maybe you don't need a restart

new month new energy!

new semester reset!

restart everything - it’s a new season and it’s time for a clean start.

this kind of thinking is a siren call. it beckons us from the rocks - it seems like a way out of the fog! a way through what feels hard and ineffective and challenging into something clearer, more in control.

but think about the language. if you start over, if you restart, if you reset, you go back to the beginning. you start from square one. you reconsider everything. nothing is off the table. you’re trying something new, you’re a beginner, you’re rebuilding because what you were doing wasn’t working.

we often want a reset so we don’t have to do too much digging into what wasn’t working. if you just say “start over”, you don’t have to really sit with what happened before, you just have to focus on what is coming next. you get to put all your energy into the new system that you’re trying, you flipped the page, and now it’s fresh and new and hopeful.

of course we want that! of course that feels good! who wouldn’t sacrifice some feeling of mastery, who wouldn’t retell the story to have all that fresh, new year new person energy.

but if we constantly reset, if we restart frequently, we end up repeating a lot. if you throw out all your progress because you have a better plan, the last plan, now - then you never give yourself credit for what you’ve tried. you don’t recognize what has worked before, the skills you built along the way. even if you don’t literally throw work away, you do tell yourself that you have to start over in order to move forward. you have to do something drastic in order to unblock.

what if you thought about it as a recommitting instead?

you’re not restarting your writing practice, you’re recommitting to it. you’re not resetting your meditation habit, you’re recommitting to it. you’re not starting from ground zero with your scheduling, you’re recommitting to rules, like a hard off time, or weekends with family.

give yourself some credit - you’re making a change, you might be making some changes or trying something new, but it’s part of the life cycle. you don’t have to restart because you failed, but you’re recommitting because things have changed, you have changed, and you need to try something different, or new.

so if you’re feeling that itch to make some big moves, start some new routines, try something you haven’t tried, or haven’t tried in a while - try talking about it to yourself as a recommitment. you’re recommitting to your goal of finishing, to your routines that worked in times like this, you’re recommitting to the scholar and human that shows up, focused and ready, as well as rested and grounded.

it might look exactly the same, but if you call it a restart, you send yourself backwards in order to move forward.

it you call it a recommitment, you get to make a change, get that fresh energy, but you don’t have to go backward to do it. you can keep moving forward.

self care week: evolution

for a long time, the foundation of my self care practice was yoga. if i was going to yoga regularly, there was a strong chance that most other things were working well.

and then i moved, and struggled to find a studio that fit well with me (ie, wasn’t racist and appropriative!). i tried a few different video yoga things, and could never found one that totally resonated for a sustained practice. nothing seemed to work and all along the way, i was moving less and feeling worse and worse about it.

and then it dawned on me that i didn’t have to practice yoga in order to move my body. i could try something else.

so now, i go and do exercise classes in a space where i feel comfortable and welcome (well, right now i take those classes in my office as they’re live streamed from the studio because i’m still not ready to be in an enclosed room with people i don’t know without masks!) i stretch really consciously to make sure i don’t get too tight. i run sometimes, slowly. sometimes i go for a long walk, and i really like to hike. it looks different, but the foundation - the part where i move my body - is the same.

there might be things that need to evolve in your self care. you might have been able to get up every morning and write from 8 to 10, but that was before your house was full of your entire family, all the time, and that’s exactly when they need support to get settled into their days. you might have been really good at stopping at the gym on your way home from the lab, but now that you lab at home, or lab during a late shift, it’s harder to do that.

it can be really hard to build a new routine and set of skills up - there’s a reason that we don’t always jump for joy at the idea of having to make huge changes in any part of our lives. it can feel really, really frustrating to have something that really WORKS for you only to have your life change, and then that thing needs to change and you’re back at the drawing board.

but our lives change all the time. so it makes sense that what we need to support ourselves changes all the time. if we let go of the idea (in stages! it’s a tough one!) that we fix problems once, and then we carry out the solutions perfectly until the end of time, then it can feel a little easier to be in a state of flux. some things are stable. some things are morphing. we’re always moving. we’re always taking care.

