letters from the coven: academia will break your brain
academic burnout, falling back in love with natural curiosity, and letting your passions guide you
dear coven,
here we are in july. this newsletter is now just over three months old and i cannot believe there are over a thousand of you here. if we were to meet up in person we could easily fill the seating capacity of canterbury cathedral and that is truly surreal.
so, welcome to my sermon. i started this newsletter after i submitted my phd thesis. i was not ready to stop writing and this was my solution, but even more than that, i have always craved the idea of a coven. a community of people with a shared interest in folklore, magic, and surreality. this corner of the internet was my version of this and i cannot thank you enough for being part of it.
if you are new here, last month i started the letters from the coven series. it is a space for me to get a little personal, to touch base with you, and to take a moment to ramble about what has been on my mind. it’s a casual, low-caps type of setting. if that’s something you’re interested in, do stick around, but if you’d rather continue reading my art history posts instead, there’s plenty to explore in my recent substack articles and much to look forward to in the coming weeks.
that being said, let’s get personal.
in the last newsletter i talked to you about how i just about survived the phd viva exam, and in that newsletter i said that not all of these posts will be about academia, but i have to admit that when i sat down with myself and considered what has been on my mind lately, academia was all i could think about. so, let’s put our dark academia hats back on once more and talk.
to make a long story short, i passed my phd but i need to do corrections to be officially awarded the doctorate. i have just received those corrections and while they are not as brutal and lengthy as i imagined them, it did dawn on me that what i thought of as finished needs more work. work i both haven’t detached from, but also work that i was ready to leave behind, at least for the time being.
when you do a phd your life becomes completely encompassed by this enormous task. it’s a thrilling privilege to have access to higher education in this way, but it comes with a lot of guilt and mixed feelings. impostor syndrome aside, often you find that the way you move through your days is entirely consumed by the phd.
picture this, you’re on a vacation after you have been working on your thesis and your day job for months. you are going to bed after a long day of sight-seeing and just as you are about to drift off, panic strikes. you think - what about the phd? you know you’ve earned your time off, but suddenly you think - have i actually earned that time off? you think that you should be writing, reading, you panic about deadlines, sources you might have misquoted, your chapter structure. you start planning and re-planning in your head. maybe you get up and you write, or you doom-scroll through the number of phd subreddits you follow. maybe you’re not even on vacation, it’s just a sunday and you’re off work, or, even better, you are at work, going about your day, or you’re in the shower, and then the exact same scenario plays out. that has been my life for the last few years.
fast forward to now, i have received my thesis corrections and part of my brain is blaming their very existence on all of those times where i took a day off, or went on a walk in the woods instead of scrolling through jstor.
i don’t want to come off as ungrateful. i know how very lucky i am for the fact that i could even do a phd in the first place. all i’m saying is that it has completely changed my way of thinking and going about my days for the past four years in both a bad and a good sense. while the panic was always present, there were many weeks during which you could not tear me away from my keyboard, all i wanted to do was write, write, write, as if some sacred muse was whispering in my ear. there were, however, many days in which that was not the case, and those tend to leave a more lasting impression that the former.
i’m in a strange position now where i have finished, but i haven’t. i also have got it in my head that i want to pursue a postdoc or a research fellowship of some sort, which further complicates things in terms of detachment.
when i say detachment, i do not mean to imply i’m breaking ties with academia. but part of me was craving a break, a ‘it’s me, not you, i just need to figure myself out’ situation. in the simplest terms, i needed to live without the pang of guilt.
during my phd whenever i started reading a book for pleasure, or even a book that wasn’t that pleasurable, but was certainly not centred around art history, surrealism, or magic, i would feel like i’m wasting time. time that i could be spending writing and researching. phds promise freedom, but for the most part, when you do a phd you have to be your own boss, and a boss doesn’t let you play fast and loose with freedom. even though the phd has more or less wrapped up, i still feel this, now directed towards the postdoc, a project for which i need to come up with a, well, project.
i have been reading a lot of gothic literature lately, so my brain immediately jumps to - maybe this could be a lead for the research project! i recently started reading a book about trees and how they communicate, it took exactly two hours for me to start thinking - maybe this could be another lead for the research project! a research project should be fuelled by your interest and passions, but if you do not let yourself pursue an interest, because it might not be of service for that research project, because it might be, god forbid, for pleasure, then you end up in a tricky situation.
