Is it fun though, really?

PhD burnout and writing

I am not sure how many people told me not to do the PhD. Several friends and acquaintances. Some random people I had come across at a writing conference in Portland. After my second year, I proudly picked up the Don’t-Do-It torch and told everyone within earshot to think very carefully before dropping their name in that hat.

Photo by Yoann Siloine on Unsplash

I think I had it better than most, and I still wouldn’t recommend it. You may have heard about the tenure-track job market, and what they say is true: the jobs are simply not there, not for the number of people holding PhDs.

I graduated last month. I am, for the first time in a long time, not a student. I am (dare I say it?) in a liminal space. I updated my LinkedIn. On the dating apps, I talked to a man who was pursuing an MD.

“A Phd, huh? That’s about the most masochistic thing you can do.”

I agreed. But now I’ve moved on. I graduated. I am not a 5’5” PhD candidate; never married, no kids. I am a Writer who has deleted the apps.

I rented my graduation regalia, which was obscenely expensive but not as expensive as buying the hood, gown, and cap which would have cost me close to my June rent. I know because I recently signed a new lease and am committed to staying in one place for quite some time. I did, however, order two graduation pictures taken by a professional photographer. They are still in an envelope, and I haven’t looked at them. When people tell me Congratulations! I say, Thank you! When close friends ask me how I felt at the ceremony, I say, I felt absolutely nothing.

Why not do a PhD? Most people will point to the academic job prospects, but I want to talk about burnout. Yes, you might be willing to go the alt-ac route. You’ll say you’re doing this as a passion project, and you’ll sign up for 5-7 years doing the thing you love most in the world (really, do it in 4 if you can), but are you ready for the identity crisis that occurs when you’ve built your entire life around literature and then realize you’d rather set yourself on fire than read Bleak House one more time? Say the word “disillusioned.” How does it feel in your mouth? You’re going to say it a lot. You are going to talk about money all the time because you’ll have none.

Maybe you are not like me. Maybe you loved your graduate career and you had parents or family who knew the field and told you to publish as much as you could within the first few years. Someone who told you how to write an academic article or a successful grant. Who told you how to give papers at a conference. These are things that are largely self-taught. Maybe you published a book or two and you’ve had campus interviews. Maybe you have a TT job waiting for you in the fall. I am so happy for you, if this is the case. Truly. I know how hard it is.

But maybe you are like me. And then you graduate. Or you quit. Now what?

Now what?

I keep asking myself this.

I still love teaching, and I think I’m good at it. The job stuff is (hopefully) working itself out.

But writing.

There were days, many days, where I did not want to write a single word. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make myself care. I would have rather emulsified earthworms and fed them to myself like a baby bird.

I have spent the last couple of weeks thinking about what kind of writer I want to be, and I have spent very little time thinking about what life should look like now that I’m finally done with school in my mid-30s. I say this because I think the nature of this Substack might change into something less personal. I might want to write something else. My self-help career begins and ends with today’s newsletter.

Upon moving back to Boise, I decided that I would restart The Artist’s Way, which I have spoken about briefly in a previous email. It is, without hesitation, the one self-help book I would recommend. It has all the God-talk of an AA meeting and has a spiritually-centered, somewhat woo-woo verbiage that can be off-putting to some, but then maybe you really miss being creative or feel like writing or art has left you for good, and you come crawling here out of desperation. Friends, Julia Cameron has entered the chat.

I had reconnected with a childhood friend here, and over an Indian lunch buffet, we decided we’d have a little Artist Way book club, which has since grown to about four of us. I was explaining the nature of my particular academic woes, how high the stakes were, that I didn’t have any retirement funds, and my novel that I’d been working on was a failure and in the desk drawer. I told her about my second Vipassana retreat and that I thought non-attachment was just not going to work for me, but in 10-days I’d realized that Hemingway was right and I needed to write 500 perfect words per day.

We met again the next week for another lunch buffet, and I’d written zero words. Because burnout.

This friend of mine is a brilliant and prolific potter. Like, very gifted. I said she should consider getting an MFA (not a PhD). I wanted to know how she did it; how did she keep the wheel spinning?

“Because it’s fun,” she said. “If it’s not fun that day, I don’t do it. If I don’t want to throw, then I don’t.”

And I think I looked at her rather rudely because deep down I’m a snob, and I said, “No, it’s about work. It’s about showing up even when you don’t want to. You have to make yourself do the work!”

“Who told you this?” she said.

"Everyone! The serious people! The real writers! Writing can be miserable and editing can be the worst.”

She nodded. She said she understood that the stakes were high. “Maybe just do something for fun,” she continued.

And this is why I put my trust in friends over therapists, or maybe this is why I think most of my friends should be therapists.

“Do something for fun!” is something you might see on a Hallmark card and rapidly dismiss, but it really rings true if you’re walking the aisles of Walgreens on ketamine. Jesus Christ, I’m surrounded by idiots who don’t know that we can do things for fun! Thank God this corporation knows the truth!! This was the feeling I had, sober, at the Bombay Grill.

I agreed to no goals and no deadlines; I am writing whatever it is that I want to write, which is something I haven’t done in a long, long time. It was around this time (last week) that I realized I could also read whatever I wanted and was no longer beholden to postpopulist readings about Montana. I could actually read something that was mediocre and just for fun. Of course, these are not earth shattering realizations, but if you’ve tied your whole identity to something for years, the need to publish (and thus get a job), to innovate and be good and sound smart can make something really not fun really quickly. I think this is probably true in a lot of fields but it feels particularly true in the arts, where it is not only your job but also the thing you do, in theory, for fun.

Writing…a supposedly fun thing I might just do again.