I never considered myself much of an interior decorator, but I must say; I have a really nice set up in my living room. My favorite old chair, angled towards to TV, has recently received the benefit of an old cushion my grandfather used when he required a wheelchair to get around. It’s up against my couch, providing me the perfect place to lay out and stretch when my already poor posture reduces me to a piece of punctuation. First, a question mark, then a comma, eventually a period. After that…I don’t know, I guess I just implode.
It’s 9:50 on a Saturday evening in early 2020. I’ve been on the couch for the last 10 hours. To my left, my beloved wooden writing desk, a bit of detritus left behind by the quick post-graduation evacuation of an older student. Stuffed with binders, notes, and sporting a wonky wheel, it provides that snug feeling that I, as a claustrophile, love.
The real triumph is the actual workspace. Under a slightly wobbly folding card table (it rocks constantly, a threat to the cup of coffee which is always there) sits the entirety of what I need for my dissertation. My workplace. A reflection of my mind, it’s both orderly and chaotic. Never messy, it’s infinitely cluttered. Writing this now (it’s about 8pm) the follow things on are the table: 2 Moleskine notebooks, a Steelers coaster, a microfiber cloth for cleaning glasses, Bluetooth headphones, 4 pens, spare ink, 4 flash drives, a 1 terabyte external hard drive, a stress ball, 11 pads of Post-Its, and sanitizer, some Doublemint, a back scratcher, rubber bands, tape, a stapler, staples, staple remover, paperclips, flash cards, metal clips, 2 manilla folders filled with articles, a novel, 2 stacks of books, regular headphones, 3 days of Post-Gazette crosswords, a can of compressed air, a copy of the US Constitution, 5 green exam books, nail clippers, and some tea biscuits. Everything here has a place and a purpose. Moving the table is just about impossible without lifting it slightly, inevitably causing something to fall.
For almost a year, this place has been my default state of being. At any given time, there’s a 50–50 chance that I am at this table. I have a perfectly good desk in my bedroom. A “some assembly required” purchase from Big Lots, it’s a heavy wooden piece with several drawers designed for exactly the kind of storage needs my discount card table lacks. You know what they say, though, location, location, location. My bedroom is isolated. Quiet. Even though it’s just a few feet from where I sit now, it feels like a mile away from the rest of my apartment.
Next to me, a pan of pasta is getting cold, and a cigarette burns itself out. My computer has been open all day and my skin glows in the light of a WordDoc. I’m constantly aware of the flickering cursor, reminding me of the progress I have not made. It’s been three days since I’ve written a single word of my dissertation. I feel terrible about it – how could I not? – but I truly cannot make myself write. Mentally, physically, and emotionally, my dissertation had me defeated.
I started working on my dissertation in earnest in the Summer of 2019. I had spent the better part of 2018-2019 researching, traveling across NW Ohio and SE Michigan (my dissertation is on Toledo). Weeks and weeks on the road, staying at the same Red Roof Inn (I have so many rewards points…) and hunched over the ubiquitous long wooden tables that adorn archives across the country. I knew that I had a fair amount of sitting ahead of me (writing for a living is basically just Adventures in Sitting).
All that being said, I was looking forward to the writing. When you’re a PhD student, the dissertation is this constant presence. It looms over you like a cloud and it’s also the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s both liberating and intimidating. For the entirety of your program — longer if, like me, you knew that you were going for your PhD before you even applied — the dissertation is just waiting there. You labor over coursework, reading and writing about books you don’t necessarily care about. You labor over your exams, reading and writing about books you might care about. Finally, you get a chance to read and write what is in a lot of ways a book that you do care about (the great irony is that no one else, outside of your committee, probably gives a shit). The dissertation is a terrible thing, in the sense that is terribly great and exciting.
At this point, I had been a student in college for 10 years, a graduate student for 5. To FINALLY be working on my dissertation was a terrific emotional and mental relief. At long last, I actually felt like an academic and, to no small degree, like an adult. It’s incredibly lame to be in your late 20s and have “homework.” Being 30 and working on your dissertation? It’s a totally different mindset, a totally different perception. It’s more fun and more serious. There’s a certain gravitas to the word “dissertation” and the weight of it is felt immediately.
I started the first chapter in September of 2019. I had taken time off during the summer, but I knew that I still had time. Besides, at this point I had two Master’s theses under my belt and I had a pretty solid writing approach and schedule. Ever the old man, I get early. By 7am most days, I am at my computer. Typically, I worked from 7am to noon. Sometimes I work a little in the afternoon, too. On any day, I am aiming to get one page a day. Taking the time to write only one page a day means that I OBSESS over that page. I write it, I rewrite, I edit, I rewrite again. By the time I am done with the day, that page is Done.
