"When you can't write your dissertation, just write."

You find yourself wandering the halls in your house, afraid the draw the blinds. The sun is shining, and, after three solid weeks of snow, it is hard to believe that you’ll be able to turn away from the day. So you don’t risk it. Instead, at eye-level, there is a small crack in the continuity of the slats, marking the place where you slide in your finger to peer out and check on the world of the living. This crack runs across the living room, into the bedroom, the kitchen. Even the bathroom window suffers this disfigurement. So goes the life of a PhD candidate, unable to write the first sentence of her book-length work.

“I’m too stupid to write a dissertation. I’m too stupid to write a ten-page conference paper. I’m even too stupid to write a coherent sentence.” These are the thoughts that will come to the front of your mind, every day, as you sit in front of the flickering white screen and try to find your brilliance. It will take a while. You won’t find your genius, not just yet. Instead, you’ll find an extra glass of wine, all the buttons that need darning in your closet, and the secret corner of your home in which a village of dust bunnies long-ago moved in, back in the year when you were living a real(ish) life, going to class and work and social events like a real(ish) person. But now you wander the halls, avoiding your computer and your dissertation advisor (Hi LH!) and your boyfriend’s well-meant but ill-received questions about how much progress you made in the day. You’ll languish in this in-between period, wondering what happened to the grand ideas you had about your prospectus-completing party and your academic motivation. Both will be specters, now.

Eventually, though, you’ll re-emerge. You’ll talk to faculty, those who have come before you, and realize that they’ve said these same things to themselves, they too were once too stupid to write (at least in their own minds), and then they recovered! They wrote! They graduated!

So you’ll return to the flickering screen, again, not quite as desolate but pretty much in the same position. You’ll realize that it might not be overnight that you find your genius, or your ability to write. But it will be okay, you think. Others tell you it will, and that is all that you have. So you have to believe them.