Miscellaneous Wonders #4
Illness, Exams, M'aidez, May Day
Dear Friends,
They’ve finally let me out of the oubliette, and I’ve entered the outdoor light to take in the spring air. As of Sunday, I turned in my first comprehensive exam (“comp”) for my PhD in English. In my program, this process requires three core committee members to create two questions each. These questions are based on a list of 100 books you, the grad student, create, as well as a document called a “Rationale” which explains your thinking behind the books and their connections. I had to pick one question from each committee member (so, three total), and write a paper (exactly 15 pages!) responding to each question. That’s 45 pages total of scholarly writing, which has to be produced in roughly one week. So that’s what I’m here to write about today. Documenting some of my exam process—but also this sense of recovery—of feeling like I’m moving back into a space of being able to read and write what I want after feeling locked out of that agency for the past couple of years.
I’d say one truth about grad school—especially when you get to the doctoral level—is that timelines are paradoxically real and unreal. On one hand, each program has a recommended timeline to graduate in five years. For people like myself who are on a graduate stipend and have a limited amount of funding, that timeline takes on some urgency, some hyper-reality. You don’t want to overstay your visit and end up paying tuition for something that was supposed to be free! On the other hand, one quickly finds out that timelines are in fact, kinda not real, and that most deadlines can be pushed back. Per my timeline, I was supposed to take my comprehensive exams during my third year of my PhD program, which was last year. Mostly I just wandered through a desert of novels with a dowsing rod, trying to find a droplet of water—and by that I mean try to figure out what my specialty and focus would be for my exams. No one seemed to mind or even really notice that my third year was quickly disappearing and no part of my exam process had moved forward. It’s also why I began this academic calendar year with such a sense of emergency that I was behind schedule and needed to get my exams completed.
I would argue that those who have that eros toward scholarly writing are better equipped to do what I am doing. I entered my program with a strong sense of myself as a creative and artist, but my sense of self as a scholar or academic has always wavered a bit. This is, perhaps, why it took me longer to find out what I wanted to write about for my exams. My creative work and scholarly work are interconnected, but they don’t always have seamless connections. I can’t always put into words why I might want to think deeply about something that might never once appear in my creative work, or vice versa. It might first be helpful to explain what a PhD program like mine looks like at a glance to better communicate the ways a creative writer like me fits in (or doesn’t) in the world of scholarship.
The English PhD journey has three stages, more or less. You are in coursework for two years, where you are taking graduate courses. This serves both as practice for your exams/dissertation (you generally write a fifteen-page term paper for each class at the end of each semester) and as a means to start interacting with faculty and building your committee. Then, after you form your committee, you enter your comps phase, which I’ve already outlined a bit. If you pass your comps, you “graduate” from being a PhD Student to a PhD Candidate. Some programs require you to write and defend a “Dissertation Proposal” first. After this you are considered “A.B.D.,” which stands for “All But Dissertation.” Writing and defending your dissertation, of course, results in you earning your degree.
For students with more scholarly inclinations, this process seems entirely linear, in my opinion. The coursework term papers prepare you for your comps, and your comps are supposed to help force you into drafting papers that could theoretically serve as chapters for your critical dissertation. Most dissertations require you to write three or four chapters of a book-length critical work, which you defend. My program is somewhat unique, because after passing exams, students with creative backgrounds (i.e.: MFA degrees) can choose to pivot and write a creative dissertation. I can’t really speak to the “Creative Writing PhD” at large, because I have the inkling that is varies wildly from school to school. I do think there are some programs which run closer to “MFA Program But Also You Do Comps.” Mine was certainly as close to a traditional English/Literature PhD as you can get, as nearly all my coursework was critical.
What this also means is that the transition from exams to dissertation is a lot less smooth—a lot more oblique—for the creative. I’ve never really had that passion when drafting academic papers. I’d also say I probably experience some self-esteem issues where I feel somewhat like an impostor. It feels more like I am generating these scholarly papers to prove to myself (and others) that I am competent as a scholar—while not necessarily feeling a sense of authenticity in regards to identifying as a scholar. On a much more basic level, it often feels like I’m completing “PhD-level homework.” I’d say some of that sense of impostor-doing-homework self carried over to my exam-writing. I’m still not certain what I will be doing with all of the critical writing I’ve generated over the years, as my goal with coursework and comps has always been checking the necessary boxes so I can finally return to my creative writing. It’s always been my opinion that a creative thesis (or in this case, creative dissertation) is the prize for suffering. You’re basically being awarded a writing residency for a year or two, where you carve out 20 hours per week for your creative work. I worry that fussing over conferences like MLA or the UPenn ‘Call for Papers’ resource would just steal time and focus away from my creative work.
