Post-Dissertation Calm (I)
The other day my partner and I were sitting outside a local cafe enjoying the warm, January sun here in Andalucia when he remarked that I had seemed much calmer than usual this holiday season. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike the holidays (I’m no Scrooge and I enjoy giving gifts) but, as he put it, I could be a little on-edge between mid December and early January. Why was I so much easier-going this year?
Only a little later did it occur to me that this had been the first year in a very (very!) long time that the holidays weren’t dominated by a nagging sense of dread and regular waves of overwhelm. Despite seasonal stressors – the inconvenient crowds, endless obligations, and financial pressures – that are challenging for many people, I still felt somehow lighter than ever. I couldn’t seem to put my finger on why, though.
Then it hit me: I defended my dissertation last Spring. This was the first holiday season during which I didn’t have to field endless questions about my ongoing research and writing, when I was going to (finally!) graduate, or what I planned to do after grad school. Instead of dread, this new year has seen me exploring and reveling in the deep gratitude I feel toward myself for deciding to complete and defend my dissertation.
I almost didn’t graduate at all. I very nearly quit after several years of sincere attempts and with a few hundred pages drafted but no idea how I would ever finish. What was worse, for at least a year I was no longer sure I even wanted to.
Not long ago, I was a 7th-year graduate student, out of funding, isolated, unmotivated, and suffering from physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. There was, despite my best efforts, no clear way out of what felt like a profoundly deep and lonely hole, I was desperately trying to convince myself I didn’t really care whether I finished or not, and just about anything other than dissertating appealed to me as a welcome distraction.
I am, of course, grateful for no longer having to answer the well-meaning questions of friends and family with little more to offer than vagaries and obfuscation. What a relief!
More than that, though, I’ve realized how those questions came to trigger my own complicated, ambivalent feelings about the whole process of dissertating, and how different the experience was from what I’d (romantically!) envisioned, not to mention the incongruence between the deteriorating state of academe and the (romanticized!) version of it I’d half-knowingly (and half-heartedly) insisted on carrying with me all the way through grad school.
In the end, I did decide to finish. The calm my partner and I enjoyed over the holidays is only one way that this decision has positively affected my life so far.
The dissertation experience I had has encouraged me to work to help others who feel similarly stuck, ambivalent, unhappy, yet hopeful about finishing and defending their own dissertations. Deciding to finish your dissertation is a decision to make with careful consideration of your overall wellbeing and an honest look at how much time it will take you to complete it. In the year since defending, I’ve reflected on the two most important things that made me successful and contributed to my finishing: an honest self-assessment of my emotional, mental, and physical wellbeing, and a manageable schedule that allowed me to tackle each component of the dissertation one at a time without compromising that wellbeing in the process.
If any of this sounds familiar, or resonates with your particular experience of the dissertation process, my 6 Month Slow Burn dissertation coaching program might be for you. I’m currently taking on 2-3 graduate students who have already missed the deadline for Spring graduation but can’t stomach the idea of another school year. I offer three different packages, depending on what you’ll need to succeed, that will take us from February through July 2026 – and from wherever you are in the dissertating process through your defense.
