I will forever associate the April, May and June of 2018 with writing my extended research proposal. About one year in, at the research school where I am enrolled, the PhD student is supposed to write a detailed plan, including a theoretical background and literature review, of the PhD thesis that they intend to complete. At a first glance, this might look quite straight-forward, and for some students it probably also is. Read a bunch of papers, come up with your research questions and the methods that can help answer them, and argue for why these answers are needed in the larger scheme of things. For me, though, it became a strangely existential process.
It started out innocently enough. Going out to dad’s cottage with two colleagues for a writing retreat, starting to flesh out what the four papers should contain and how they are connected. But this soon led me into thoughts about what I wanted the papers to give me, in a larger sense, the methods and topics and collaborations that I wanted to cultivate. What do I want to become when I grow up? And how (terrifying, daunting question) can I contribute to science, this noble human pursuit of knowledge?
Being so completely focused on one single thing puts me in a special place. I had no other responsibilities at work, all my teaching was done for the spring, there were very few meetings and seminars happening, and I had even taken a break from the reading groups I am part of. The only things I did was eat, sleep and write-think-breathe my extended research proposal.
Already during the second week of working on it, I would get into these states. I do not really know how to explain it, except for it being like a door opening. Thoughts would just appear, ideas, connections, elegant turns to my arguments. And not only related to my research. Once in that state, the ideas that came flooding could just as well be about short stories, video clips, art projects, events, baking, knitting patterns. I was not particularly focused. Instead, it was as if I was working on all fronts at once, and it was overwhelming and exhilarating. It will take me years to finish all the ideas I got, if I were to decide to realise them. Which I most likely will not.
But this prolonged state of flow was not only thrilling. At times, it made me feel unhinged, and even though I, in the moment, thought all my ideas were brilliant, there were moments when I could not shake this nagging feeling of having lost touch with reality and that actually, these ideas were banal, too strange, or simply nonsense. The exhilaration also made my sleep unreliable, making every other night mostly sleepless, a haze of inspiration that I did not know what to do with. Eating often slipped my mind. And my behaviour towards people around me became erratic – although, being inside it, it is hard for me to really tell. Long, cryptic text messages sent, winding, explorative monologues, mood swings. Very little listening on my part. A shot of undirected energy, unmanageable. I cannot have been easy to be around.
I presented two days before the summer solstice. It went well. Both discussant and supervisors had mainly nice things to say about it. So the plausibility of my ideas was not only in my head. A day later, I drove up to Leksand and celebrated midsummer with about half of my former master programme classmates. Intense, exhausting, lovely.
And after the weekend, I drove straight to dad’s cottage. Twelve days on my own in a small house by a lake. Catching up on emails, reading papers and book chapters on philosophy and history, taking a step back from the directly thesis relevant. Running or swimming at least an hour a day. Saving butterflies and bees from dying inside the glass verandah. Entire days of not speaking with anyone. Time to breathe.
After that, I felt ready to enter into normal life again. I am still cleaning up some of the messes created during my writing process. The social side-effects. It was amazing, this feeling of being completely consumed with something, the days on end in a disorienting, pulsing flow. The openness. But I do not know how much of it I can survive and still be a functioning, healthy, tax-paying human being with stable and loving relationships. I am going to have to keep it in restricted doses, for things that really matter. I do not have the constitution to live in that kind of high for long, or often.
Katja Malmborg 