Yesterday, I submitted my thesis manuscript.
This sounds dramatic. Olà! Bravo! Applause! It doesn’t feel dramatic at all. It was disappointingly undramatic. Anti-climactic, even. No working through the night until the last moment. No crying and pulling out my hair. No losing weight, as some told me they did. I was sitting on the train and polishing off my introduction in places where my dear supervisors kindly and generously commented on my still clumsy text. ‘Tatiana. I know it’s difficult, but when we have a situation in which we end up having a very long sentence, overloaded with multiple clauses etc., it is advisable to break it up for the reader’s convenience, keeping it as short and simple as possible – while attending to linkages and connections between the short sentences that may emerge from the long and overloaded ones’. This wasn’t an actual comment, I’m being cheeky – but it reflects the undramatic nature of what was going on. The point is: I wasn’t changing my research questions and theoretical framework on the submission day, like I thought I would. I was just taming my long sentences.
I waited till 1 pm, to make it feel as if I did more work than I actually did, and sent my materials in. At the same time, I sent a screenshot of the submission email draft to my ‘sister-in-arms’, another PhD student. Shall I press ‘send’? – I asked, with a perplexed emoticon. Do it and come over to celebrate, she answered. And so I did.
But something happened later last night that made my PhD journey come full circle. Again, nothing dramatic, and not something I realised until I woke up today. Undramatic as it was, I harbour its gentle energy today, on midsummer eve, and will probably carry forever from this moment. Like a rivulet that splits off a big river, to perpetually run towards the sea.
I spent last night having dinner with my abovementioned ‘sister-in-arms’, her husband, and our PhD supervisor. We are social smokers, and we smoked a few cigarettes. Everyone was sharing their stories of when and how they started smoking. I didn’t share mine, because I didn’t think I had one. And it was only when I woke up today that I remembered the role that cigarettes played in the last few years.
I started smoking in my twenties, when smoking was still socially acceptable. One could smoke in coffee-shops and pubs! And we did. I had my share of Jim Jarmusch’s coffee-and-cigarettes situations in my home city of Novosibirsk. Another ‘thing’ was smoking in a pub in Britain, with a book and a huge mug of tea. But soon smoking in public spaces was prohibited everywhere, and many social smokers like me quit easily, as it wasn’t a habit but a ritual which was now stripped of its joy and abandoned.
And then I started my PhD.
At the beginning of my second year, still in August, I went to a friend’s wedding to Romania. On the morning of her wedding day, before leaving for the village where the wedding took place, I sent some texts to my supervisors. I had been working all summer. I hadn’t taken a break, because I didn’t feel I could afford one. Getting into the literature, understanding the field was overwhelming. I was in a state of stupor, just trying to get through the reading, make sense of it, and write reflections in a form that could later be used for the thesis manuscript or academic papers.
As I was enjoying my hotel breakfast, looking at a beautiful old church and patting myself on the back for the great work I thought I’d done, an email came back from one of my supervisors with comments. Nothing dramatic – just critiquing and giving suggestions. But reading those comments in the car on a bumpy Romanian road on the way to the wedding venue set off a nagging alarm in me. There was no break from this. I was in for a long and bumpy journey.
The wedding was incredible: my Romanian friend was marrying a Frenchman, and it was a marvellous and fun mix of people in a fairy-like place in the mountains. In the evening, we were dancing, and a friend of ours from Sweden showed up with a cigarette. Jokingly, I said, oh, Mike, I didn’t know you smoked! Without a word, he handed me his half-smoked cigarette, and then got two more from someone, one for each of us. I don’t smoke, he said, do you? No, I said, and we laughed. It felt silly, to be smoking again after more than a decade. It was fun. This was the first time since I had my child that I was away from my family, alone, in a foreign country, right after Covid. I had a sense of freedom, of breaking away.
I tremendously enjoyed the beautiful Bucharest, walking the streets alone and eating gelato. I was becoming someone new. I wore new clothes, I didn’t recognise myself in the mirror. I listened to new music, I was making new playlists. I wrote many poems on that journey.