The other thing about how I write is that I like to change places. Sitting in place for too long makes me bored and anxious. My eyes start to gloss over and there is a serious personal point of diminishing returns. I’d often start at the cafe across from my apartment, knocking back as much espresso as my body can safely consume. I’m a coffee pooper — that’s just something that you know about me know, so there you go — so that espresso usually really hits.
There’s no point in trying to be dramatic about COVID, to say something that no one has ever said before. (I almost said “All that changed when the pandemic hit”.) I had finished Chapter 1 by this point and was working on Chapter 2 and my progress was fairly steady. I had a large outline/timeline document (~290 pages) that I was using as a guide, so I was feeling pretty good. Like a lot of people, I initially did not think COVID was going to be a big deal. I was at a bar with friends a few days before the first stay-at-home order when into effect. In the early days of the pandemic, I assumed it would be a short delay, more akin to SARS. We’d stay home for a few weeks or so, catching up on Netflix and some pleasure reading (I refer to this as the “Tiger King” phase, when we were all convinced it would just go away if we just stayed home, watching our unlimited queues of good and bad TV). By the time we had moved into May, though, the reality set it. This wasn’t going away, in part because of the nature of the virus and the ease with which it spread, but also because of the complete evacuation of authority by those with the power to stop it.
Those first few months I did nothing. I was already set to be off for the Fall Semester — the department gave me a semester off of my choosing for the purpose of writing — so I had plenty of time. While it was still tenable to do so, I had visited my family in Ohio. I was back by June and at that point, I stared down my computer, ready to work again. The thing about my writing schedule is that it is dependent upon having a schedule. My dissertation was not my entire day. I had places to go and other things to do. I was able to structure in specific time for writing because it naturally fit around teaching, grading, my commute, my life.
By June, I had nothing left. No cafes to loiter in. No bars to relax in. At that point, it was still unknown if it was safe to go for walks, easily my second-favorite activity after reading. I woke up one Monday morning with nothing else to do but write. It started off as a dream. I had not idea exactly how long my dissertation was going to be, but I had a fair idea (currently, with the Conclusion not quite done, it’s 352 pages).Writers dream of this kind of time, this kind of freedom — chosen or imposed — where the only obligation is to the manuscript, the only responsibility is to write.
I made a good-faith effort at keeping my regular schedule and discipline. I wrote from 7–12 each day and was making solid progress, for the most part. The lack of distraction was making we more productive and I soon eclipsed the 1 page a day target. I churned out Chapter 2 in less than a month, Chapter 3 in just a little longer than that. “If I keep this pace” I told my mom “I could probably get the manuscript done before Christmas or even Thanksgiving. How nice would it be to have this behind me in my final semester?”
Optimism is always a product of the moment. When things are going well, the blinders come up. It’s hard to see what’s around you when everything is shining so brightly. When you have nothing to do, it seems so freeing. My days were completely open, unbounded by the rigidity duty and responsibility. Aside from my dissertation, I had started on a few personal projects. A collection of essays. A novel. A master list of all my books. I was making progress on each one of these products, finally feeling like the person I always wanted to be.
When you measure your self-worth in productivity, having the time to work becomes an opportunity to validate yourself. Work was giving me a purpose, an escape from myself. To waste that time was to waste myself. The point of diminishing returns came quickly. I thought that more work would translate into more happiness and the loneliness of my life would recede, the faster and more I typed. I was getting fatigued. I was still calling it quits around noon, maybe 1. The rest of the day was a struggle. You can only watch so much TV, play so many video games. Eventually, even pastimes become a burden.
Sitting in my room those hot July and August days, I felt like I was suffocating. The heat was oppressive to be sure, but the tightness in my chest was not from the weather. I tried to work harder. I thought maybe the malaise wrapping itself around me was from not working enough.
I had no idea what was happening to me. I felt like I was dying, slowly. I stopped getting up early. In bed around 4am and up around 10am. I’d pound out my dissertation, irrespective of quality. The rest of my day was spent on the couch. There were entire days where I did not move from that couch, accidentally falling asleep there with the TV on.
I began to have horrible dreams. I have only vague ideas of what they were about, I just know they were terrifying; you don’t wake up sweating and panicked because you dreamt you won the lottery. The singular focus of my life was starting to make everything else fuzzy and faded. I’ve been an indefatigable walker my entire life; I could barely get off the couch. I’ve read, on average, probably 3 books a week since I was about 8 years old; every time I cracked the pages, my eyes just glazed over.
Something was wrong.
To say I was lost is an understatement. I’d had almost no human interaction for months. I wasn’t productive (we’ve already established that Productivity = Value in my big dumb brain). I was inconsolably sad, impossibly angry. But I couldn’t stop.
I honestly don’t know how I got done what I got done. There were days where, hungover and reeking of alcohol, I sat at my computer and sweat for 5 hours, writing barely a few hundred words. Others, I would sleep in until late, starting in the evening and going until the middle of the night, spitting out text of questionable quality, hands shaking from cup after cup of black coffee.
