I started reading Because Internet, by Gretchen McCulloch, this morning. I first became familiar with her work when I listened to her on an episode of the Fansplaining podcast. I’m not quite sure what pointed me to her Weird Internet Careers series of blog posts, but I have read and re-read these posts, working toward building a roadmap for myself to have a Weird Internet Career. Because it seems like of all the people in the world who could have a Weird Internet Career, I’m one of them.

In her bio for the book, McCulloch says she “lives in Montreal and on the Internet.” Me too, Gretchen. I mean, I live in Durham rather than Montreal, but also on the Internet. We are of a kind, Gretchen McCulloch and myself.

So. Go read those posts. If you’d rather read them all smooshed together in one Google Doc, you’ll get a link sent to you after you sign up for Gretchen McCulloch’s newsletter.

Do you know of any people with Weird Internet Careers? Here are my favorites, besides Gretchen McCulloch.

Kim Werker - Kim Werker started the online crochet magazine Crochet Me back in the early 2000s, which led to an offer to be editor of Interweave Crochet. She did that for a few years, and moved on to other work. She is a freelance editor who probably gets most of her clients from Internet interactions. She is a speaker and instructor. You can sign up for her latest class, Crochet for Challenging Times and get access to an ever-growing library of instructional videos and patterns, as well as access to a class-specific forum on her Community for Creative Adventurers, which she crowdfunds through both Patreon and the community software. Use code STUDENTLOVE40 to get 40% off the cost of Crochet for Challenging Times through the end of July. Now’s a great time to buy, since the cost of the course is going to increase in the future. Kim has a lot of other classes you can find on her website. too. And if you join her online community, you can jump in on video calls, which are a great source of delight and help to stave off loneliness in these super isolated times. Kim has also edited and written books; all of this has been fueled by stuff she does on the Internet.

Austin Kleon - Austin Kleon’s first book, Newspaper Blackout, was the result of him posting a newspaper blackout poem on his blog every day starting in 2005. He is one of the most generous people online and has four other books you can check out, videos of him that you can watch, and is currently experimenting with doing more online speaking.

Leonie Dawson - Leonie Dawson is a freaking rainbow hippie goddess, artist, writer, and multimillionaire. Her career started because she was a blogger; she created custom artwork for clients she met online, hosted women’s retreats for Internet friends to meet in person, and for many years offered a subscription community that included access to everything she made, including ecourses, ebooks, and meditations. Now she offers several ecourses and, like both Kim and Austin, is immensely generous.

So these are my favorite people with Weird Internet Careers and the thing is - NONE of them monetize their blogs through ads. While they might do some affiliate marketing, it’s unobtrusive and not their main source of income. I’m thinking if I want to have a Weird Internet Career, too, these are the models I should look to.

Who are your favorite Weird Internet Careerists?

Please note: Robin DiAngelo says she’s writing for a white audience, and I’m white, so my perspective on this book will likewise be more about its usefulness for white people. Author and scholar Lauren Michele Jackson states that for her (a Black woman, I think), “much of the material felt intuitive.” I don’t feel remotely qualified to tell any BIPOC if this would be a valuable book for them to read.

I read White Fragility over the weekend, only reading it so quickly because my university library limits checkouts of the eBook to a 24 hour loan period. The book reinforced a lot of the things I learned as I was working on Project READY.

I would especially recommend it if you need an introduction to the concept of racism as a systemic force rather than a personal failing. Whether it will be helpful for you will depend on where you are in your journey. If you have done some Racial Equity Institute training, a lot of the concepts will feel familiar, I think. (It’s been a few years since I did mine, and I think they’ve changed a bit, but certainly some of the ideas are related.)

I’ll share some quotes in a bit, but as a person who has been (slowly) increasing my awareness in this area for a few years, the most valuable part for me was when DiAngelo offered a specific example of a time when she made an unintentionally racist joke in front of a Black colleague who had only just met her and later worked to repair the breach this caused. I don’t want to summarize because I don’t want this to be seen as a set of tips, tricks, best practices, or lifehacks. I’ll just say that much of the book is introductory concepts and it’s all leading to the discussion DiAngelo offers of what to do next.

