*Submits 75,000-word PhD thesis.
Phew. That took a while. No, I don’t just mean the four months of thesis writing, or the four years for the PhD. This is, in fact, the home stretch in a personal marathon I’ve been running for over a decade. Perhaps I am jumping the gun slightly in getting too excited, since I still have to pass the viva, but it seems like one of those milestones worth sharing and elaborating upon. So, forgive me in my excitement for this moment! For those unaware of the PhD process: in 2-6 weeks, I will defend my thesis in a viva against two examiners, interrogating me to determine if I am in fact, worthy of a doctoral degree. Wish me luck?!
What’s next? Provided this goes my way, I will spend the next couple of years in Newcastle publishing this work and using the work in this thesis as a base for further investigation. After that? All I can say is stay tuned. I would of course like to recognise some significant contributions, including that of my parents and family in supporting me when driving towards this goal. I’m also grateful to have met so many amazing people along the way, especially those I can call friends.
Furthermore, I also want to dedicate the thesis submission to my grandfather, whose funeral was last week. Having to take the decision not to attend in person weighed on my mind, so I can at least remember him during this moment of success, and I hope it would have been of value to him too.
Reaching this stage has been long and it been interesting to imagine how insane it sounded when I first decided to do it. I have written about getting here in depth many times. But it still felt worth summarising to myself in writing, and I am presenting it below for anyone interested.
Eleven(ish) years ago, I found myself lost, aimless and confused. Epitomised in an instance of finding myself sat on my living room floor contemplating: who exactly was I? What was my purpose in the world? Would it make a difference if I wasn’t in the world? Can I – should I – do more? This reflection period was the natural culmination of a difficult learning experience starting after I had left school. Initiating after dropping out of a university course I hated, after drinking my way through it, it was amplified by being passed over and demoralised into depression by a supermarket that had clearly decided, I wasn’t worthy of development. In that contemplation, my mind would flirt with the lessons I had been captivated by in school, with topics I had kept up with, out of pure fascination. Science. Perhaps I could become a biologist and contribute something meaningful to the world. Perhaps I can take part in our collective modernity and help increase the breadth and accuracy of human understanding of the universe.
What was I thinking? I scanned groceries through a checkout (and briefly sold mobile phones). Why would I be able to do that?!
But those thoughts didn’t go away. They only grew. I can say I even felt something like a calling. I had to do it, no matter what happened to me. Even if I failed. All in. I mean it, all in. I am not sure anyone who didn’t know what I did would believe my full story, mainly because I have always thought of it as a battle. I think even looking back it’s reasonable to present it as such, if only because it felt that way.
My initial route post-secondary education meant I had some self-inflicted barriers to entry. Like an increasing number of students these days, it meant I had to simultaneously work and study, with a need to first re-attain my A-levels. I was also told I would have to personally pay for any future university course (now £9K a year), having been rejected for tuition fee loans. This resulted in anxiety and depression I thought was surely the worst place I would ever find myself (spoiler alert: it was not). I found myself stretched physically and mentally, isolated from the world and almost incapable of withstanding anything even remotely negative, and I was barely in control of my thoughts. But I had a target. Something to keep me going. I had this future purpose, just out of reach. I could even see it if I squinted the right way.
Fortunately, my parents realised this wasn’t me just messing about. I meant this. This was happening. After I had struggled for a couple of years, I admitted the struggle to myself and my parents, who let me move back home. I got my A-levels and got accepted by Reading University to study Biochemistry. Now I could commute to the university and turn my income almost fully towards tuition instead of rent and food. Even here, it was tight. Having my debit and credit card both rejected at a petrol station was an interesting low point along this path. So, if a calling wasn’t enough to motivate me, the constant threat of utter and spectacular failure was hanging over my head (financially, academically, and the invested self-worth). I felt this every single day, ‘knowing’ if I failed then I was indeed not of worth. It was no surprise, then, to find myself in a different headspace to the other students. Although, it was also important to see there were some students with their own, significant, barriers which did help to ground me from time to time. I tried my best to control the growing internal insanity, but it certainly ate away at my (for lack of better word) soul. Of course, it didn’t help that I am prone to a kind of all-consuming and debilitating anxiety, generating distorted models of the world in which to perceive reality. Add in some undiagnosed hyper-sensitivity in my gut with reciprocal feedback to this anxiety, and the stress became inescapably perpetuating. Only in the last few years I have begun to control both, and as an aside, it pains me to see society unintentionally teach young people how to think in ways that mimic my very worst moments, in a way that I can attest to causing so much suffering. Anyway, the common theme throughout the whole reimagining of myself is an apparently necessary (and crushing) level of isolation. With little choice in this matter, at least it seemed that way, I turned inwards and doubled down. I just kept reading science. If I was alone, I read more papers, or textbooks. I wrote out my thoughts. I compared and contrasted information across disciplines and I thought about how this knowledge was useful in the real world. I secretly listened to lectures at work whilst I stacked bread onto shelves at 5 am. I lived science. It was my escape, and it paid off. Top student awards in my second and third year, and a PhD place at Newcastle University.
The PhD itself has certainly been an interesting experience, and I have recently written about this in significant detail. But in short, it started with perhaps one of the best years of my life, followed by three years of me learning things about myself that I wish I knew twenty years ago. How might my life have been different if I really knew what was going on with my physical and mental health, and how to manage and control them. The catastrophising, the selective filtering, the positive feedback loops, and the hyper-sensitivity in detecting ‘danger’, causing false positives with real world physiological consequences. What if I knew my weaknesses, and my untapped strengths? Still, it may have been worth reaching this kind of hell, in my own mind, to develop methods to control these problems. I have also become somewhat adept at academic life, by finding an unusual niche of both, enjoying hours of pipetting in time with the beat of, often loud and energetic, trance music (audiobooks and podcasts also seem to work well), and then reading enough papers to temporarily convince myself I am suddenly omniscient, with the accompanying endorphin boost. Overall, I have discovered who I am and just exactly what I am made of. I have revealed a resilience that was not obvious to me and can look back to recognise I sacrificed more than anticipated. I have instinctively isolated myself from others, and experiences, to focus on one thing, getting to this point. But it worked. Here I am, ready to finish stronger than I have ever been. Just one more step left.