The benefit of isolation is that no one can see how much pain you’re in. The few times a month I saw someone — really, “see” someone because Quarantine is still ongoing — I unloaded so much residual neediness. I’d call my parents and talk to them for hours (one time, I was on the phone with my mom for 2 hours and only half of that time were either of us talking; it was seriously just nice to know that someone was actually there, on the other end of the phone). Loneliness is like a coat that you can’t take off. Not a straitjacket, or anything like that. That’s something that someone else puts on you, makes you wear. This is something that you wear by choice. You place it around you and by the time you realize you want it off, it’s stuck. And even if you could take it off, you wonder if it’s better than being exposed to whatever else might be out there. So you choose instead to leave it on because at the very least it’s familiar.
Writing a dissertation is a challenge under normal circumstances. The emotional, mental, and intellectual labor that goes into it is exhausting. Funding, advisor issues, personal hiccups, frustrating conclusions, the general perils and pitfalls of writing. It’s a challenge, but one we sign up for and can reasonably prepare for. During a pandemic is a nightmare. The rigorous joy that comes with the intellectual pursuit is sucked away, replaced by dread, shame, and panic. Dread, because you no longer look forward to the work or feel capable of doing it. Shame, because you know that you need to, you’ve been building to this for so long that failing at the final turn seems worse than death. Panic because every day, every hour, every minute, every second that you aren’t working is time that you cannot get back that could have gotten you one step closer to finishing and oh my god now you’re not just behind schedule you’re behind schedule on the day you were going to use to catch up and now you’re going to have to have a catchup day for your catchup day.
The stress culture around PhD programs is no longer hidden It’s an open secret that’s become a parody of itself; numerous social media groups have popped up in recent years providing memes, gifs, and comics dedicated to both exposing the absurd realities of grad school while attempting to create a community of mutual suffering and group sympathy. These outlets provide a much-needed humor to a population that increasingly has little to laugh at other than itself. Issues like imposter syndrome, poverty, poor advisor-advisee relationships, competition, over funding, and the near-impossibility of finding gainful employment upon graduation have become normalized in the PhD experience, to the point where expressions of incredulity and exasperation have been misinterpreted as not only expected but acceptable realties.
This has been a silver lining to this increased awareness. Mental health in higher education has affixed itself firmly into the zeitgeist. Numerous studies and articles have revealed what are now well-worn and oft-repeated figures about the grad student experience. There is a mental health crisis, with grad students being three times more likely to experience symptoms of depression and emotional stress than the general population. We’re depressed. We’re poor. We’re burnt out. The issues of graduate education have become as synonymous with the graduate experience as qualifying exams, teaching assignments, and dissertations.
Graduate students often lack the necessary relationships and networks to properly decompress from the rigors of their programs. Most off our on-campus social interactions are with departmental faculty and our cohorts and not much else. Even within these ostensibly tight-knit communities, the isolation of graduate student work prevents any substantive relationships from developing beyond the classroom.
I would not categorize these issues solely as mental health. A hefty chunk for sure, but not entirely. But let’s pretend they are. You would think that universities would be quick to address such obvious structural problems. Mental health has emerged as one of our major social, cultural, and political issues of the 21st century. Athletes, politicians, singers, actors, as well as plenty of us regular folk have brought attention to the importance of mental well-being. The notion that we can overwork our minds and deplete our emotional batteries is no longer considered a sign of laziness or as a personal failing, but an aspect of wellness on par with putting a bandage on a wound or taking Advil when you have a headache (or, for the youths reading this, when literally anything happens; once you get older, you start waking up with injuries that you didn’t have when you went to bed).
Universities are massive bureaucracies. Most people don’t realize that but that’s essentially what they are (plus institutions of higher learning and a bastion of free thinking and ideas, blah blah blah). The number of associate deans and vice provosts and assistants to the vice associate provosts are staggering. You would think that such a structure might suggest some degree of responsiveness to issues like mental health. They are great at addressing the symptoms but often fail miserably when it comes to prevented care. Lip service and liability is the name of the game. Catchy hashtags, college-sponsored coffee breaks, swag bags, a yoga class and a free subscription to a wellness app are poor substitutes for addressing the systemic inadequacies of a system that prioritizes a stoic individualism in the face of a frantic, exhausting, and hyper-competitive environment. The stress environment of PhD programs stifles socialization.
A long-running joke about grad students is how much we love free food (and we do). Part of it is that we’re poor and free food is good for our wallets. But less understood is the fact that these situations wherein free food is provided are also, often, the first time in days that some students have actually spoken to another person face-to-face on something not about their research. We aren’t so much hungry for food – although, yes, we are starving – as we are for some brief socialization, even if the majority of that socialization is in the form of nods, small talk, and quick words between bites of mediocre pizza.
No program really prepares you for the realities of life in a PhD program, partly because any program that self-aware would have likely solved its problems already.
Dr. Bradley J. Sommer, PhD 
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