The PhD.

At times, it is hard to wake up every morning and believe in what you are doing. Today I’d much rather take the next bus and get out of here. Often I feel like my life has been suspended, and that my personal life has shrunk to a ridiculous dwarf size. The project takes over all aspects of my life, including dreams and walks. I stopped being wired, because, after six months of that, I was going crazy, and I just did not have the strength to go on being a rattling, jittery, nervy insomniac. I now realise how destabilising indifference can be. I have never been indifferent to what I do, but it seems to be a side effect of the exhaustion. It is also related to the intensity of emotions I need to face when working with people, both those that are breaking down crying during my interviews, and those that do not care about what arrangements we have made. I cannot help those who were not very lucky in their lives, and my questions precipitate tears. I feel inadequately trained to relate to them successfully, and some of the asymmetries will remain, and make me feel sick. The thought crosses my mind: all this adds up to is possibly just another degree for yours truly. I have never been bored with my studies, but it seems that I am saturated of them now. The thing is, I cannot find an excuse good enough to leave, even though my heart is not entirely (or should I say, at all) here at the moment. I chose this, I am the agent of this mess, so I better sit it out, and try to work against the exhaustion and the feeling that (it’s all a lot of oysters but no pearls) I am not in my pool here and slightly out of my depth. Hopefully it will change again, and I will find the pleasure back, and I will get rid of the anxieties that are deeply buried in my lungs and that burst into the open in the form of carbohydrate cravings. What if it will not? Eight months is a very long time to be spent with all the annoyances and frustrations of fieldwork. We get into things so easily and we change so much over the course of time, so that what once has occupied our whole mind changes so much that even the formerly most fundamental premises stop making sense. If I change so much in the course of six months, how likely is it that I will still be interested by anything academic in my thirties? I am frightened and bored by the idea of having an academic career, particularly by the stress, the mobility and the singularity (not to say loneliness?) it may entail.Here I am on the road a bit further away from a naďve starting point. Even one of my most powerful symbols of quest, that of the Warrior of the Light, has been appropriated by some artist in relation to Gigi B. I was deeply offended, but I suppose I needed to realise that my spiritual quest is superficial and driven by the consumption-desire of one particular best selling Brazilian’s oeuvre, among other highly eclectic modernist narratives of development, growth and improvement. Der Bildungsroman in all new shapes and sizes. It did hit a nerve at the time, but growing up disappoints, corrupts, deceives, and draws up new obsessions, replacing old obsessions, of equally dubious quality. Some desires remain the same, unfulfilled. Sincerely, still, and hopefully still learning, growing, yours, Candide-Nutshell, in a moment of Endeavour-Lost