Working At Philosophy, Part 2 - That Time I Considered Quitting Philosophy

By Stacey Goguen

Before I dive into the nuts and bolts of how we work, I want to talk about why we work—or don’t. I struggled with getting work done in my first half of graduate school. My writing was sloppy, and I rarely left myself time to polish it. Even when I did proof-read, often my mind was usually a stressed-out mess, so I would read over my mistakes without catching them. Sometimes simply reading philosophy was just as hard.  Again, it was like my mind was on hyperdrive, constantly babbling in the background, making it impossible to concentrate on anything other than more accessible than fiction, Facebook, or the news—which I spent a lot of time reading instead, just to fill the time or to try to get myself to calm down.

During this time, I did okay in my classes, but I had no idea whether I was, in general, getting any better at philosophy. My professors and advisor were helpful, but I felt like there were underlying issues (like maybe I’m just horrible at this stuff) that I was too scared to bring up with them.

Then I bombed my first attempt at my qualifying papers. I struggled for months on these papers and didn’t ask for help (for fear someone would tell me to just give up). As the deadline approached, I freaked out, found it incredibly hard to focus, and did a rush job in the last week, leaving myself little time for careful editing and polishing. One of my papers I turned in was so bad, a professor made me promise that I would never turn in something that sloppy and subpar to them ever again.

Two months later, a whole bunch of things in my personal life went to shit. I was in a bad place. It was summer, a time when I am usually at my best mood-wise. Instead, I was in what-I-now-believe was something of a depressive episode. Many days I struggled to find a reason to get out of bed. Sometimes I wanted to cry all day. And sometimes I just felt numb all week. Ahead of me loomed a second attempt to pass in my qualifying papers, but I couldn’t see a path forward. I had been in graduate school for four years, and if I had made seemingly little progress in that time, how was I supposed to get myself together enough to not only pass my QPs, but then successfully defend a prospectus and write a dissertation?

Clearly, I thought, if there are some people who just can’t hack it in philosophy, I must be one of them.

At point, I honestly thought I might drop out of my program and quit graduate school. As you might have guessed, I did not in fact end up doing this--though I did such little philosophy work in the next six months that I pretty much took an unofficial leave of absence (apart from my TA duties).

I’m lucky that several things happened during those six months, which were the beginning of a huge shift in how I thought about philosophy, graduate school, and my life.

In rough order, they are:

1. During a phone call, I angrily snapped at my sister for trying to offer me a small piece of advice, revealing to her, and myself, that I didn't know if I was going to complete my program, or quit. She responded with such sympathy and support that I was a sobbing mess for the rest of the day. She told me that I did not owe anyone this degree, including myself. So I should only pursue it if I believed that it would lead to something worthwhile, or I would simply be happy to spend time pursuing it.

(I didn’t know if that was the case as the time, but it changed the question I was pondering. I slowly stopped posing the question as, “Am I good enough? Will I make it?” Instead, I asked myself, “Do I want this? Am I happy doing this? What do I think this will lead to, and is that something I want to spend my energy on?”

2. One of my friends suggested I try therapy. I resisted. I didn’t think my problem was psychological. My problem, as I thought of it, was that I was a big loser who sucked at life. My friend told me that she thought graduate school is so hard, and so cruel, that probably just about every graduate student could benefit from therapy—which can just be having someone to talk to, who spends a lot of their time helping people with hard, cruel situations. She pointed out that therapy was actually incredibly cheap on our student health insurance ($10 a visit), so why not try it out?

So I did. And I even told the therapist, “I might not even need this. I don’t know if anything’s wrong with me.” Blah blah blah. I didn’t even have a clear understanding of what therapy would entail. (Would I have to lie down on a couch? Do they already try to subscribe you meds?)

(I will talk about this more in later posts, because I now have a lot of opinions about how therapy is viewed in our culture, and what sort of thing we consider it to be.)

Here are the most important things I learned in therapy, regarding my work at least:

--Fear was driving a lot of my daily habits and approach to work. This was, generally, unhelpful.
--I was kind of a mean asshole to myself most days. This was also, more unhelpful than not.
--It wasn’t primarily laziness or ineptitude that was making me horrible at working. Because once I started to address the first two factors, work got easier, and it got way more enjoyable.

3. Another friend invited me to work out with her semi-regularly, which included running. I agreed to try it out, if only to build up some semblance of a social life.

Running also taught me something important, namely, that there was at least one thing in the world  that I started out absolutely horrendous at, but the more I did it, the slowly less horrible I got at it.

I think being in academia for long had made me forget that there are some things in life that you can get immediate, obvious, and concrete feedback on. Oh right, some things you can practice and get better at. I had forgotten what that felt like.

