I’m finally done with my PhD. It’s been a long time, and many people—myself included—questioned whether it would ever actually happen. After all, for most of my industry friends, I’ve been doing a PhD since they’ve known me. For most of my academic friends (many of whom presumed I was doing a PhD when I first started attending academic conferences in my field back in 2009), I’ve been en route to a PhD for so long that it’s strange it’s only just now happening. Either way, everyone keeps asking how it feels to be done.
To be honest, the last big push broke my brain a little, but in ways that are difficult to express.
In the aftermath of submitting my dissertation I tweeted a thread about the burnout I was feeling.
And the next day I also tweeted this.
A friend messaged to comment that she was glad I was doing better, but I think this misreads the nature of burnout. Or at least the nature of what I’m feeling. I hold both feelings at the same time. I’m actually fine—sort of.
What Does It Feel Like To Be Done?
I’m tired. So tired I can’t really function normally right now.
But I’m not depressed, exactly, or listless or grieving. I don’t feel the sense of loss and lack of direction many of us felt at the beginning of the pandemic. I can get out of bed. I can do basic self-care. I want to be productive and get back to the other commitments I have on—projects I’m actually really excited about! But I can’t seem to motivate myself to do anything productive. Anything that feels like pressure or a deadline triggers an extreme anxiety response. Very low-stakes things like “I should take the recycling out before the truck comes tomorrow” elicit something very close to panic. I’m tearing up just writing this. It’s getting better, but I’m almost a month out and it’s not gone. But as strongly as I feel this panic, I can be fine and cheerful the next moment. It’s a rollercoaster.
I’ve written previously about my journey with ADHD and how it feels to need to force myself to do things. I think for me, burnout and ADHD together have combined into a superstorm lack of dopamine. Sometimes this manifests like depression might: it feels like a great effort to do very basic things like shower or make the bed, and I feel very physically exhausted after doing them. But in previous times when I’ve been depressed, there was a dark looming cloud over everything—threatening to move ever-closer. Currently there is no such cloud; I’m not unhappy, I’m just spent. Out of gas. Tired.
Sometimes there are surges of anxiety: what if it’s not really done? What if I actually failed and nobody has told me yet? Shouldn’t I be working on it still? Isn’t there more I need to do? It’s far from perfect—maybe I can still edit it even though it’s been submitted.
I don’t feel the freedom I expected to feel. I don’t really feel emptiness though, or the sadness you sometimes feel after a big project ships and you’re not sure what to do next. I just feel tired and kind of numb.
I wondered if some of what I was feeling might be called dissociation, which had always been described as feeling very detached from your body like a passenger along for a ride. But I feel almost frustratingly aware of my being in my own body, and everything going on outside of my body feels very far away—so extremely external to me as not to be real. This, I learned, is in fact another form of dissociation, and is something my healthcare professionals are monitoring but are not yet concerned about. It’s improving each day.
How Did I Get Here?
The end of the PhD was not pretty. I guess it probably never is, but I crunched so hard for so long, it’s really no surprise that my body is broken from it. It feels in some ways like something I deserve.
I have long railed against the culture of overwork in both academia and games, and have criticized friends and colleagues for glorifying that culture with humblebrag posts performing busyness. Academics are particularly conditioned to equate busyness with productivity and there is no upper bound for the performance of busyness that other academics find enviable and laudable. I’ve unfollowed friends for glorifying this culture because it feels like the Kool-Aid academics drink and pass to initiate grad students as a first step toward exploitative labor practices.
So I find myself in a difficult position here: I’m not sure how to write about the trauma of the work without glorifying it. I’m not proud of my work habits the last 3 months of the PhD. In fact, I find them deeply embarrassing and borderline shameful considering how much I’ve tried to advocate for healthy work-life balance. There’s a reason I started this post with the impact and not the process. It got really ugly.
The last three months were a barrage of necessary deadlines. I made the deadlines, but my stress-level increased with each one. The stakes got higher and higher. I started developing a negative relationship with my desk so I moved to the table. The same thing happened with the table so I moved to the couch; then with the couch, so I got a workspace. I haven’t been able to return to the workspace since submitting.
I developed back problems from the hours I spent sitting. I stopped running due to the back problems (I’d previously been running 20 – 30 miles per week. I haven’t been able to get back for more than a mile yet.). This meant I had no outlet for the stress, and I could feel the tension building up in my body. Honestly, at some point, I probably needed the cortisol to keep going. When the stress wasn’t enough to keep me going, I switched to caffeine—lots of it. Closer to the deadlines, adrenaline took over. By the end, I had so much adrenaline, cortisol, and stimulants in my body that I didn’t sleep more than a combined 5 hours for the last week. I knew the resulting crash would hit hard. I had no idea what an understatement that would be.
The fact that this is not shocking to most people I’ve told is frankly, abhorrent. Especially now that I see the fallout on the other side.
I will never work like that again.
Aftermath
We all know that rushed work is never as good as it could be, and for me that is the most frustrating part of it all. At the end of this, I find that I suffered through this process to produce a document that I’m not actually very proud of. I’m proud of the ideas and the research, but their presentation—the part that is usually pretty easy for me—suffered extraordinarily under the constraints. Everyone tells me that’s what a book is for. I hope I get to a place where that’s comforting. It was comforting at some point during this process.
For now, I’m trying to give myself space to heal. Tomorrow, I’m heading into the desert to unplug for a while. I’m trying to avoid unnecessary deadlines and hustle until I’m back. I’ll need to get back to work soon, and I’m hoping to be in the best place I can be as I prepare for that. My team has been incredibly understanding during all of this, but I worry I’m trying their patience.
Going forward, I need to figure out what this means for my work. I want to continue to engage with research communities, but I’m wrestling with what that looks like for me.
My relationship to academia is complex, and will likely remain so. And since most research venues are structured to serve academics first and foremost, I suspect this means my relationship to research communities may become complicated too. I want to believe in the vision of academia, and I will always push for knowledge creation and dissemination, but I’ve seen how the sausage is made; there is an ugly underbelly to the institutions that keep academia in business, and most reasonable academics acknowledge this but continue to perpetuate it. Academia has not figured out its place within hyper-capitalism, nor how that position needs to change in a society that is growing increasingly systems-literate. The research venues adjacent to academia serve an important role in academia’s systems of exploitation, and though no one person is at fault, if nobody protests these systems they will not change. I’m not yet sure what my role is, but I’m in a particularly interesting position as an outsider-insider. This was true for me as a grad student who was fortunate to pay my bills through industry work rather than the threat-of-debt, low-wage employment model to which grad students are usually beholden, and it remains true as someone who wants to engage with research conferences but is not beholden to tenure metrics.
And the fact that I hold my relationship to academia in tension means that I’m also wrestling with wondering what this was all for. PhDs have been (patronizingly) described to me as a badge of honor that allows the brandisher to have a seat at the table of the research community. Ignoring the insulting classism there, I wonder what the point of such a badge is if I’m excusing myself from the table. I want to continue engaging with the research community, but it is difficult and very expensive to engage as an independent researcher, especially if I live by my values around open access publication of my work.
So I’m currently a little lost and a little broken. But I’m also taking active steps toward recovery and will continue to wrestle with these things in the coming months, I’m sure.
In the mean time, I find myself reconnecting with games and fiction for fun. The panic response to deadlines and external pressure means that I feel no desire to play things I think I should. Instead, I’m free to just play what seems fun and enjoy games again. It’s probably the first time that’s been true in years.