One of the articles about the end of the girlboss that I mentioned last week in my post about Naomi Alderman’s The Power critiques the book as “the Lean In of the 2020s, a book by a white woman, for white women, that says: See this big systemic problem? Start by working on yourself.” I think this is a well-made point, one that I’d like to unpack in the future so I will keep thinking about it. The article’s author, Leigh Stein, then points out that “White Fragility is social justice through the lens of self-improvement and, as is always the case with self-improvement programs marketed to white women, there’s money to be made here.” Stein cites DiAngelo’s speaker’s fee of $30,000 - $40,000. I’m keeping my eyes peeled for more people writing about this but haven’t tracked it down yet. But, as a point of comparison, see Ijeoma Oluo’s Twitter thread about the pay gap between white speakers on race and BIPOC speakers on race; Oluo’s fees are $0 - $12K+, depending on who’s asking. I’ve just bookmarked a Slate article about “White Fragility” to read for later.

What I think both Stein, and Lauren Michele Jackson, author of the Slate article, worry about is that people will read this book and think, “Cool. I am antiracist now. I did it, I read this one book, I’m done.” It’s a reasonable fear. I urge you not to be the person who says that to yourself. This book is a fine introduction to systemic racism. I don’t think it can begin to touch on the larger project of dismantling that, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t value in improving your own day to day interactions and working to be more conscious of the ways you can’t help but be influenced by a system centuries in the making.

That said: here are some bits I found especially noteworthy. All page numbers are from my ePub edition.

“…we don’t have to intend to exclude for the results of our actions to be exclusion.” (p. 14)

I did not set this system up, but it does unfairly benefit me. I do use it to my advantage, and I am responsible for interrupting it." (p. 126)

“…stopping our racist patterns must be more important than working to convince others that we don’t have them.” (p. 129)

As I continue to read and work through Project READY at my own (very slow) pace (because working on a project is not the same as actually trying its outcome), I hope to write more about why this is work for white people, the tricky balance of honoring BIPOC knowledge without demanding BIPOC labor (pro-tip, lots of BIPOC scholars and thinkers share their work in easily accessible spaces, so you can learn a lot without asking anyone you actually know to do this work for you), and why (unfortunately) white people seem to receive this kind of thing better from other white people than from BIPOC.

Here are my goals for 2020 Q3:

School goals

• Complete my dissertation data collection.
• Write two chapters of my dissertation: Ch. 2 Information Horizon Maps and Ch. 3 Information Literacy Practices.

Life goals

• Read for fun, a lot.
• Find my relaxation response triggers as described in Ginevra Liptan’s book, The FibroManual: A Complete Fibromyalgia Treatment Guide for You and Your Doctor.

I’m keeping it light. I had many more goals in mind but these are the most important things right now.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading Dr. Kelly J. Baker’s book, Grace Period: A Memoir in Pieces. I read it very quickly, over the course of maybe two or three days. I would stay up late reading it and walk around the house in a bit of a daze, squinting at my phone (I read it via Kindle Unlimited and have no Kindle, so).

I read the book hoping it might illuminate post-ac options for me, particularly the path of a freelance writer. I found that it struck me on a much more visceral level than that.

It’s interesting that it touched me so deeply, because Dr. Baker and I are very different. Dr. Baker came into academia with a dream of being a tenure track professor. She worked as a contingent instructor and a full-time lecturer, spending six years on the academic job market before determining she needed to take her “grace period.” I came into the PhD program focused on getting good at both conducting and understanding research, without my heart set on a specific professional outcome. I assumed there would be no tenure track job for me, and as I watched my tenure track, highly respected advisor deal with all that this professional life entails, I determined that it wasn’t something I was interested in.

AND YET.

In spite of that, so much of this book resonated with me.

Baker talks a lot about love, the way we are supposed to love our work, discipline, scholarship. She says,

I both adored and loathed my training. I see-sawed from romantic highs (seminar discussions, research, theory) to tortured lows (self-doubt, impostor syndrome, research). I almost quit multiple times. Yet I trudged through, because love is about compromise, or so they say. (p. 28, Kindle edition)

This resonated with me so strongly. I had my first PhD meltdown, as I call them, in the first week of my program. I remember it well. I was working on my back deck, enjoying some unseasonably tolerable weather on our hammock, and I realized that in the first week I had already fallen dreadfully behind. “I can’t do this,” I thought. I even told W. that maybe I should quit.

