The PhD Guilt Baby

The Guilt Baby

I am resurrecting this blog after quite a long hiatus to help me keep focused on my PhD. For those of you who know me, you will know that I am a workaholic and find my PhD a difficult beast.

A PhD is a very interesting life choice. This year I will finish after trying to truck through it during sickness, troubled family members and a enforced artistic hiatus in order to travel to Iceland for a residency and create some other works. In Iceland I gained the insight into why I need to finish this PhD. I am a finisher. I finish things that I start and therefore I will finish my PhD. It is also a fantastic opportunity and I am learning how to love it.

I was talking with a friend / mentor yesterday and it was an incredibly useful exercise. I know everyone says it helps to talk but I actually did it and this conversation really hit home. We talked about the feelings you have while you complete your PhD. The stress and the frustration, the highs and lows. I brought up my guilt baby that I had been carrying around for about 3.5 years and found out I wasn't the only parent out there. Other people give birth to PhD guilt babies and they cart them around as well. 

 

 

A PhD guilt baby is a little creature that wakes you up every morning saying "why aren't you working on your phd today?" It is very active at social events suggesting "you should be working". It is particularly rampant when you sit down to watch a movie or to read an unrelated book, "you realise you could use your time more effectively don't you?"  It can be a strange beast and I have been told that it won't leave you for a while. Even once you hand in your final piece, it will still chatter at you from time to time. 

The only times I escape from the guilt is when I am working on my PhD or when I am making with my hands. Such as silversmithing, or leatherworking. This mindfulness in the activity at hand is more enlivening and replenishing than sleep. Maybe this is when the guilt baby slumbers.

So I am going to treat the guilt baby like a real one and factor in feeding times, and sleep and play time. 

I will feed the baby with productivity to quieten it.

I will put it to sleep by doing something mindful each day. 

I will allow it to play by acknowledging it's presence but not letting it distract me from other activities.

I wanted to openly acknowledge this because often your PhD is about pretending that you are on top of it all the time. When in actual fact you are in a state of constant questioning. Which is like having a concentrated, focused existential crisis that you have to factor in time to try and decode each day. 

on that note I will leave you with a new love of mine, Ann Hamilton. 

 

She makes INCREDIBLE installations. I will post about her in the coming days. 

In the meantime I am focusing on figuring out what my final installation will be this year. A week spent nutting things out. This is the part I really enjoy. I will post photos of the process as it evolves.

Sarah out.