Strange to say that one of the most dreadful experiences of my life was worth doing, but it undoubtedly was. I left academia and haven’t looked back (at least not often), but I left on my terms, delivered the monster child, wore the funny cap at the ceremony, and immediately started four or five of the things on my “after the diss” list. Seven years is a long time to put off living.
Two small things helped me: 1) Time alone. Really alone. In order to finish each of the last two chapters, I spent a few days alone at a friend’s house in the country: no phone, no web, just me and the laptop. 2) Notes to self. Before going to bed each night during the crucial writing stretches, I would jot down a concrete goal for the next day (“By 5:00 tomorrow I will have a crappy first draft of this section. No matter how bad it is, I will finish it.”) I’m a great maker and breaker of elaborate schedules, so the narrow focus of a daily goal was much better for me.
One other surprising aid was Albert Ellis’ book Overcoming Procrastination. It’s not the kind of book I would normally read. Like most English Lit. grad students, I wouldn’t list “self-help” among my favorite genres. And this book isn’t winning any Pulitzers; the prose is clunky (for a reason, it turns out, but that’s no excuse), and it often seems hopelessly dated. And yet something about his cranky voice and complete no-nonsense approach was dead-on for me. It identified exactly the kinds of crazy thoughts that were keeping me from finishing.
More importantly, this book was the catalyst for a real revelation that led me to finish the dissertation: the idea that I could fail to finish it. Here’s the thought: so, you fail to finish. What is the absolute worst consequence? For me it was the shame of telling my friends and family. I pictured the humiliating scenes of confession, the condescension, the disappointment. But then I realized that most of them had assumed for years now that I wouldn’t finish anyway. And somehow I found great freedom in this thought—the idea that I could fail, in fact that in some ways I already had failed and had survived it. And it allowed me to let go of the book that I would have written and get on with the book that I wrote. For better and worse.