“Maybe I should quit” and “I’m going to get kicked out” were constant refrains from me that first year.

And yet. When people ask me if they should do a PhD, I say “YES TOTALLY!” followed by “No, definitely not.” Because you totally should; when else are you going to have time to prioritize deep learning? But you totally shouldn’t; it’s almost impossible financially without a supporting partner. (Two of my fellow SILS PhDs that I can think of and I myself have lawyer husbands, and I don’t imagine any of those three could do this otherwise.)

The love we feel for this deep learning, as Baker points out, allows us to be exploited. The minimum graduate stipend in my program is about $7000 below the minimum cost-of-living for one person in the town where the university is located. That exploitation, Baker says, “doesn’t make us love our work less. Instead, it often pushes us to love that work more—to consider it something deeper, a vocation instead of just a job.” (p. 30) I’ve fought against this sense, pretty successfully, but I suspect that’s because I’ve already experienced that vibe as a K-12 educator and I’m so burned out from it that I won’t let it happen again.

Baker writes about how most years, her birthday was a day to mark all the ways in which she failed in the past year, but after she began her grace period, “My birthday became a day that showed I made it through another year. For once, that was enough. It always should have been.” (p. 78)

My birthday is two weeks from now. I do use it to reflect on the past year often, but mostly, I celebrate it with great fanfare, because it is worth celebrating that I made it through another year. Both Dr. Baker and myself live with mental illness; sometimes I feel that I’m connected to life by a very fragile thread. For that thread to hold up for a whole year is always a cause for celebration.

I’m working from my Kindle notes and highlights here, so things are getting a bit fragmented and disjointed.

As I mentioned earlier, the chapter “Writing Advice” as a whole felt worth noting to me. In particular, how no one had suggested to her that writing could be a career. Me either, no one who I trusted on career matters, anyway. Baker writes,

At 18, 19, or 20, I wished someone took the time to tell me that my perspective was unique. That the only person who could write like me was me. That I shouldn’t try to be someone I wasn’t. That background, the place where I landed, made me who I was. That this place that birthed me might not be New York City or San Francisco or Boston and that was okay. That this place, that no one had ever heard of, created me and pushed me to be a writer. That I shouldn’t try to be someone I wasn’t. That I could emulate other people’s writing styles on the way to finding my own. That there was something about my voice that needed to be heard. That writing would give me the chance to speak and be heard. That my voice mattered. That my writing mattered to me and that was enough.

Finally, Baker says some things that remind me of my favorite Kitty Pryde quote from Astonishing X-Men. Baker notes:

Maybe I’m seeking something big when I should focus on something smaller, like a chubby toddler hand in mine.

I used to hate waiting, but now, I wonder if waiting is where living resides.

Life is about how we weather our transitions.

Reading all those bits inspired me to reply to her in this Twitter thread:

Also, also, I'm getting a little weary of the "Kelly's gotta figure out her life & work again" thing I've been doing for the last 7 years.

I'm extra. And maybe tedious.

— 💀Dr. Defund the Police💀 (@kelly_j_baker) June 17, 2020

Maybe... maybe figuring it out is all life is. Maybe that's "the fuck" Cheryl Strayed is talking about.

— Kimberly Hirsh, Future Library Doctor (@kimberlyhirsh) June 17, 2020

So. This is a book that shifted a lot for me. I highly recommend it to anyone at all connected to academia or just trying to figure out what’s next.

I read Naomi Alderman’s The Power very quickly (well, what passes for quickly now that I’m a mom) over the past week or so. I found it riveting; it was the first fiction book in a while that actually kept me from going to bed at a reasonable time.

The framing device is that one writer, a man living 5000 years from now, has written a historical novel set in roughly our time, and has asked his colleague, a woman and another writer, to read it and give him feedback. A quick bit of epistolary writing introduces that set up; the book then immediately jumps into the novel proper. In the history of this world, sometime around our time, teenage girls began to discover that they had the power to discharge electricity from their bodies similar to the power electric eels have. They are also able to awaken the same ability in adult women. And, as you might imagine, this changes the world a fair amount.

