Hi. Welcome to my bleak corner of the internet. I am a PhD student struggling to get across the finish line of my program. I also have aspirations of being a fantasy author. Instead of working on either, I am here, making my own corner of the internet for the absurdities that live in my head.
honestly? I'm a procrastinator. maybe procrastination is part of my writing process. maybe I am just lazy.
At one point, I wanted to be an artist. I haven't painted in a few years. I only had my art in a gallery once for a student installation. I did a couple of comissions and I never got paid for those projects. Maybe they just werent good enough. I began to feel like a person who painted, not a painter. i'm beginning to feel the same way about my writing. I've written countless essays in my decades of schooling. my masters thesis lies dormant in the university website, collecting dust until the data is so old that no one will care to publish it if i do anything with it. i finally have three publications where i am a contributing author from research projects i worked on, but i never found my voice there. I have 90,000 words in my dissertation proposal, but do any of them matter? academia does this thing where you are pushed to specialize, trained to teach, get little practical training in doing public facing research and get thrown into a job market where "publish or perish" is the name of the game. The thing is, I feel like i have no specialization, i feel like i am all over the place. my publications have little to do with the work i want to do. my masters has little to do with my dissertation. I'm beginning to ramble. Let me get to the point. Can I call myself an artist if I don't do art? If i never pick up my art supplies again? Can I call myself a writer if I never finish a fucking project? what will happen to me if all my dreams are deferred?