidence and comfortability to speak to camera?

For roles where that is part of the job, I understand of course. But for the roles where speaking to camera isn’t a part of the position, why is this the move?

Is it an attempt to disrupt the use of AI in cover letters and resumes?

I think about how many people are nervous and anxious for in-person interviews, let know want to hear themselves on a recording or watch themselves back on video.

If I didn’t start creating content here two-ish years ago, I would have no experience doing video at all (and still I rarely do talking straight to camera on here or @tiktok) and how I would feel even more disadvantaged.

(2) I was not prepared for was “we’re always accepting resumes” or “send us a job description you might fit”. I know talent pools exist, and I’ve seen that before, but the latter of these examples above have really made me think about how mental health or levels of confidence might get in the way of shooting a shot like that.

How you have to have somewhat of an entrepreneurial mind or creative mindset to dream up your own job description. And that not everyone has that or wants to do that. Especially to get a job in this economy.

A few months ago I went to a talk for a ‘changemakers’ organization and asked a question about how their app process could be adapted to not favor extraverts so heavily - what it would look like to make space for those who want to make a difference in the world but don’t want to be ‘on’ socially all the time.

And I wish I could ask the job market the same question.

What if not everyone wants to build a personal brand or record a video CV or create their own job title? People are applying to 100s of jobs with minimal interviews and no offers - what would it look like to be creative in a more inclusive way?

What would it be like to consider confidence in a more inclusive way?

#softacademia #cambridgeuniversity #universityofcambridge #oxbridge #university #gonvilleandcaius #cambridgecolleges #jobsearch #jobsearching #mentalhealth #lightacademia #darkacademia