Officially a Doctor

I graduated on 22 January 2016, and am officially Dr Ro Smith, a doctor of philosophy in philosophy, passed with no corrections.

Apologies for not posting about it at the time, I didn’t have any photos myself and only just got some through!

I hope everyone is appreciating my sparkley graduation shoes. And the silliest bonnet. I wanted to keep the silliest bonnet.

If you donated to this blog or to my Go Fund Me last year when I was in need, you helped this happen, and I am incredibly grateful to you. I would not have made it without you.

There was a long time – a very long time – when I really stopped believing that I would get here. I had been so ill and poor and depressed for so long. I’m still not physically 100%, and mentally… well, that’s a process, and a long one, which isn’t entirely about the PhD.

Neverthless, I’m really proud, and grateful. I did it. I was capable of doing it, after all. And I did it well. There were a tiny number of typos. That was it.  The examiners said in the end that they would accept it anyway. Typos and all. (I did correct the most glaring typos, though – the photos at the top of my blog are not a lie, I really have had green hair, and red hair, and many other colour hair.)

And so many members of my family came up for me. My dad came from Australia, my mum, two sets of aunts and uncles, my step-dad.

I wish I had been thinner. I wish I had had suitable smart clothes to wear that I could still fit into (the dress I am wearing was more low-cut than I would have liked and didn’t exactly have a graceful fit). I wish my hair looked better – I had fried it in my attempts to go back to blonde for graduation. Maybe one day when I’m better off and thinner I will rent the gowns again and get it professionally done. Still, it’s great to have done it at all.

It is very strange to have it done. I’m still temping at the moment. I need to publish before applying for academic jobs and I’m… honestly not read to leave my city, yet. And most well-paying jobs I am qualified for would involve that, even if they weren’t in academia.

I’m tired, and I’m still ill a lot. And I want to get serious about my writing. I want a first draft of a novel this year.

I also want to relax. I’m getting back down the allotment (you might have noticed). Which is something I was really sad to not be able to give enough time to the last few years. I always promised myself ‘When the PhD is done…’. And it’s important in terms of exercise. I was down there for four hours today. It’s hard to get such good, prolonged exercise doing anything else.

I want to paint and not feel guilty about it. I want to choose craft projects for reasons other than ‘It will be quick’ and ‘I can give it to someone else as a present because that is the only way I can afford presents’.

I’ve bought material and a pattern for an ambitious Daenerys cosplay this year. Still a lot of work in getting that done, though.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the things I want to do, but I’m trying not to do that. Trying to unlearn my habits of continuous anxiety and guilt.

But hey, I’m a ‘Dr’ now, and that’s something. Some kind of validation of my existence and ability and intelligence. Not the only way such things can be validated, of course, but… something I needed to do, for me. Yes, I had something to prove to myself, and to the world. And maybe that’s not terribly healthy, but I needed to do it.

It’s strange and surprising to find that I have done it after all.

 

2015 – that was a year that happened, didn’t it?

I wasn’t going to write one of these. 2015 is… exhausting to think about.

I was so poor, and depressed, and ill at the start of the year. A week into January I had to ask for your help to pay my rent and my bills. I was flat broke and had exhausted all other avenues. It’s a humiliating and panic-stricken situation to be in. I am so very grateful to the strangers and friends who kept me afloat in that period. I quite literally would not have made it without you. In the end I raised £1,460 via Go Fund Me, and about £60 via my tip jar (that last may have been smaller, but was immediately accessible funds badly needed at the time!).

Thanks to you I kept a roof over my head and I was able to finish my PhD.

The PhD

Which I did. I submitted at the end of May and was examined at my viva on 26 August, where I passed with no corrections. I was completely floored. Having spent the previous year largely bedridden due to illness (and the two years before that ill enough that I often went immediately to bed after work), I spent the final months of my PhD frantically writing up in my supervisor’s office. He didn’t get to see a full draft before I submitted. I was convinced I’d have major corrections – another chapter to write at least! – but I didn’t.

I had typos.

And they decided to accept the thesis with them anyway.

It’s… a bit hard to deal with. I had no reason to think it would go so well. A lot of people had told me I couldn’t do it over the years, and that my depression and illness were symptoms of me trying to do something I wasn’t cut out for. I knew I was ill because of the poor diet I had adopted because I had no money and was depressed, and that I was depressed because of long-standing issues combined with the fact that so many people had no faith in me to do my PhD, which was the most important thing in my life. And now a few people have made comments along the lines of ‘You see, you had nothing to worry about!’ … I can’t sweep it under the carpet that easily. I can’t just set aside how difficult it has been.

