Having a moment of fustration

I'm having a frustrated moment; I’m in one of these creative spaces where you just sort of question everything: I’m doing the whole gamut of existential (what's the point of any of this research) to practically (I don't know if I'm doing this right) to critical (I could be doing this better), and a new one for me, competence (I don't think I'm very good at this). I think the last one is maybe the most difficult for me to wrap my head around, and I guess that's learning: I literally am not as good at this as I would like to be, and that's the point. Like when I was picking up the sitar, it's pretty humbling and it definitely helps me revisit the empathy I have for my students.

The way through a moment like this is work ethic and rigor, and I know how to do and embody that. I've put the daily reading on the back burner for a while as I reflect on and try to make sense of all of the content I'm working with, and that has jarred a routine that was pretty effective. But I need to fall into a new routine of synthesizing, writing, editing, and holding ideas loosely. That's pretty much the approach for the next few months, as I begin putting together a thesis proposal. I have the center but not the connective story, and the framing activity here is to let the center move and shift, and see if it comes back to where it was.

I'm continually struck by how unproductive (and therefore undignifying) this whole process must feel for younger students, who likely go through this creative spin over and over but without any established working process and maybe even without an ethic of grinding. I would have been run over by this when I was younger. In many ways, I'm glad I got rejected by CMU's Ph.D. program (yikes; 25 years ago?); I don't think I would have finished it, and not finishing something would have really been defeating for Younger Me.

And with that; back to work.