A few months late to the party, I finally watched Bo Burnham’s Inside. And then I watched it again. And then I listened to the soundtrack on repeat for several weeks.
Read MoreTag: mental health
Strolling and Wandering
Right before I took my oral qualifying exams, I called my adviser in a panic. I had failed my German and Latin exams almost ten times each, and time was running out to pass them before I would have to push back my oral exam date. My adviser talked me down. “Take a walk” he said “when was the last time you went to the park?”
Read MoreAsk yourself: What are you afraid of?
I started writing this one almost two years ago, but put it in the digital drawer because I thought it was kind of obvious. But as more people in my life have come up against the same problems with paralyzing anxiety or decision fatigue, I’m realizing this is actually worth saying.
Read MoreRevising
The words “revise and resubmit” carry with them a particular emotional response in academia: a unique combination of hopeful self-satisfaction, anxiety, and existential dread. Its a trite truism that we all need to learn to accept criticism. Academia turns accepting criticism into an art, that also happens to be part of our daily workload. Revise and resubmit is one of three possible responses when submitting an article for publication in a journal. Rather than outright accept or reject, revise and resubmit means that the core concept is good, but the readers had comments. “The readers had comments” could be written on the tombstone of every academic. Your peers, colleagues in your field, found some things worth changing. It could be that you failed to site a relevant study, or you used a word in a way that didn’t sit well with someone. The overall gestalt is “I liked it, but not as much as you wanted me to.” And the feeling that comes with that is being damned with faint praise.
Revising is perhaps the most essential part of my writing process. Something about how my brain works means that I need many drafts to get the point of my argument across without distracting my reader with something else. I wrote recently that it’s been my tone or my word choice that stops people from understanding me. It can also be the order in which I introduce evidence (apparently I think in concentric circles instead of lines), and as a result I have had editing processes that involved flipping the order of the entire paper.
But revising is still exhausting. Internalizing criticism is exhausting. Doing the same work repeatedly is exhausting.
Today, I had an epiphany about a piece of writing that I have been working on for a decade. In 2010, I wrote a paragraph-long aside in a junior seminar, which became a standalone MA seminar paper in 2013, which became a journal article in 2015. And since 2015 I have tried and failed to get this paper published. The criticisms of it have been varied, but all true. At the same time, I presented this work at a conference in 2016, and it’s up on my Academia.edu page, where the praise for it has been loud and consistent – this is a valid piece of scholarship that would be a useful addition to the field. So, every once in a while, I come back to this paper and revise it yet again, and submit it yet again. I have never been granted a revise and resubmit, just rejection after rejection, but the overall impact of the conflicting responses to it has been revise and resubmit. “I like it, but not as much as you wanted me to.”
My epiphany was a totally different framing to this piece. Instead of launching into the historiographical fray, trying to make my contribution in a debate that is already very full, I should be viewing things from above. What am I actually adding that is new – is what I asked myself. I’m suggesting a different methodological approach to the question. Whereas that methodological approach was a secondary point before (making the whole piece very complicated), I’m making it the main argument now. I can still use a lot of the work I’ve already done, but reframing the piece is actually an easier approach than trying to fix the problems that existed before. The reason this was novel for me was that I suddenly connected what I had been trying to do in this article with what I’ve been working on for my dissertation. I hadn’t thought about it that way before because I wrote this article long before I articulated the methodological argument of my dissertation.
Maybe this version of the article won’t get it accepted to a journal either. But it’s an interesting process to go back and fix what I was trying to say. There’s certainly a limit to revising, and there’s no point in revising something that is totally in the past. But here I have another chance to make this article work while it’s still relevant, and the process of doing that is potentially helpful for other things I’m working on too. That level of self-criticism, that internalization of the feedback I’ve gotten, also feels important, like maybe one day I can not only anticipate the criticism, but head it off entirely.
Everything I could say feels trivial
The US had an attempted coup on Wednesday.
Read More2020 Year in Review
In 2019, I spent a cumulative three months at home. And I wrote about it here on this blog. It’s a big part of the reason I started writing here. That year was incredibly trying. I was constantly isolated and moving around. I wasn’t able to form new relationships and I was constantly in new places. I was often living in a single room by myself without a real kitchen and I had a very small budget for food. When I wasn’t working, I was binging CosTube and BreadTube, learning to crochet, and playing video games. I could only interact with most of the people I knew, including my infant children, through phone calls and videos. That year, it turned out, was a rehearsal.
Read MoreWorking motherhood
In my circles, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is one of those deep losses that aches dully for a long time. Among the women I know, there is a feeling that RBG was one of us, whatever that means. To a certain subset, it means that she was a working mother.
Read MoreTwo years postpartum
The most important thing I’ve been told in this early stage of motherhood is “the postpartum period is two years long.”
Read MoreNeurosis to Anxiety: The development of contemporary mental health
A brief history of mental health over the last 20 years.
Read More "Neurosis to Anxiety: The development of contemporary mental health"
Connectivity
In the week or so since most of the US has locked down to slow the spread of Coronavirus, I’ve repeatedly joked to my friends and family that last year, when I was living alone and far away from them while on research, prepared me for the experience of lockdown. During that year, I lived in isolation, hardly went out except to go to my libraries, mostly ate shelf-stable food because I often didn’t have access to a kitchen, and communicated with everyone in my life via video chat. It was painfully lonely, and I don’t mind saying that it launched a deep depression that piled on top of my already untreated postpartum depression. But the Coronavirus lockdown has felt different, even though so many aspects of the experience are the same. And I think that difference is the fact that everyone in my life is experiencing this same isolation simultaneously – almost everyone I’m in regular contact with is either in New York or California, both of which are in full lockdown currently. As a result, that last piece, the communication via video chat, is something we are all willing to do. Last year, I had to constantly try to catch the people in my life at convenient moments, essentially taking them out of their own lives. But now, we all have the same daily struggles and schedules, and those aligned circumstances are making us all more willing to connect.
Read More
Robin Writes 