When I came back, I sat down to work on my supervisors’ comments. It was terrible. I read them carefully, I colour-coded them, I reflected on what I needed to do, I made a list of revisions to be made. When I sat down in front of the text, I couldn’t change a single word. I needed to rewrite my research purpose and questions. I had no idea what they should be. I had no purpose, no questions. I had just words, words, words on the screen, words in the colour-coded bubbles. I love words, I love writing – but at that moment I was in hell. I couldn’t change a single word in the text. I made mind-maps, drew on a white board, sketched on white sheets. I was ready to throw everything away and start anew. But no new ideas were coming. I tried tweaking the old ones, but I couldn’t alter a single word on the page. They all seemed equally dead, meaningless. As if someone else had written them, not me, someone dead.
I sat in front of the screen for three hours. That’s when I cried and pulled my hair. After three hours of not producing a single sentence or making a single edit, I stood up and went out. I didn’t know where I was going, I just walked. At some point, I was struck by a desire for a cigarette. I went into a tobacco shop and stood there, staring. I had no idea what to buy – I had completely forgotten what I had smoked more than a decade ago. The tobacconist started back at me. Eventually, I bought a random pack of cigarettes and a lighter. I needed to escape, to break free.
Thus, a ritual started. That year, I was alone. I was alone all the time at work, completely isolated. Once a day, I would go out for a cigarette. I stood in the meadows, between huge glass wings of the university buildings, on a little wooden bridge over a pond, and smoked. September turned to October turned to November and early December. I wrote a lot of poems that marked the seasons as they were passing by. That daily cigarette became my moment to look forward to, something that helped me to get some work done and get through the day.
I don’t know how I managed to rework the text. When the time came to submit my yearly study plan, I just stood at my desk and typed nonsense. What I had didn’t work, and I just typed new words into the template. My research purpose and questions, my theoretical ideas, and all the great things I was planning to do. I was just a machine, churning out words (this was before AI). It didn’t matter what I wrote.
Around December, things shifted ever-so-slightly for me. I took a little more agency, I made some decisions. There was no silver bullet, but I was making some progress. I was not trying to figure out my bigger research frame, I was working on a specific paper, and having that limited scope helped me. I was just playing with ideas and material and seeing where it could lead me. It led me to the first paper I submitted and relatively soon published.
The following year, new PhD students came, including my ‘sister-in-arms’. We started spending time together and occasionally had a cigarette on campus. I was no longer alone. Gradually, my need for the individual smoking ritual fell off. I enjoyed the social part of it, at conferences and afterwork gatherings. The journey was overall bumpy, just like the Romanian road I’d been travelling on in that distant August. But I was writing, teaching, creating many intellectual friendships, coming into my own. I knew that things would fall into place if I tended to them long and diligently enough.
Last night, the cigarettes conversation reminded me of where my journey started. The energy of that conversation was so drastically opposite to that hard start. It was gentle and smooth. It’s a river, rather than a road. It takes me out to sea.
At the end of my PhD, things come full circle. I have addressed all my supervisors’ comments, colour-coded and not, and submitted my thesis. I have many relationships and don’t need to feel alone. And yet, I go right back to where I was in that isolated second year.
In a couple of weeks, I am returning to Australia where I currently live, and I will experience this feeling again, as I have experienced it in the past three months. There is a sense of physical remoteness. In Australia in general, there is a sense of being far away from the rest of the world, and that makes Australians very sensitive to seeking cultural, political, social, and economic connections. I am like Australia: I am a remote, introverted continent, bursting with exotic, exuberant life.
But I don’t resort to smoking when I am there. Instead, I go to the beach. In the morning, I get the staple Gold Coast flat white in the local Sunny Boy. I bring my Aboriginal ceramic mug and surrender it to the barista. Waiting for my coffee, I sit and pretend to be reading a book, while carefully observing the local crowd: tanned, toned, wearing the Gold Coast uniform (clothes that could pass for both swimwear and casual wear), with their golden retrievers in tow.
Then I sit on the bench, pretending to be reading a book, while carefully observing the ocean. It is different every day. The waves roll and roll. Azure-blue, light blue, turquoise, bottle-green, midnight blue, opal, obsidian, amber, honey, gold, lead, silver. They roll and roll. Every day is a new wave, a new page.
Fathom 