Being happy about finishing my PhD is… complex.

I am looking forward to graduating, though.

Today I told a salesperson that my title was ‘Dr’. That was nice.

A New Mattress

I was ordering a new mattress when I did that. I can afford a new mattress now. That’s nice, too.

My current mattress is the one I bought at the start of my PhD when I moved in to share a house with my friend Fred. It was the first unfurnished place I had ever lived in. It seems a lifetime agio.

It was never a particularly good mattress, and it ceased to be anything but deathly uncomfortable years ago. I got a couple more years of life out of it with a mattress topper, but even that has been struggling for a while.

Imagine being bedridden on a broken mattress and too poor to replace it because you are too ill to work. It’s not fun.

I’ve been temping full time since June, and now I can afford a new mattress. It’s good.

Temping

Full-time income is really good.

Not working in the evenings and weekends is really good.

I have played a lot of Dragon Age. Which is really good.

Temping isn’t really good for me, though. I work with nice people and they don’t mind if I have blue hair, but I only get half an hour for lunch and is in an Enquiry Centre. I answer phones all day every day. I find phones very stressful. I have a very good phone manner, but phones are not good for me.

I need a job in something I’m actually trained for, but I can’t get an academic job without publishing, and I needed a break from all that, and I’m so tired when I get home from work that all I do is play Dragon Age.

And instead of losing weight after the PhD was over, I’ve continued to gain weight. Because work is stressful and there’s a food table at work and when I’m stressed I eat from the food table. Also, I have continued to be ill, so even though I have been exercising, I have not been exercising enough. Yeah.

Nine Worlds

I had my least ill Nine Worlds ever, which was nice. And I also gave my first paper on their academic track, which seemed to go down well. And I was on a panel about geekdom in academia. I enjoyed both a lot!

I also had an updated Daenerys costume, and I got to take part in Knightmare Live – childhooddream fulfilled!

For various other reasons I have a lot of anxiety right now about the thought of going back. I hope I will overcome them. Nine Worlds has been a real bright spot in some very dark times, and I would like to feel that way about it again.

Editing

Although I have done less editing overall this year than previously, it’s still formed a fair chunk of my income and was vital in seeing me through those last few months of my PhD. I’ve also expanded my client base of authors and come to enjoy working directly with people who know what they want.

My sincere thanks to all my clients for being wonderful and a joy to work with this year.

Writing

It’s not been a great year with regards to writing for me.

I had one story published – ‘The Runaway King’ in Fox Spirit Book‘s Missing Monarchs anthology. I got to second round with pro magazines more times than I ever have before, but nothing was actually accepted.

I’ve barely progressed at all with my novels.

Some of that is deliberate. I put a hold on more or less everything in order to finish the PhD, but I had intended to return to writing when I was finally free. I haven’t.

I have mostly just played Dragon Age.

Some of that is much needed rest. Some of that is still me not being particularly healthy. Some of it is the FEAR.

I need to get over it.

I’m 32 and my life has been on hold for the last nine years whilst I finished the PhD. I can’t bimble along waiting until I’m Ready to become a Writer anymore.

Resolutions

I want to have a full first draft of one of my novels before I’m 33. That’s six and a half months. It’s not impossible, but I need to get serious about it if I’m to manage to do that alongside a full time job.

I want to lose at least a stone in weight. I need to lose three or four stone, but I’ll settle for one. My clothes don’t fit and my health is suffering. This can’t go on.

I want to be earning more money this time next year than I am now. I’ve never earnt as much as I do now, but it’s temp work. There is no job security and I don’t get paid if I’m ill. I also have a lot of debts to pay off. Things are better now, but they’re still tight. I want to get out of this situation of limping by and owing lots of people money. I need a proper job.

That might be an admin job or a job in publishing or an academic job – those each come with varying levels of difficulty, but at some point I need to stop just coasting and take control of my life.

So. There’s three resolutions. I know a lot of people don’t believe in resolutions, but they have sometimes worked for me in the past. I want 2016 to be the year that everything changes for the better. A lot happened in 2015, much of it for the good, but there was too much hardship for me to really look back on it with any fondness.

Thanks to my wonderful friends who have been with me through it all. You’re very special people, and I’m inadequate in expressing quite how much your support has meant to me.

Thanks also to the friends, family, and strangers who kept me afloat this year.

And now I think I need to move on from thinking about 2015. I want to look forward, instead.