4. I started to get interested in philosophical work on implicit bias and stereotypes. This led me to learning about stuff like “imposter syndrome,” “stereotype threat,” “belonging uncertainty,” and “effort optimism.” And over time, I slowly thought, huh, I think this stuff can explain some of what’s been happening to me. Specifically, I think I was experiencing a healthy dose of imposter syndrome, where we doubt whether we’re good enough to be where we are. And belonging uncertainty was encouraging me to read every ambiguous social cue as potential evidence that I didn’t belong in philosophy. Throw into that mix your standard microaggressions (less eye contact, slightly more condescending questions, etc.) And for the cherry on top: a culture where people rarely talk about how they work, or their past failures. So of course I was a wreck who thought I didn’t have what it takes.

These four things, as well as other smaller events, such as reaching out to friends, saved my career. They allowed me to understand what was happening to me, and they allowed me to adopt a framework other than, “Maybe you’re just not good enough for this,” which was getting in the way of being able to enjoy graduate school, as well as being in a secure enough place psychologically to assess my work habits.

(I also think there’s a whole bunch of structural and cultural things that were ‘getting in the way’ of me being happy and healthy, which I’ll talk about in later posts.)

Over about the course of a year, a huge shift in my worldview happened when I realized that my struggles and failures were not only not evidence of me not belonging in philosophy, but also, perhaps more the norm than the exception in graduate school.

Because as I started questioning other graduate students from a number of programs, I found out that a lot of other people had stories like mine: months or even years of struggling to work, dejection, uncertainty about whether they’re getting better, as well as bouts of depression and anxiety (or the worsening of chronic conditions) that made working torturous. This was both sobering, but also intriguing. I find myself in awe of the fact that we can have these weird, isolating experiences, and they may end up being neither that mysterious or rare. They are actually part and parcel of the human experience. To learn that regarding something you thought you were completely alone in experiencing, there are researchers out there who could go, “oh ya, that thing. It’s called X. I have a paper on it.” Or, when you finally admit your struggles to a professor, they go, “Oh ya, that’s normal. That happened to me, too.” That is, frankly, life-altering. It’s a powerful experience, to suddenly have a theory or a framework to understand what has happened to you, when before you just had confusion and shame (and hermeneutical lacunae).

What I learned was that, at the bottom of my struggles with fear, stress, and cruelty towards myself, was that when I sat down to “do philosophy,” my self-esteem and sense of self-worth felt like they were on the line. And every time I struggled or failed, it felt like my self-worth was being eroded. And I found that when I changed that, when work was no longer a threat to my identity and worth, it got a whole bunch easier. I mean, this took years of re-orienting my views about talent, effort, compassion, and virtue (you know, small stuff). But I’ve now gotten to a place where more often than not, I don’t feel like philosophy is eating away at my soul.

In future posts, I’ll talk about some of this stuff in more detail (like imposter syndrome), as well as some of the stuff I learned about how philosophers work (like how amazing goal-setting is. Really.)

But I wanted to first acknowledge that graduate school, and academia in general, is a psychological gauntlet for many (most?) of us. And I think a lot of us struggle to feel like we are any good at it, and to be happy and healthy while we do it. And I think, pretty much all of the time, that is not because some people can’t hack it, or aren’t cut out for it. Rather, many of us struggle because hard things are hard, and things that are tied up with your sense of self are doubly so.

I will leave you with something else I found helpful: Academic Coach Taylor.

Not only is this a funny rift on a football coach giving academic advice, but often, Coach Taylor eschews the “maybe you aren’t cut out for this” framework when you fail.  Instead, he asks you what you’re going to do about it. I found this helpful--perhaps because the framework of football and athletics served as a reminder that maybe philosophy could be like running. Even if I absolutely sucked at it by all objective measures, if I kept putting in the hours, I would eventually suck less at it. 

So I took some of Academic Coach Taylor's advice, attached his words to pictures of cute animals, and hung them up around my apartment. Every time I walked out the door I was told to "Get out there and destabalize that dichotomy," accompanied by a picture of Goldeen, the pokemon. Because humans are weird.

Some of my other favorites:

“You’re not stupid. This is supposed to be hard.”

"The only great dissertation is a finished dissertation."

"You going to cry over negative feedback, or are you going to make the necessary revisions?"

"Excellence is the message. Pain is the medium."

"We present conference papers to practice taming our FEAR"

"Is your dissertation about Netflix? Then get off of Netflix."

"Get your ass out of bed and write me a 350 word abstract."

Comments

[Jerry Green]

1) Sounds like wisdom runs in your family.
2) Glad to hear I'm not the only one with a motivational poster on the wall. Mine's right above my monitor on my desk. Its a bit less positive than yours, though: it says 'Good enough is not good enough'. For whatever reason, shame and fear tends to work better for me than positivity does (and also I don't like tautologies :)).

