I thought the muses had left me. For a while I seemed to have lost the exhilarating energy that fuels this blog. Perhaps it was because last Friday I had the crazy idea of trying to use that energy to write few paragraphs for my dissertation. I think I insulted the muses by even considering their guidance while writing about international trade. I must say I wouldn’t blame them for leaving. The muses gave me a gift of personal intimacy to share here with you and there I went, misusing it to talk about the asymmetric effects of globalization…

I also got a cold. Spring has really played hard to catch this year and I inevitably fell under the weather. I should have paused to take care of myself, right? Liquids and rest… But there I sat, on the chair, captured by the guilt of what I saw as just another excuse to be unfaithful to my dissertation.

After all, this is what the task has become: to diligently work on it, proverbially in sickness and in health, ‘til the defense hopefully do us part.

Taking the sweet muses out of the equation for a moment, I think that I am so used to being self-conscious and hesitant when writing my dissertation that Friday’s unfamiliar energy was just too uncomfortable. Today, feeling a bit better courtesy of various cold and flu medicines, I went back to the text. My first instinct was simply to discard what I wrote Friday. But I didn’t. Instead, I continued writing around it, fleshing it out. I take it as a small victory against shame and self-loathing. I hope many more will come.

But what will my life look like after D-day? Will I finally take time to exercise, separate stress from eating, get back home earlier, read for pleasure, take vacations? I must tell you: The life I imagine is nothing short from achieving all my recurring New Year’s Eve resolutions, and all at once. Boy am I setting myself up for disappointment!! My quality of life will certainly improve, that is clear, but I will still be me. And I think I am fine with that.

A new week begins. I need to have a draft by Friday. Did I mention that, more than having the time, at this point I really must make the time? A nice email from the school administration kindly reminding me that I must graduate by August 31th really woke me up. No more snooze button, no more extensions. Even with the most diligent administrative follow up, there comes a time when your school just needs you to get out.

I am thankful for that. As I mentioned before, a deadline is a powerful instrument. I am writing this partly in the hope that by putting my thoughts in paper here I will be less hesitant to draft my paper. The crucial difference is that I cannot really be myself in the paper. Can I? It wouldn’t look professional if I add jokes, or short sentences expressing my frustration and eureka moments. Right?

As serendipity rocks, a friend recently recommended “Economical writing” by Deirdre McCloskey. The book is hilarious and full of tips, including: “Be Thou Clear; But for Lord’s Sake Have Fun”. To me that also means be yourself, even when writing academic papers.

The author also knows so much about our struggles:

“Sitting down to write can be a problem, for it is then that your subconscious, which is dismayed by the anxiety of filling up blank pieces of paper, suggests that it would be ever so much more fun to do the dishes or to go get the mail. Sneak up on it and surprise it with the ancient recipe for success in intellectual pursuits: locate chair; apply rear end to it; locate writing implement; use it”, p. 20.

After using writing implement, I have been using a navigation outline (I may be the last in hearing about this, so please forgive my naivete; I celebrate anything that helps). Using Headings (and the styles’ area in Word’s home tab) I wrote the skeleton narrative and elements I want to include in the paper. The navigation pane avoids the annoying scrolling down and disoriented search for the specific section I am working on. I can just click on it on the left side of the screen. It has really helped in reviewing the bits and pieces I have written along the way, and putting some of them to good use. The rest can be part of my research agenda!

I didn’t do it on purpose. I just had more urgent stuff to get off my chest. But without the two workshops I have attended I wouldn’t be where I am: ready to write, about everything, apparently…

The first workshop I attended was last Spring. The discussions were fascinating and very useful, touching upon the same literature I needed to acquaint myself with.

On the matter at hand, I learned two facts:

Fact 1: Writing a dissertation is ideally about finding your research agenda, one you would take with you in your academic career. You don’t need to write everything about your topic to finish it! You can leave some for the future, ready for your postdoc, first job, first book. Or just for others to continue pursuing it if you are not going to academia.

Fact 2: The dissertation is a school assignment, a damn difficult one, for sure, but still a school assignment. They want you to finish it! They want you to submit something and get on with your life.

Aren’t these facts liberating? They are precious. They are the absolute key to freedom! You still have to write it, though…

The second workshop was also fascinating. Students from different disciplines exposed me to cool topics I would have never heard about otherwise. I also understood more about methods. Not everyone writes in «economical» terms or needs to test hypotheses. Very refreshing to say the least…

The most important part about both workshops, however, has been the people, the unlikely community I didn’t know I desperately needed: all on the same boat and willing to go part of the way together, guided by experienced professors. I am forever grateful for their generosity.

The writing process is a hard path. I am not going alone.

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