Soft Academia

A corner for mental health and academia to meet 📔🌿💻☕️🕰️🍂🕯️

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Today’s ode is to the waiting required of academia.

Waiting for a response on a conference abstract.

Waiting for acceptance or rejection of a paper in a prestigious journal.

Waiting on people to fill in a research survey.

Waiting for responses from other people that have to help you get participants for research.

Waiting on all the data to come in to begin analyzing.

Waiting on the analyzing in order to write that chapter of your dissertation.

Waiting on edits.

Waiting on offers.

Waiting on meeting confirmations.

There’s a balance to be had, I think, in life between presence and planning.

The here-and-now as well as the future. And strangely academia takes me out of both.

At least in this moment of time.

It’s just waiting, waiting on things that shift both my immediate choices but also future choices. Sometimes when I feel ‘stuck’ in something, I

think about what I would explore with a client if they brought me this moment as if it was there life. (The true irony I think about people always being worried about therapists therapizing them, is that we often do it to ourselves more than anyone else).

And what always comes out is this self compassion that I am not very good at giving myself all the time.

Stuckness makes sense.

Emotions that flow in and out, make sense, and of course they are there in this situation.

That waiting on so much out of our control as an adult can return us back to childhood and teenagehood, when so much was not in our control and we begin our first awareness of that.

So, this post, as are most, are for me as much as they are for anyone else who might relate.

The waiting of academia is hard and of course you have emotional responses to it.

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A peaceful river cam

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Let’s talk praxis.

Praxis is defined simply as practice.

Activists often use the word to communicate what theory of knowledge informs their actions.

So an intersectional feminist praxis would be making choices in one’s life and work informed by that theory of literature.

I specifically want to talk about how difficult academia makes it to live in integrity within my praxis.

One of my alma maters, Michigan State, sent out an email introducing something called Projects, connecting current students to alumni who might have a short term virtual project that benefit both you and the student.

And they allow for paid and unpaid projects to be listed.

Which is where I am stuck.

I recognize my current university is experienced as internationally prestigious and is a place of power & influence.

That connecting with a current Michigan State student to provide them a chance to work on something connected to Cambridge is a wonderful opportunity for them to receive external validation from the rest of the world to support their career development (i.e. having Cambridge on your resume).

AND what is also true, is I’d like my practice to not be classist, meaning that only those with enough financial privilege to do unpaid work can participate in these sort of activities for future benefit.

I don’t want to make choices that benefit the wealthy.

Students shouldn’t have to choose between bills and career opportunities.

If I am underpaid as a doctoral student, and therefore cannot afford to pay someone for their work with me, where does that leave my praxis?

Is it out of my integrity to make that choice to not pay someone at this point when I can’t?

Is my guilt about my praxis worth not connecting someone to a world renounced space they may not have access to otherwise?

I’m not looking for advice on what I should do, but I would be interested to hear what choice you would make in this situation? Or how a struggle of praxis has shown up in your academic career?

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Give me all the beverages to get through all these trauma papers

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A post for (some) international students.

On the eve of a trip back, I have been thinking a lot about a place’s impact.

Of the plenty of subtle or not subtle ways people are ready to tell you that you’ve changed or how living abroad has made you Other in some way.

That the months in between the last visit and now dug a trench between old home and new home; a divide that eventually some people may decide is too wide because we now have “nothing in common anymore”.

I’m not a third culture kid so this is what I wrestle in my adult life, with relationships with other adults.

And I write this relative and within the privileges I have of not being challenged by my outward appearance of “belonging” in either country, the one I grew up in or the one I am in now.

No one in the US has ever told me to “go back to where I came from” because I fit, physically, as a “typical American”. I have that same white privilege in the UK; no one assumes I am not British on a glance.

With that privilege I think about how the words, phrases, foods, experiences I have in this new country, I do not out of survival; I do not have to assimilate to seem more aligned with nationals because my appearance does not wrongfully disqualify me in some folks eyes from believing I belong to begin with.

That those changes have come because it feels natural and of the place.

How, for example, it feels more comfortable to say queue instead of line these days, but how a slip of that next week will trigger a conversation, a joke, a comment about “how British you are now” - how different you are from us.