It’s an interesting book to read in the middle of a pandemic and widespread protests; each step of the way you see how the world is changing due to this new power, how a paradigm shift happens. It often felt like I was reading about right now, though of course the details are different.

What’s more interesting to me, though, is how it begins as a bit of a power fantasy.

I mean, just imagine. Imagine being able to walk down a dark street alone and not fear for your safety.

I didn’t realize until I had read this book that I never feel safe doing that. (What a privilege to have this fear at the back of mind than at the front, I know.)

As I read it more, this seemed more and more like a power I would like to have. Oh, I wouldn’t use it except in self-defense, I would tell myself.

I don’t want to spoil much, but as you might imagine, a lot of things that currently are things we expect of men become, in this book, things that women do. (What’s that saying about absolute power? Oh yeah, it corrupts absolutely. Though maybe it doesn’t, according to the study described in the linked article. But in this book, it definitely does.)

Layer upon layer of recognition settled in as I read the book, even close to the very end, constantly saying “Oh, THAT is a parallel to THIS thing that happened in our world…” and as I read, it reminded me of a recent Atlantic article, The Girlboss Has Left the Building (as well as The End of the Girlboss Is Here in the Medium publication Gen).

When I read the Atlantic piece, I highlighted this quote:

…when women center their worldview around their own office hustle, it just re-creates the power structures built by men, but with women conveniently on top.

And that’s what we watch happen again and again in The Power. It begins as a fantasy and ends as a dystopia.

More quotes from the Atlantic article:

Slotting mostly white women into the power structures usually occupied by men does not de facto change workplaces, let alone the world, for the better, if the structures themselves go untouched.

Being belittled, harassed, or denied fair pay by a woman doesn’t make the experience instructive instead of traumatic.

Making women the new men within corporations was never going to be enough to address systemic racism and sexism, the erosion of labor rights, or the accumulation of wealth in just a few of the country’s millions of hands—the broad abuses of power that afflict the daily lives of most people.

And Amanda Mull, the author of the article, concludes:

Disasters disrupt the future people expected to have, but they also give those people the space to imagine a better one. Those who seek power most zealously might not be the leaders people need. As Americans survey a nation torn apart and make plans to stitch it back together, admitting this, at the very least, can be an easy first step in the much harder process of doing the things that actually work. Structural change is a thing that happens to structures, not within them.

I have never been all in on the hustle, but I’ve had a waxing and waning admiration for girlboss behavior. The idea of making your way to the top appeals to me; the idea of treating your employs poorly - of firing them for becoming pregnant, harassing them, berating them - that appalls me. The Power is entertaining as can be, and also a reminder to watch myself. Watch myself for the ways that, when I want to dismantle a structure, I might end up reinforcing it instead. Watch myself for the ways I can use what power I have to help rather than to hurt.

Still would love to walk down the street at night with no fear. I don’t think the dismantling of the structure that prevents that will be finished in my lifetime.

We’re coming up on Q3 of 2020 and I don’t know how the year is going for you (except to the extent that I totally do), but 2020 has gone differently than I thought it would back in December 2020. Most years, I buy Leonie Dawson’s My Shining Year Life Goals Workbook, and indeed I did at the end of 2019. If I’m remembering correctly, it was my gift to myself for finishing writing my dissertation proposal.

I never get all the way through the workbook, and that’s fine. This year, I set myself a goal of finishing it by March 21 in time for the astrological New Year but, guess what, it didn’t work out. I still got pretty far though, and today I’ve been looking at it and noticing where I’ve been sticking to these even though, due to the pandemic and the vibe it’s given me, I haven’t looked back at the workbook since I last worked on it in early March.

I wrote in the workbook that this year, I want to feel creative and connected. I’m moving in those directions, but only recently recommitted myself to both of those desired feelings, even though I didn’t remember that I’d put it in the workbook. I said, 2020 will be the year that I defend my dissertation proposal and it’s possible I wrote that down after I’d scheduled the defense for early February. (By the way, I finished writing the proposal at the end of November but didn’t get to defend it until February. THANKS FOR NOTHING, HOLIDAYS. j/k, holidays can be great.)