i find it very difficult to find the balance between falling down rabbit holes for pleasure. something that used to be my favourite activity as a teenager and perhaps the main reason behind why i’m well-suited for a pursuit like a phd. i recently watched a video by anna howard of wild geese entitled how to fall down a curiosity rabbit hole and reconnect to your creativity. it frightened me to realise that while she was talking and i was agreeing with her, a very real part of me was thinking - okay, but your next rabbit hole could be the lead for your research project!
this is the danger of academia. due to its all-consuming nature, at times you end up restricting your own curiosity, muzzling it and training it to exist in service of great research, great writing, great ideas. but what about just living, just being? i promise, this is not a hate-letter to academia, this is an expose of how deep my love affair and obsession with academia runs. to me, academia means learning, and i have a deep love for learning, but in recent years i have constricted learning to a singular path, one that i feel i must break out of now.
i’m not sure i have a solution for this conundrum. i want to allow myself to explore subjects that i might never end up writing about. i want to pursue an interest that might provide no more than an exciting afternoon of reading. i want to re-read books i love without feeling like i’m wasting time that i could be spending reading something new, especially when i have a full time job and limited reading time. all of this is hard to do when what i’ve known for the last few years has been research-focused, when i work within the humanities, which always feels like a race to keep them alive that doesn’t allow for much meandering. i mean, how can you let yourself slip into rabbit holes when your field of research might get defunded any minute? your amassing student loans and the academic job market aren’t going to sort themselves out while you read about trees, right?
this is all to say, i’m probably experiencing burnout. maybe it’s not all academia, maybe, in large part, it’s also our way of living, creating and consuming. after all, we live in a world where high-productivity is rewarded and regarded as the contribution of value. everything must have a point, everything must lead to a conclusive result.
i think of all those people sharing how they feel that everything they do or think must be monetized or turned into content, how their way of thinking has become plagued by algorithms and numbers. and i can’t help but wonder if in a strange way i have placed myself in the same position, but with academia. how my passion and love for academia is still there, but it has somewhat been overrun by a need to churn things out as fast as i can with no room for mistakes.
perhaps my biggest problem is that i think of the words i have written as more valuable than those that take longer to shape into a coherent thought.
you might be thinking - hey, didn’t you say at the beginning that you didn’t want to stop writing and that’s why you started this newsletter? where does that fit into all of this? well, i’m glad you asked. substack has helped me massively in this regard. sharing what i have researched with people and receiving attention for it worried me in the beginning, because i didn’t want my research to turn into a content machine, but, luckily, it hasn’t. it’s made me appreciate my initial curiosity.
my curiosity led to my research. in undergrad i didn’t worry about productivity. my dear coven, in undergrad i was the queen of meandering. of falling down rabbit holes. of nearly missing deadlines and checking out books in the library that had nothing to do with my lectures. that type of nonchalance and natural curiosity is what led me here. that is what produced my thesis and the posts you read today. what you are reading is the result of nonchalance and natural curiosity left to run wild. you reading my posts and choosing to subscribe to read more reminded me of how important it is to let yourself go, to explore what interests you, whether it ends up being the greatest thesis ever written or not. and i thank you, from the bottom of my heart for that.
so now i’m reading my book about trees and walking to work at 8am and noticing the oaks, and the birches, and their branches creaking in the wind. i might not use this for a research project, but i’m looking at trees in a way i have never observed them before, i feel as if part of me understands their language better. i feel that the earth beneath me is alive and i fantasize about the trees and their root systems and what that means not just for them, but for us. no matter what my brain tells me, that is not useless, it can never be useless.
this is how i’m slowly trying to re-shift my focus from intense high-productivity to a gentler approach and forgiving steps towards natural curiosity with no promise of reward. yes, i do need to complete my corrections. yes, i do need to come up with a research project. but i also need to breathe, and read, and follow my intuition and curiosity. that is what led me here. i don’t know where it will lead me next, but isn’t that just terribly exciting?
but before the excitement begins, i will allow myself this moment of quiet exploration.
that’s all i have for you today, if you have made it this far, thank you for listening. please do share if you have felt the same, not just in regards to academia, but to maintaining creativity and curiosity in today’s world.
if you are someone who enjoys learning about works of art and literature motivated by magic, please consider subscribing to this newsletter and follows its visual companion.
as always, thank you for reading.
with all my love,
dani
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This this this, all of it so familiar to me, even though I left that part of my life 10 years ago. Beautifully worded.
Wow, that is overwhelmingly beautiful, sincere and deeply moving,thank you