Here in New England the month began with the landscape still stinking of late winter. The days and nights were cold—and wet. I received my first exam’s questions three weeks ago. I was feeling an inordinate amount of stress. Said stress certainly compromised my immune system. Why do I say that? Two days into exam-writing I woke up with a slight cough, incredible fatigue, and a fever of over 100 degrees. After a few days of little-to-no improvement, I went to urgent care, where I was officially diagnosed with Influenza B. I don’t even really have the words. I was in the middle of unequivocally the most difficult task I will ever have to take on as a graduate student, and I was suddenly too weak to do anything, let alone write. I suspect the stress made the Flu hit me just that much harder.
If the Flu shot I had received in the fall was by any means efficacious, whatever strain(s) I was inoculated against existed in the past. Because I felt every part of that Flu as New and True. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this type of sickness where you’re not necessarily in pain, yet simultaneously every atom of your being is being consumed by discomfort. I tried to watch TV, but mostly just found myself unable to focus, wrapped up in a frustrated delirium. In the days leading up to my first exam (before coming down the the Flu), I had decided I had done everything I could theoretically do to prep, so I would try to relax and take my mind off the forthcoming exam instead of obsessing. I started playing this new video game called Blue Prince, which was inspired by Christopher Manson’s MAZE book from the 1980s, if anyone remembers that. The basic premise of Blue Prince is that you are a fourteen-year-old boy who is in line to inherit a relative’s sprawling manor. The manor itself has 45 rooms that change day-to-day, and your goal is to reach the 46th room to fulfill some requirement to inherit the property. Some of the game-play involves drafting these rooms you enter, which are rolled randomly, often by chance. In my sick discomfort, I tried to play some Blue Prince in a state of delirium for a couple of days. As a result, I started experiencing the “Tetris effect”1 I had to write 45 pages for my exam, and I started having dreams of drafting 45 rooms, each one representative of the 45 pages I needed to write for my exam. The corridors of Blue Prince spilled over into all my thinking.
Maybe I was attracted to a game about rooms in a home because illness rendered me entirely domestic. I spent nearly two weeks confined to my bed, and while I’ll spare you all the melodrama of having to push myself to write when I was too weak to form even one competent thought, I will fast-forward to tell you I got it done. I got my exam turned in 8 minutes before my midnight deadline. My committee was understanding and granted me an extension, although it was still incredibly tough, because I was still very weak even after the Flu had passed.
Perhaps it’s too soon to even be writing about all of this. For starters, I have not received news whether I passed that initial exam or not, and I certainly have doubts about the quality of my work given the combination of duress and illness I was under. If you’re wondering why I did not ask to retake it later, well, it’s because I was told that if I forfeited due to illness it would count as a failure. You are allowed to fail your comps, but at least in my program, you only get one re-do. If I had forfeited, I would be able to re-take it in the fall, but I would have to pass that second attempt (I certainly wondered about what would happen if I got sick again). Not to mention, it seemed that all the progress I had made would be scrapped, and I would have to receive all new questions to respond to. As someone who experiences chronic sickness that is prone to disabling me, the “disability rights” part of my brain obviously has some thoughts about this I will keep to myself for the time being. What I can say is that I more-or-less felt backed into a corner and that my only option was to push ahead. I don’t feel good about pushing ahead and pushing my sick body past its limits, but I am glad the hardest step is behind me.
It’s, of course, not over. On top of not knowing whether I passed my initial written exam of 45 pages, I also have a second written exam (only 15 pages) that starts next week—as well as a final oral exam that’s been momentarily pushed back to June due to my illness impacting my timeline. I’ve definitely been in a strange place mentally, that’s for sure. I’ve felt the full gamut of emotions (relief, resentment, frustration, exhaustion, joy) at this first major deadline finally moving behind me when it feels like I’ve lived under the shadow of my exams for the past two years. By this I mean I have pretty much almost exclusively been trying to read and write toward my comprehensive exams since I completed my coursework. I understand this structure I built in my head based on requirement and guilt was not entirely beneficial to me. It was definitely not helpful to feel this burnt out, but also feel that I could not fully give myself permission to read anything that was not on my exam lists (despite this, I did sneak some non-exam books in). At the same time, it felt necessary for my focus and survival.
So while I am very-much still in the middle of my exams, I am also experiencing a sense of levity that I have not felt in a long time. I should also say it was very surreal to be sick during this late-winter-still-thirty-degrees-and-wet-and-rainy-and-miserable-weather and then suddenly emerge from my Gatorade-Dayquil-Nyquil-bed-crypt and run into the blaring brightness of spring with birds singing, trees in bloom with their white and pink bursts, and the temperature reaching the high seventies. I feel like I’ve been experiencing a rebirth that has synced up natural cycles of the seasons.