What I lost and what I found when I finished my PhD

No matter how it looks, or where it takes you, the end of grad school necessitates a change. You are completing one cycle and starting another, no matter if that cycle is academic, professional, personal, intellectual. As with everything, your mileage may vary, but here is a list of things I lost and found after my defense (some immediate, so much later, and I'm sure there will be more things on both lists in another year, or another decade.)

Things I lost:

• A sense of myself as a student, always learning and growing

• An intellectual community with tons of shared interests, vocabulary, references, and ways of thinking

• A vision for the future that was standardized

• A good excuse for not going to things I didn't want to go to ("sorry, can't! will be writing - big deadline!)

• Good reasons to be self-deprecating ("Oh I'm just a grad student) in professional, and sometimes personal, situations

• A plan for the future that was assured for semesters or years at a time

Things I gained:

• A (tentative! still growing into it!) identity as an expert in my subject field, and also in my skill set

• A new understanding that plans are just plans, and that being open to change and new opportunities would serve me professionally and personally (even if it's really scary to enact those things, or even think about them sometimes)

• An expanded definition of the word colleague, and where I could find those people

• A desire to engage in my field beyond what I could cite or what I could write

• The realization that even if I were to stay an academic, that would always be a choice - and that I was free to continue to choose what I wanted to do "when I grew up" forever

• Much clearer work/off boundaries

• An appreciation for how hard I worked to actually write and defend a dissertation 

• New ways to think about, and talk about, the skills I gained researching and writing a dissertation

• New confidence in my ability to communicate complex ideas in a variety of ways 

• The knowledge that what made grad school hard often had very little to do with the quality of my work, and much more to do with the system in which that work was produced and evaluated

• More clarity around the behaviors and beliefs that I held and reinforced that made grad school hard 

• Learning for fun instead of to survive

• A degree that certifies me as a researcher and writer and instructor at the very top of her field

Consider the following: designing experiments on yourself

I grew up watching a lot of Bill Nye the Science Guy, and from that came a healthy appreciation for the scientific method. When it comes to evaluating myself, I often (still!) fall into cycles of self-criticism, guilt, and shame - everyone else is doing this with ease! Why doesn't their advice work for me? Why am I, a seemingly smart person with lots of motivation, unable to make x y or z thing happen for me? 

I've landed on the idea that my working life is a sequence of experiments that I run on myself, rather than a never ending cycle of evaluation and interventions to try and get to a "perfect state." I'm always refining what I know about myself because it is always. changing. So I always have something new to experiment with! 

Here is how I do it:

1. Hypothesis: Working out at 6 am will give me energy all day, and leave my evenings more free to spend time with my family.

2. Experimental design:

   1. I will attempt to work out at 6 am, 3 days a week, for 2 weeks. 

   2. I will make note of my energy at breakfast, lunch, and dinner on all days during the 2 week trial period.

   3. I will rate how relaxed I felt after dinner (relaxation/family time) on all days during the 2 week trial period.

   4. I will make note of how much sleep I get each night on all days. 

3. Collect data using bullet journal (aka, I just write it down) 

4. Preliminary findings: 

   1. I do feel more energetic on days when I wake up and work out at 6 am. 

   2. I see no discernible change in my relaxation levels at night, as I often find more and more to work on as the day goes on. 

   3. Getting enough sleep when I wake up at 5:20 am is virtually impossible.

So, the results are inconclusive! I feel better but I'm also not getting enough sleep. So I repeat the process:

NEW Hypothesis: I feel better with some exercise in the morning, so going for a walk around the neighborhood before breakfast might increase energy while not cutting into sleep as drastically. 

And then I experiment again! I imagine that this experiment will shift when it's not warm enough or light enough at 7 am to go for a walk, or if I had more regular appointments early in the morning, or if my husband started also working out in the evenings, making it a "together" activity. None of that means I'm "bad" or "wrong" or not trying hard enough, just that I need to be flexible and adjust to the changing conditions of my life. Viewing all these areas as places that I can collect data and make informed decisions, rather than "areas to improve" has helped me be more playful, and less shame filled, about the constant cycle of evaluation that we all tend to be in.