I said I wanted to learn more about web development and build a foundation for my own business. These are both things I’ve been taking steps toward and will keep working on.

I brilliantly didn’t have any conferences or workshops in mind to go to, so that’s worked out fine. (I did get to travel to Charleston in February, which was lovely.)

I said I wanted to invest in Leonie’s Money, Manifesting + Multiple Streams of Income ecourse and that was my reward to myself for defending my proposal successfully. I haven’t completed it yet, but just working on the first parts has helped me save a lot of money and be a more responsible financial custodian.

I also said I’d like to read books that Dr. Katie Linder and Dr. Sara Langworthy recommend on their podcast Make Your Way, and I’m doing that. Again - without looking back over the workbook.

I wanted to reuse or buy used instead of new more, and I’ve done that. (Ask me about the $17 Nook battery I got on eBay rather than replacing my Nook with a $170 Kobo eReader.)

Hilariously, I said I wanted to do Zoom calls with friends. And guess what? I HAVE.

And I said I wanted to do my dissertation research, on which I’m making good progress.

Is there a bunch of stuff I haven’t gotten to yet? Of course. Am I going to get to everything I wrote down? Probably not, and that’s okay.

I’m still really impressed with what I’ve done so far this year. What about you? What things that you wanted to do this year have you already done?

I’m re-reading Jeff Goins’s book, You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) and I came upon a bit that I highlighted and made a note on. Goins, writing about legacy, quotes Steve Jobs:

we all long to “put a dent in the universe”

And in my annotation I respond:

I would rather have a legacy of having added something to the world rather than damaging it. Is Jobs’s language here reflective of the tech industry as a whole? Disrupt. Move fast and break things? How is that working out for us? What if instead we moved gently and restored things? Pretty sure I’m stealing this idea from Jenny Odell.

Jenny Odell writes in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy about how our current American society values growth over maintenance. She writes about the value of restoration and care. Her writing makes me want to mend and tend and fix.

I’m going to keep thinking about this. I think if I keep reading and thinking, I can connect it to visible mending, Kintsugi, the idea that women respond to stress with a “tend and befriend” approach, and the New Domesticity. Stay tuned.

1. Kelly J. Baker’s book Grace Period, which I devoured over the course of 2 days. I want to say so much about it, but my brain just won’t get it all together right now. For now, I’ll point you to the post that is the source of the chapter about which my only note/highlight was highlighting the title with the note, “This whole chapter”: “Writing Advice.”

2. Max Temkin’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation in 40 Hours.” The best of the show selected for you. As Temkin suggests, if you like these 40 hours, go ahead and watch the rest. I watched the show as it aired, so after about 8 of Temkin’s recommendations I felt confident that I still love the show now as much as I did then and went back to the beginning and am slowly making my way through. Great crafting TV, as well as incredibly soothing and full of delightful characters and truly, if you ever need to understand me, imagine if Data had the big feelings of a toddler and the empathic abilities of Deanna Troi.

3. Dr. Olivia Rissland’s thread about learning from reading a paper a day. I’m going to start this today (though I’ll be mixing in book, thesis, and dissertation chapters) with my key areas of interest: where information science and learning sciences intersect and where LIS and fan studies intersect. (And then I’ll keep researching and writing at the intersections of those, I hope.)

4. Alexandra Rowland’s thread about growing and caring for super long hair, written right before Alex got a haircut that is short and very cute. (Alexandra Rowland is probably my favorite Internet person discovery of the past couple of years; I maybe ought to write Aja Romano a thank you note for this.)

Okay, that’s all for today, I can now use the restroom and get back to data analysis. (SO INTERESTING! Like, no sarcasm, it’s really cool finding out where cosplayers go to find and share information!)

A little over a year ago, M. and I were in Atlanta to accompany W., who was attending an organizational meeting there. On our second full day in the city, we visited the Center for Puppetry Arts and their Worlds of Puppetry museum. They have a Jim Henson gallery there, and there’s a video tour of it on their Facebook page.

You enter through a lovely entrance and move through spaces dedicated to Jim’s early life, his office and earliest work, and Sesame Street. There’s a really cool Sesame Street-style set that you can actually work on yourself, with monitors so other people with you can watch your performance. And then leaving that space, you turn a corner and directly in front of you is…

Yes, Kermit.