[pbj]

This post feels like my own autobiography. I even took up running during my PhD and have been addicted to it ever since. Going for that sub 3:00:00 marathon currently.
Me? Ten years in philosophy. Nothing but failure. But coming to terms with my own psychological insecurities didn't help me with the one thing I actually needed: getting a fucking job.
Do you think for most of us in this position, that it actually gets better? I've been on the non-academic job market for over a year. Let me re-phrase that: I've been unemployed for over a year. 150 job non-academic applications. 150 unique and finely-tuned cover letters and resumes. And nothing. Coming to terms with having imposter-syndrome (and blah blah blah) wasn't the issue. Being in an economy where I would be unemployed for over a year and actually being an imposer to having a livable wage, that was the real issue.

[Pendaran Roberts]

Graduate school and the academic job market, especially philosophy, are extremely hard and competitive. There is never such a thing as 'good enough'. It is inevitable that such a work environment breads anxiety and depression. Really, for a lot of people, academia is not psychologically healthy. Even after all these years, I still struggle to put negative thoughts in check. I even remember talking to tenured professors who confessed to struggling with anxiety and depression.

Your experiences are not unique Stacey, as you of course now know.

[Stacey Goguen]

@pbj, ya, that's the other side to all of this: the structural stuff that makes it more likely that graduate school is going to be a psychological gauntlet and economic hardship for a lot of us, personal gumption and resilience be damned.

"Do you think for most of us in this position, that it actually gets better?" I honestly don't know. (Can't tell if that was meant as a rhetorical question, anyway.)

Being unemployed is often its own special kind of hell. I hope something comes through for you.

And I wish there was a clear way to incentivize departments to offer more support to recent graduates on the non-academic job market. They often seem to just pat people on the back and say, "good luck, nice knowing you."

[Larry Cesare]

For what it's worth from one who earned a Masters and a Doctorate in clinical psychology many years ago, spent seven years as an invited core faculty member in the doctoral program from which I graduated and went on to parent three children who each eventually went to grad school in various fields, I offer the following observations:

Studenthood, especially at the graduate level, is inherently unsettling because it requires continual exposure to one's own areas of ignorance. While in that role, it can feel as though one's life and one's very self are being gradually torn down. Ironically, this is a cumulative byproduct of extended learning. Think of ignorance as large dark wall and knowledge as a light shining on it. As the area of the light grows larger, more it comes into contact with the vast darkness. In other words, the more you know, the more you know you don't know.

The problem with academe, especially grad programs, is that they represent a culture that has is very good at challenging students to face their areas of ignorance, but not at helping students to develop confidence in their unique knowledge, skills and professional self-esteem. Look at the way the departmental pecking orders play out with ego wars among faculty recruiting unwitting grad students as their pawns and the primary mode of attack being one of convincing others how much smarter they are than anyone else.

At some point, grad students needs to recognize that this game is rigged against them and that to remain in such a toxic, borderline abusive environment eventually reaches a point of diminishing returns. Sooner or later, despite faculty pressure to the contrary, one must leave the nest and face the real world with the confidence that comes from believing that, while one may not possess all information there is to possess, one now has the capacity for formulating the right questions and finding the right answers. And while boldly escaping from the Chinese finger trap that is academe, freed students must remain committed to lifelong learning and be comfortable with the phrase "I don't know.”

At that point, the student will have grown beyond where their professors remain stuck.

[Paula]

I think it's really sad that rampant physical or mental illness or the worsening of these illnesses is supposed to be "normal" just because one is in graduate school. While I'm sure it's fair to ask students to go to therapy or take medication, I also wonder whether we should restructure our programs such that these very serious things are prevented from ever entering students' experiences. It's difficult for me to believe that these illnesses are simply the byproducts of exposing oneself to one's own ignorance. That's not how it seemed to me, at least!

[Stacey Goguen]

I think you're right Paula that it doesn't have to be this way.

And speaking back to pbj's comment, a lot of these problems with grad students needing an extreme amount of psychological resilience to get through unscathed could be non-issues if structural aspects of our programs and academic life were different.

[Henry Lara]

Stacey, thanks for the awesome post. Please keep them coming.

[Brandon]

"What I learned was that, at the bottom of my struggles with fear, stress, and cruelty towards myself, was that when I sat down to “do philosophy,” my self-esteem and sense of self-worth felt like they were on the line. And every time I struggled or failed, it felt like my self-worth was being eroded."

This perfectly describes how the past year has been for me. I've been seriously considering quitting for a month now and reading this post was extremely encouraging. Looking forward to reading some more of your posts as I struggle through. Thank you so much for sharing your experience!