waiting

Today’s ode is to the waiting required of academia.

Waiting for a response on a conference abstract. Waiting for acceptance or rejection of a paper in a prestigious journal. Waiting on people to fill in a research survey. Waiting for responses from other people that have to help you get participants for research. Waiting on all the data to come in to begin analyzing. Waiting on the analyzing in order to write that chapter of your dissertation. Waiting on edits. Waiting on offers. Waiting on meeting confirmations.

There’s a balance to be had, I think, in life between presence and planning. The here-and-now as well as the future. And strangely academia takes me out of both. At least in this moment of time. It’s just waiting, waiting on things that shift both my immediate choices but also future choices. Sometimes when I feel ‘stuck’ in something, I think about what I would explore with a client if they brought me this moment as if it was there life.

(The true irony I think about people always being worried about therapists therapizing them, is that we often do it to ourselves more than anyone else).

And what always comes out is this self compassion that I am not very good at giving myself all the time. Stuckness makes sense. Emotions that flow in and out, make sense, and of course they are there in this situation. That waiting on so much out of our control as an adult can return us back to childhood and teenagehood, when so much was not in our control and we begin our first awareness of that.

So, this post, as are most, are for me as much as they are for anyone else who might relate. The waiting of academia is hard and of course you have emotional responses to it.