Some other emotional landscape I’ve been navigating is feeling like I’m finally approaching this space where I can give myself permission to read and write what I want again—but not knowing quite what to do with that sense of freedom. I do want to be clear that I truly enjoy my graduate program. I like pursuing a PhD. I realize I could drop out at any minute if it no longer had value to me. I realize no one is forcing me to do this thing, to be here. The challenges haven’t always felt good, but they are temporary. I know they will pass, and that the sense of accomplishment will be greater than whatever momentarily hellscape I teleported onto. That all being said, I have been consumed by this sense of overwhelm this week when thinking about reading and writing in the aftermath of the initial exam process. What does one do when they’ve been let out of the oubliette?
When you’ve been stacking up a TBR (To Be Read) pile for two years—and especially when you have ADHD like I do—there can be this short-circuit of executive functions. It’s this feeling that you have too many options and don’t know where to begin. I’m simultaneously dealing with the knowledge that I’ve been putting down Post-It Notes of chapters-to-write for a creative manuscript project for quite awhile, and now I have to write dozens of chapters of this planned-out novel—something I have never done before as a pantser. While that knowledge is overwhelming in a certain sense, I know I’ll get through it. A better question for me was how to tackle this question of decision-making with my TBR pile while experiencing decision paralysis2. Something I thought about was: okay, let’s say I was writing a newsletter on TBR stacks and overcoming decision paralysis. What would I tell someone else? So, I wrote that thing. And I’m going to close out today’s newsletter by telling you.
Tsundoku, TBR Piles, and Overcoming Decision Paralysis
Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to unread books on a bookshelf meant for reading later3. As someone who has accrued quite a stack of unread books over these past few years and has developed a sense of anxiety over how to move forward with reading for pleasure again—especially in the aftermath of reading as a type of labor—I’ve asked myself how a person might be able to escape the fatigue of decision-making and enter a space where reading feels enjoyable again (instead of feeling entirely like a career-related task). Here’s the guide I came up with:
Conduct a 30-minute “TBR Audit” of all your unread books. Dump every title into one list, using a modality or platform of your choice (Obsidion, Joplin, StoryGraph, pen-and-paper…). Don’t sort yet—just capture information.
Tag your books—but don’t rank them. Assign two to three tags (max!) per book. Your goal is speed, not perfection. Tags (“graphic novel,” “comfort,” “poetry,” “short”, “fantasy”) let you filter by mood and category later without agonizing over priority.
Give yourself permission to go “easy” or “soft,” especially if you are returning to reading for pleasure after some sort of interruption where your time was required elsewhere. This is especially important if you’ve recently or previously been reading texts like longer novels or critical theory. These “easy” books should be ones you can get through relatively quickly, providing you with a sense of enjoyment and confidence at the same time. Possible genres could include poetry collections, chapbooks/zines, graphic novels, novellas, plays, flash fiction collections, or children’s literature like middle-grade novels.
Begin to “shelve” your books, either by literally shelving them on a physical shelf space in your home or by beginning to file your TBR Audit list into one of three categories. These categories should be:
Now
Next
Someday
The ACC (anterior cingulate cortex) in your brain loves fewer options. Consider your tags—what books might be soft/easy—and quickly file your TBR into these three categories. Consider the tags you are most excited about alongside what books you can read quickest. Mix pleasure-seeking with strategy. These first-thought-best-thought books should fall into the “Now.” Expand from there, with books that seem more difficult or like they’d take a longer amount of time being shelved in Next or Someday.
If nothing from your new Now pile has jumped out at you as your next read, grab three books that seem incredibly appealing to you as a potential “Now” read. Spend 5 minutes reading the opening chapters of each book. After, consider which one you want to keep reading the most—and move on with it.
When you begin reading from your “Now” pile, pair the reading experience with a sensory anchor—experiences that you can associate with pleasure. Light the same candle, prepare a beloved snack, play an instrumental music playlist, or sit in the same exact spot when you go to read. Over time your brain links the pleasurable cue with “reading time,” making initiation easier.
Lastly, give yourself permission to DNF (did not finish). Give yourself permission to get rid of DNF books, either by donating them, selling them to a used book store, or placing them in free little libraries around your town. Decide up-front on a personal DNF rule—e.g., “If I’m not into this by page 50, I’m out.” Guilt-free exits prevent backlog creep. This should help reduce the sensation of buying more books than you can read.
I’ll be taking my own advice and conducting my own TBR Audit later today. I’m considering even spending the entire month by reading a genre like comics, just to refresh my palate. If you decide to do your own audit, let me know how it goes.
Hopefully by the next time you hear from me, I’ll officially be a “PhD Candidate.” Keep your fingers and toes crossed for me.
Until next time,
JD
“Decision paralysis” is a real phenomenon, often associated with ADHD and other executive function disorders. Decision paralysis, also referred to as analysis paralysis, occurs when an individual is unable to make a choice due to overthinking, excessive options, or difficulty prioritizing. For people with ADHD, this struggle is often linked to executive dysfunction, which affects cognitive processes such as working memory, impulse control, and problem-solving.