I lost a post I wrote this morning. It was called: This is becoming obsessive! I found myself up at 5 in the morning, eager to do one more post. You must know, I love to sleep, a lot. This sudden urge to put in words my anxieties and conundrums was scary. Obviously, I succumbed.

I don’t have a diary, not since a very pink one with a symbolic lock, many years ago. I vaguely remember the pleasure of writing my hopes and worries, for my eyes only. The motivation has changed, but the pleasure remains. With every sentence, I imagine I exhale the smog in my brain and inhale fresh air,  in a prairie, a Spring morning. As a bonus, my job and my paper feel lighter. So please bear with me (and make sure your work was actually saved!).

To continue the story, last year started well. Somebody suggested I sign up to present at a conference. He was right. A deadline makes wonders for a procrastinator like me. I spent days and nights developing a narrative about a  trend I was observing. Exploring a new idea is not easy. For one, you risk being naive. Your argument may just not be good or it has been explored before and you are just catching up. Writing a theoretical framework or statistical exercises felt like squaring a circle. I finally had to give up. To avoid the same mistake, I decided to explore a traditional debate instead.

A saying I love is “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results”. Murphy’s law is another one…

After a break to clean my wounds, so to speak, I jumped into a topic my favorite authors had developed. Soon after insecurity stroke. What could I really add to what they had explored? How could I fairly paraphrase their beautiful sentences? I delved into the empirical analysis instead. I produced graphs and more graphs, tables and few ill-fitting statistical tests. I presented them to my advisor who thought were interesting and asked for the theoretical framework…

It has to be! I don’t want to jinx it, but it really feels like most of my excuses are no longer valid. And I have had many excuses over the years, believe me. A recent one was that the reason I was stuck was that I was writing in English. Well, 15 years in the US, how valid can that be? I mean, I work in English, I speak English at home, I even dream in English. So that is that.

Still, I convinced myself and others that I needed to do that. It should have been obvious that writing in Spanish was a waste of time. For one, I had to translate it to English along the way, to make sure I had something to send my advisor, who doesn’t speak Spanish…

To be honest, I was really stuck and confused about what I was doing, so taking a break from English for few days was refreshing. I could to express my ideas clearly and it felt good to use something I was fairly good at doing (writing in Spanish).

The risk with excuses is that you may find out that they hide something bigger. I mean, what if writing in Spanish was still a struggle? What you don’t use tends to get rusty. That is a fact of life. Well, after so many years, my Spanish was very pompous, full of extra words and expressions that, as you can imagine, do not work well when translated to English. English is straight forward. Full stop.

What I learned in the process is that it was an excuse, and a bad one, as most of them are. It was self-doubt cornering me. After a year working hard I thought I should know what I wanted to say… There comes shame again, my dear friend.

Writing is a roller coaster. Last week I was in despair. This week I am happy, but I cannot help but wonder if this blog is just another excuse to avoid writing…

I have been registered for my PhD for way too many years. I defended my proposal almost a decade ago. My mentor suggested we write a paper together and thanks to that, I got the first paper done and published and thought the other two would be as “easy” as the first one. 

Papers are never easy, of course, but doing it jointly really takes the haunting soul-searching out of the way. In case you are wondering, my discipline is economics so, instead of doing a long project with many chapters, you can choose to do three “publishable” papers.

There I was, happily oblivious to what life had in stock for me: A beautiful baby girl and many exciting adventures at work. So, to make a long story short, I only kept the dissertation in my mind as big guilt cloud, hovering over everything else, but I didn’t write a line for years. 

I kept making sure that I would be able to finish eventually, requesting as many leaves of absence as they allowed me and paying for maintaining status every term. So, the dark cloud was not only psychological but administrative and financial.

I also kept talking about it, so the shame of not working on it was also public! I think this was a double edge sword. People encouraged me to continue and gave me lots of tips, which was great, of course. The problem was that over the years, by failing again and again after receiving great advice, I began to feel so insecure that I thought I was never going to be able to do it, even if I had the time.

And since last year… I have the time… 

Oh, the tortuous psychology of writing! In English… not my mother tongue! By myself and doubting I would ever be able to write anything at the same level as the first joint paper! and so on and so forth. After all, I am writing this blog to share what I have learned in the process. 

Next possible post: What I have learned from Dissertation Workshops