I'm 25 years old now: which means twenty years have passed since I knew I would be a vet, fifteen years since I was to be a champion showjumper, ten years since I wanted to be the unexpected rising star of English ballet, and a varying number of years since wanting to be a park ranger, mounted policewoman and all of the other (usually animal-related) jobs that I've at some stage dreamed of having. In the very early years of my life, I proclaimed that I would be either a boy, or a clown. As time advances, that claim seems to grow more and more prophetic.
In actuality, none of those vocations have come into being. I am neither a qualified vet, nor do I live in the country with a horse in my back garden as I unflinchingly always forecast. I don't yet own a dog and I don't run a tearoom. Instead, I share a flat with two other 25-year old girls behind the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, London. It's a small, cold, dampish place with single glazing and an unusual layout, but we like it. We have an unkillable mouse and seem fated to shiver in our beds at night. Without our hot water bottles we'd have most likely died long ago. I can't help but wince at the coincidental crossover of my first winter in the flat and a rampant attack of pneumonia. So: it is not luxurious. But it is well-located - just two minutes from the tube station and in close proximity to the ordered beauty of Brockwell Park, and eight minutes away from my brother Tim's house, and ten minutes away from cousin's Simon's house. Brixton is vibrant and noisy, a clash of different cultures and exotic discourses, our road especially prone to middle-of-the-night misdeeds and shady occupants. Last year I inadvertently walked right through the middle of a drug exchange that was happening on our doorstep: well-mannered to the last, I even bid that they 'excuse me please' as I negotiated my bike through the middle of the packages that were changing hands as I passed into our shabby stairwell. To the credit of the seller (although I think the word is dealer), he did apologise and give me a hand with the door.
As my Mum would say, I live a hand-to-mouth existence, earning just enough money to get by comfortably, but not enough money to save or luxuriate in. For the past eighteen months, my life has revolved around a PhD: a research project based in a Fine Art department but which really takes its cues from methodologies related to visual culture. It is also an undertaking which means I have a lot of time to myself, and a lot of freedom in which to live. With such freedom comes the stress of unstructured time, hours and hours of time that could be devoted to the eternal process of research and rediscovery but which very easily get translated into reading novels that definitely do not relate to my thesis, (I'm currently reading Howards End) thinking upon and dissecting Simon Armitage poems, going on dog-trot runs around pleasant parks and watching decidedly unacademic comedy clips on YouTube. It hasn't always been this way: for the first 5 months of my doctorate I lived at the British Library, enduring eight-hour days in Science 3, desperately grabbing around for texts that could be in some way illuminating to a project I had no handle on. After the fifth month, I rebelled, stopped visiting the B.L and instead explored London, listening to songs and replaying Curb Your Enthusiasm and failing to attend to any element of my work. This continued for a guilt-inducing 6 months before admitting I had well and truly lost my way. Such realisation nudged me back towards a happier mid-point between work and unrelated exploration. What I have learned is to treat the doctoral work as a job that must be attended to in order to earn my keep: thanks to a bursary and scholarship from the University, it is the monetary bread and butter of my existence. My thesis pays my electricity bills, and working on it is a responsibility that allows me a few sacred benefits. I do not have to commute. I do not have to sit at a desk in a room with other employees, dodging the minute detail of office politics. I do not have to take my lunch break when I am told to. I don't have to abide by the rules of a manager who I may or may not respect. I am free to go to galleries during the day, I can thankfully ride the tube when it is quiet, and I can go swimming in Hampstead Ponds during cold wintry afternoons. I can examine cultural attractions when others are being productive in their suits and ties, and feel as though my life is untainted by corporate cynicism. All of this I like, and appreciate. My life unfurls at its own leisurely, lo-fi pace: I cycle through a life that is certainly not glamorous, definitely not impressive-sounding, but at least not connected with the world of commercial work and money and high ambition. I experience London through the eyes of an Other and feel sidelined to many of the typified mechanisms that drive the city forward.
It's not a life I expected to live, or one I even knew to exist at all, and I continue to oscillate between feeling contented and feeling wildly lost. I have felt depressed more frequently since starting the PhD than I thought I could feel, but I've also come to know my own mind with an uncompromising sense of intimacy. This means I derive great strength from the academic and intellectual knowledge that I have attained so far. I have had the space and opportunity to read not just widely but also deeply, which makes me feel enriched - I have more tools in my arsenal, and a sharper sense of curiosity. But I wonder whether it's a life built around floating, existing on the peripheries and living by modes of defence rather than attack. Often, my days are spent warding off listlessness and thinking of new ways to approach the unrelenting task of research. I am not dynamic as I would be if people relied on me. I suppose I am on my own; walled in by a thesis that sits on my shoulder and refuses to budge, and a lowly position within the dominant social hierarchy.
I sometimes wonder whether my young self would feel proud or outraged that I've stuck with the doctorate for 18 months without feeling love or passion for the task itself. She'd probably be kind but despairing. She would advise me to go and pursue happier, more productive and more integrated avenues, ones that didn't allow for the constant self-analysis that she would find tedious and wasteful. She would encourage me to travel widely, and have fun, to be around others, to relinquish the ivory tower PhDs seem to demand you build. She would tell me to focus upon the essential task of making myself happy. She was a very good little lass, you see, one who only wanted to laugh a lot and have fun, and feel wanted, and essential; and somewhere, in amongst all the Derrida, and the overanalysis of research models, and the endless days of filling time and attending to self-supplication, I realise I have lost my grasp on her.
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