Other.

The capacity for difference, for change, for allowing a place to influence a person is so varied.

The way in which distance or difference is internalized for some people will be very different from my own as someone who sought out a life different than what I had known.

Sometimes it is welcomed, sometimes it is celebrated, sometimes it is ridiculed, sometimes it isolating, sometimes it is degraded, sometimes seen as a betrayal, sometimes it is unnoticed.

And how there’s a balance in acknowledging how your choices have impacted a relationship, and who’s responsible for what in an interaction like that.

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Study set up for the summer ☀️

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It is wildly hilarious (to me personally) how quickly it goes from feeling like the jokes and memes about being a PhD student seem a * little * bit dramatic, to them being absolutely the most accurate thing I’ve ever seen.

My department has a first essay that went down pretty breezily, and therefore under prepared me for the absolutely tragedy of my work-life-sleep-socialize balance of the past couple weeks.

Shy by 5 words a 10,000 word limit & with a spin on it in my own way, I feel proud of it in a lot of ways.

I connected trauma treatments to the ‘perfect victim’ in criminal punishment cases, and the political history of trauma to the language we use around mental health, and the way play is a hard wired piece of our biology no matter how cultures value it.

And I don’t know what the expectations or opinions of me will be after my supervisor, advisor, and assessor read it, but I am feeling grounded in my choices to frame, speak about, and create PhD studies with as many lenses as I see the world through.

I didn’t spend time stressing about what I should or shouldn’t write in that regard, which surprised me, but I did spend time stressing about the subject of memes: Word fucking over formatting, meeting with your supervisor with no new updates but having to fill the time anyway, crashing an internet browser with too many open tabs, repeatedly saving and backing things up because of horror stories due to said crashing, knowing the paper is done because it is in fact the worst thing you’ve ever read in your whole life, realizing you are in fact like a dog walking itself with the leash in their mouth.

I don’t think I ever called a PhD student dramatic to their face, but I do want to apologize for my thoughts towards y’all before, because damn is the crash course fast.

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Brainstorming corners - titling manuscripts has become one of the most playful and creative!

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Cafe corners are where the study magic happens (and also where manuscripts are written when you love coffee 😅)

📍Fitzbillies Cambridge

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This I guess is dedicated to those on the edge of fields, on the cusp of topics, in the intersections.

Because it can be isolating to not be ‘up to date’ on the up and coming leading voices in the field, self-confidence diminishing to google meanings of words in the title of a talk discreetly.

It can be vulnerable and awkward to try to make friends who showed up to the conference together because they met at another conference in the field or work in the same lab.

My intersections always seem to come up at conferences, which inspired this writing. The specifics may only apply to me but the topic spans to anyone in intersections.

I think there is space for applied psychology - yes that even includes play therapy - in psychiatry spaces, especially when discussing global equity.

(Applied psychology is the real world applications of the theories and foundations taught in school)

Back to play therapy, it shows across multiple studies as a modality that is culturally sustaining and even shows meaningful results when therapist/child don’t speak the same language.

Something talk therapy or pharmaceutical prescription can’t report the same about.

This should solidify its place in global mental health, I think.

The reckoning psychology is having around rigorous research, insider/outsider research, reproducibility crisis, publication crisis, has real consequences for collaborating and discussing across sectors and silos, for confidence and comfortability for colleagues to connect, for multidisciplinary outputs and perspectives.

Conferences a glaring place for it.

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This is maybe your sign to pick a college with a pool at Cambridge? 🤭

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Being on “sides” of social media like ‘academic/study blog’ Instagram or ‘academic’ Twitter (when it existed) lends itself to hearing so much advice about what a PhD ‘should’ or ‘could’ look like.

As if someone from another field knows whats required of you in your field or your specific project or as if there are ‘right’ schedules or proper ways to do things.

And I’m exhausted by consuming it.

It’s challenging sometimes to even be flexible in my own brain about what my PhD needs to be, let alone be inundated with tips and tricks master-lists or roadmaps to success.

Lay off the advice, really.

(The napministry has some lovely posts about this).

It’s wonderful to share what worked for you, but it probably isn’t going to work for everyone else so I wish people would stop framing it that way.