M. and I turned that corner and my breath caught in my throat. “Hello, friend!” I wanted to say. It felt like seeing a dear friend you hadn’t seen in a long time, which was something I had done the day before, so I had a very recent memory to draw on. I wish I could have hugged Kermit, but you can’t really, through that plexiglass or whatever it is box. But I could look at him and smile. It was such a feeling of homecoming. Somehow, though he is but felt and foam, I feel like Kermit gets me.

Lately, I’ve been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. It also feels like visiting with old friends, in the moments when I’m not amazed by my own new middle-aged-woman lust for Jean-Luc Picard. (And that’s all I’ll say about that.)

Geordi. Riker. Troi. Not Data, because I am Data. Data knows so much and always shares more than is useful. Why wouldn’t you want to know the intricacies of how this ship is constructed, or the details of that culture’s expectations surrounding honor? Oh, right, because we’re all about to die, or at least one of us has been abducted, and you probably would rather only have the information you need to handle the situation. Oops.

Yes. Data and I are one.

But the others, they feel like my friends, in the same way Kermit does. When Jonathan Frakes showed up on Patrick Stewart’s Sonnet-a-Day video, I was like, “YES! FRIENDS! Let’s all sit outside and read Shakespeare, MY FRIENDS!” (And also know, I was not imagining them as Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes. Sorry, my dudes. You inhabit those other guys in my heart forever. And reading Shakespeare together is totally a thing your characters would do.)

I’ve been wondering about why I feel this way about these imaginary people/frog, and why I don’t feel quite the same way anymore. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my favorite show, and I wrote a Self-Insertion Mary Sue expressly so I could imagine what it would be like to be friends with the characters on it, but when I watch it, it doesn’t feel like visiting old friends, or even seeing people I visit with daily. It feels like watching a TV show I love. Same thing with 30 Rock, New Girl, How I Met Your Mother, Difficult People, and Happy Endings. Is the difference that I encountered The Muppets and ST:TNG as a kid? I don’t know.

Was I a lonely kid? I’m not sure. I changed schools about every two years until high school, when I stayed at the same school the whole time. I had good friends from 6th grade on. I was verbally bullied and came home crying almost every day in 5th grade. I don’t know. Maybe these characters feel like my friends because they were there for me in those times?

Regardless of why, I think I’m just going to lean into it and embrace it. As I’ve mentioned before, our family is all-in on Muppets these days, and I’m loving TNG. It’s nice to visit old friends.

I saw this tweet today:

Want to succeed #withaphd?

Don't disappear into an academic bubble while you study:
-work #altac jobs
-do placements
-volunteer
-network

Do this during the #phd and it won't be as hard to reinvent a career after. Don't get locked in the ivory tower
@AcademicChatter

— Chris Cornthwaite, PhD (@cjcornthwaite) June 16, 2020

This is excellent advice.

BUT.

It might not be for every PhD student.

For the past year or so, I’ve been reading and re-reading Karen Kelsky’s The Professor Is In. Most of the book is about what you need to do if you want to be competitive in the academic job search (in a pre-COVID world, mind you). I have done very few of these things, and that’s okay.

I came into this hoping to get really good at research - especially qualitative research. I have started doing this and will be lucky enough to get to do it for another year, working on both my own project and someone else’s.

In my interview for the doctoral program, the admissions committee asked me, “What do you want to do after you graduate?”

I said to them - honestly, but calculatedly - “I would love to be in a situation where I could research and teach, but of course I’m realistic about the job market.”

One of the committee members said, “You might have to move to get a job.”

My once-and-future advisor said, “You might have to go wherever W.’s job is.”

W’s job is here, where we already are.

I won’t say we definitely will never move. But I will say that it’s very unlikely any job offer I might receive would draw us away.

I came into this program already attached to this particular geographic area - which is saturated with both higher education institutions and scholars. And I came in viewing it much more as continuing education than as job training, which I think has only benefitted my mental health.

