[Wrote this during the blackout, was utterly unable to post it, made the connection to being unable to retrieve my e-mail, checked others’ blogs for news, hunh! half the east coast is blacked out, and I’m blissfully unaware. Of course, had ifMUD been up, I’d have found out in no time; but it, as my ‘net space provider’s servers, lives in New York City.]
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Just yesterday I wrote the following in an e-mail:
“I’m doubting myself heavily, finding myself restating others’ truths over and over again, not saying anything new. I draw parallels that others have not drawn, but don’t feel that this is enough. It’s difficult to have faith in this monster project while in the midst of it, while unable to see the whole, the whole does not exist yet. I return again and again to the thought that I’m much better suited for the role of facilitator, or feeder of the masses, creator of an environment in which cool things happen; not one who makes cool things happen. This makes me sad.
“I cannot wait [to be back home], but will come back to an unreal backlog of work, and fear that I will drown in it. I will cancel my digicablemodem ‘net service from home, as an attempt to create some quiet inside my head…”
Today, while driving back from an errand that took an hour and a half instead of the fifty minutes it should have, I saw a police car with a rainbow sticker on it. It was like someone had suddenly shone the sun on my abysmal mood: there’s hope for tolerant humans yet, hmm? I thought nothing more of it, until Joseph Campbell shone his eyes at me from the TV screen and spoke about following your bliss in a rebroadcast of The Power of Myth on a public television station. The universe is telling me something again.
It is unbelievably hard to keep your spirits up during a long, generally lonely PhD project… I sure didn’t keep em up all the time. I wish I had something really wise to say, but all I’ve got is, well, follow your bliss :)