Update on the Rhube

I submitted my thesis on 29 May 2015. It’s done. It’s in. It’s not everything I might have wished that it could have been in better circumstances, but it got finished and handed in, and that’s something I was not convinced I could achieve for a very long time. Not that I didn’t think I could write a thesis, but just that I had been so poor and ill that I thought 8 years’ work might ultimately go down the drain.

And for a long time I seemed to be surrounded by people who didn’t think I could do it or get why I was trying. People who took my agony at the fact that I might not complete as a reason to suppose that I should not be doing a PhD at all. That was incredibly draining. Having people you care about tell you they don’t think you can do the most important thing in your life is gut-wrenching and heartbreaking.

But then there were other people. You guys. Those of you who used the tip jar to keep this blog afloat even when I wasn’t producing anything. Friends and strangers who contributed to my Go Fund Me, literally paying my rent and food and bills so I could finish and telling me they thought it was worth it. That was very special to me. It meant something. People actually believed in me and wanted me to finish.

And my supervisor let me work out of his office, that really helped, too. Because my house was a sickroom that had got into a really horrible and depressing state. And there, with just enough money to live off, and a quiet space to work in, I did it. I got that fucker done.

I come back to this again and again, but Virginia Woolf was So. Damn. Right. You need enough money to live off and a room of your own to work in in order to write. And I think that goes for academic writing as much as for fiction.

My viva is still to come, but that happens at the end of August. Now… I’m resuming some kind of life.

I start work at a temp job tomorrow morning. I’m gonna have actual money coming in. And I’m gonna have to go to bed before midnight. Which is something that’s been really hard for me to do since I had neighbours who routinely kept me awake past 1am. I don’t have those neighbours anymore, but I’m still afraid of going to bed and not being able to sleep. It doesn’t make sense, but I’ve been conditioned that way.

And today I’m playing the role of Washing Police on a kitten who has recently been spaid and Must Not Lick Her Stitches (her owners would rather not stress her out with a cone more than necessary). It’s not my cat, but I don’t mind chilling with a kitten for a day, watching Netflix and catching up on my writing.

I don’t have to feel guilty about how I use my time when I’m not working anymore. That hasn’t been true for over 9 years, if you include my MA. It’s… very, very odd. But good.

By the end of this year I want to have finished writing one of my novels. Not sure which one yet. I have the Superhero with Depression, the One with Clones and Nanites, and the Fantasy One with Dragons and Spies. At the moment I’m leaning towards the One with Clones and Nanites…

And the kitten is washing again, so I’d better keep a closer eye on her.

Toodle-pip!

Getting my shit together

No Music for the Apocalypse again this lunchtime, or probably until my PhD is finished.

I am in Getting My Shit Together mode.

My supervisor is very kindly letting me use his spare office (yeah, he has two at the moment) so I have somewhere I can be that’s not my house (sickroom pigsty) and not the library (full of noisy students and expensive coffee). So I have a place to be where I am expected at specific times and where I am expected to work. It’s good for me. Although my body has not yet caught up to the ‘going to sleep before midnight’ expectation of this deal.

I have continued to be ill, although not as ill as I was. And I basically have no time left. Like, no time at all. I have just over two months to do six months’ worth of work. And, quite frankly, I am not up to pulling all nighters. But I’m finding my motivation again.

Which means I need to set aside this blog even when I have something to write about that I know will get hits. Even when I want to continue a series. Even when I feel crappy about how many unfinished post series I have – Read Along with Rhube, I have not forgotten you!

But I’m being an adult about this. There’s something I have to spend the next two months doing, and it’s not writing about apocalyptic music or George R R Martin. In June I can start thinking about a post-PhD life again, but that’s June. That’s not where I am right now.

In the meantime… money is still very tight.

I’m getting work, but I’m still wondering every month if I’m going to make my rent. I have clients who have been very considerate in paying promptly, but I… just have no leeway at all. I’ve done enough work to pay my rent this month, but whether I can pay all my bills when I need to is another matter.  And I can’t afford not to meet the agreement with my bank that reduces my overdraft by £100 every month. It’s like my rent went up by £100.

Any donation you could make to my GoFundMe would still very much be welcomed. The less work I have to take on the more chance I have of being able to do the ridiculous amount of work needed over the next two months. Or you can pay me directly via the Tip Jar in my sidebar.

Thanks again to those who have already donated. You guys have literally kept me going when I was out of options.

This’ll be an interesting year to look back on, I’ll tell you that.