I say all this to let you know that I really don’t need to do all the things Karen Kelsky says to do for the academic job market. And yet I would look at her lists and think, “OH NO! I HAVE DONE NONE OF THESE THINGS!” Like… It doesn’t matter. Those aren’t the things that will get me a job I want. But I still worried about not having done them.

I came in from an alt-ac job, and had every intention of returning to a (different, because my department was dismantled) alt-ac job after graduation. Now, alt-ac is probably not going to be much of a thing, so I am turning my attention to post-ac possibilities. The advice in the tweet above applies equally, I think, to both alt-ac and post-ac. But it’s another list of things I haven’t done, with the exception of having taken on one metadata analysis contract gig.

I didn’t disappear into the academic bubble, though. For the first year of my PhD I disappeared into improv, but after that I disappeared into my family.

I got pregnant in my second semester of the PhD program, and while it was not expected (because I was dealing with PCOS-driven infertility and had only pursued minimal interventions thus far) it was very much desired. My son was born in October of my second year.

I started to make a list of all of the things that have happened with my family in the time between when I started my PhD program and now, but giving specifics felt too much like violating privacy, so I will alternate between specifics and being vague, depending on the level of disclosure I feel okay about.

Here are things that happened in my household or family of origin during my time in the PhD program:

• My adult autistic brother tried living on his own for much of the summer that I was pregnant, with only myself and my sister as support. A mile from my house, and more than a few miles from my sister’s house. In the end, my mom moved in with him, and now he and both of my parents live in the house we bought right before he was born.
• I had a baby who grew into a toddler who grew into a preschooler, for whom I have been the primary caregiver in terms of weekday care and invisible labor (though I will say I’ve had amazing support from my partner, who often gives me long stretches to myself on weekends, and our extended family; we’ve also had part-time childcare either from family or at a Montessori since he was about 12 weeks old).
• Two family members were rushed to the ER with chest pain on the same day, several states away from each other. (They’re both alive still, thank goodness.)
• One of those family members has had five surgeries, four of which happened while living in close proximity to me. More than one of these made that family member unable to drive, and I became the driver of choice for this family member.
• A different family member was diagnosed with cancer and had surgery to remove the cancerous organ. That seems to have gone well, but you know, recovery from that is not nothing, and required a little support from me.
• One of the aforementioned family members was hospitalized on suicide watch for a few days, and has since taken on a lot more medical appointments in response to that.
• Another family member has dealt with mysterious digestive issues and only in the past year has figured out the reason; this family member hasn’t needed much from me in material or physical care but there’s still a toll that providing emotional support takes.
• I myself have had mysterious fatigue and pain that persisted even when my diagnosed conditions were well-controlled.
• I spent about 8 months figuring out how to get my kid settled at his Montessori school, because his body would not conform to their schedule. (In the end, we switched from afternoons to mornings, and it made everything easier immediately.)

And also, until the past year or so, my husband traveled for work A LOT, which was only a problem in that I was so focused on child caregiving during those times that I couldn’t get much PhD work done.

I essentially became a member of a sandwich generation 5 - 10 years before I expected to have to do so. This period of my life is inextricable from caregiving for other members of my family.

So I look at those things and consider that my childcare was devoted at first exclusively to attending class (that’s right, I worked the writing around the baby), then to attending class and writing, then to writing. I consider that often by the time my childcare hours came around, I didn’t have the spoons left to do good work for my PhD, much less the time for extra jobs, volunteer opportunities, or networking. And I ask myself, when? When on earth would I do those things?

And the answer is, I don’t know. If I wanted to devote more energy to finding fault with myself, I could answer that question. But for today, anyway, I’m over it. I’m over blaming myself for life being what it is. I take control where I can, and do well with what I’m given; I have an internal locus of control and rarely feel powerless about micro-level life stuff. But I’m done being harsh to myself about it.

I’m done.

Addendum: the author of the above quoted tweet followed it up with this tweet:

I should have added this! I was really just thinking about some ideas, not a laundry list.. I'm just adding pressure

— Chris Cornthwaite, PhD (@cjcornthwaite) June 16, 2020

So like I said - good advice that you can use if it works for you, but don’t need to feel pressure to take on.

I should also add that it’s easy for me to say I’m done, because I have had some of the uncertainty around settling the next year resolved for me. Details on that to come later.