Even to themselves, too, because things will change.

It may have worked for you to block-schedule your time for year one, but maybe you start noticing that isn’t helpful anymore but you’ve already packaged it up as the ‘way to do your PhD’, publicly and privately.

And that can be a shitstorm to break away from. Maybe today I’m journaling to expectations, from others and yourself about completing a PhD.

There can be a mysticism around PhDs and it sort of feels like the trend of giving out advice for scheduling or supplies or milestones is to fight that mysticism but it alienates people too.

A constant topic of discussions on these sides of social media is imposter syndrome and it somehow feels connected that people are comparing themselves to PhD students who are claiming to have the best path forward, and they may take advice that then doesn’t work for them and are left these sorts of ‘doing something wrong’/’not enough’ feelings.

It feels disingenuous to move through conversations with PhD students (current or future) as if my aesthetic office supply addiction is how I stay organized or that I recognize scrolling through activists social media accounts as part of my research reading so I don’t feel guilt about it or that public facing writing is an important component of a PhD.

And it’s okay that it’s not true for others.

Less PhD advice that is cloaked in certainty and absolution please.

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Visit the museums of your university okay?

Cambridge University anthropology museum

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The culture and conversations around publishing in academia are horrific.

There are predatory journals to watch out for and high-impact versus low-impact journals (how wild that we even classify people’s life works that way) and thousand dollar fees you have to pay to journals have your work published in some cases and supervisor histories of leaving out graduate students as authors on papers and egotistical power-hungry horror story of reviewer number two.

Because I chose the applied route of psychology - becoming a therapist - I consider myself fortunate to never be pressured to publish during my undergraduate or Masters. Especially when I think back to nineteen year old me and how she might have crumpled under the words of a harsh reviewer.

I am doing my PhD without having published a single paper, and I often feel strange about that.

I think often about how I want my PhD research, and any additional work & time I spend in academia, to be disseminated and accessed.

I think about paywalls for articles and public-facing journals and mainstream publications and twitter threads and instagram graphics and non-internet access ways to engage with the public.

I think about who I want my research in the hands of the most.

I think about how putting my work into the world could be spun in ways I never intended.

I think about how I feel when I go to email another academic and scroll through twelve pages of publications on their CV and why that’s a measure of success at all.

I think about what it means to have articles in the same two journals for an entire career for some academics and why I have an emotional reaction to that.

I consider what’s meaningful for me to write about and if that’s different than what’s meaningful for people to read.

And who’s work I can build upon and how to continue conversations that started years before my existence.

I think about my relationship to the value of publishing, and also my relationship to an identity of writer. Of researcher. Of academic. Of future doctor. And the responsibility of being vulnerable enough to put my work into the world when it’s a challenge to systems and cultures I want to contribute to dismantling.

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Books that make me a better writer, researcher, academic and creator.

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I like the small indicators that summer is here in Cambridge even if it’s kind of cloudy and I don’t have a summer break.

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What I haven’t done since starting a PhD?

I haven’t thought much about the bees, about if their numbers have risen or fallen around the world.

I haven’t bought myself biweekly fresh flowers like I used to when I could walk to Pike Place Market.

I haven’t discovered any new slam poets or walked barefoot in the grass.

I haven’t eaten a single crêpe.

I haven’t thought about the Girl Scout pledge or that Kendrick Lamar’s Swimming Pool used to be on the warm-up playlist for my high school senior year swim girls team.

I haven’t wondered about the coral reef regrowth that happened during lockdown.

I haven’t done a paint-by-number of a European village nor have I finished reading an entire paperback book.

And it makes me consider what we lose when we take on new identities: grad student, researcher, PhD candidate, Oxbridge crew, immigrant.

What I have done since starting a PhD?

I have read thousands of pages on childhood trauma and store the links & citations.

I have learned how to explain that play is a hard-wired biological process and why play therapists should be one of the leaders in mental health recovery for young children in the clinical world.

I witnessed the most embarrassing attempt of a metaphor comedy sketch at a LEGO conference.

I practice boundaried communication with professors and peers.

I set email signatures with my expectations and turn off email notifications outside of work hours.

So I have to consider, too, what we gain when we take on new identities.