INTERNATIONAL
TEXT: ALIREZA ROHANI | PHOTO: ARJAN REEF >
OVERCOME YOUR
POST-DEFENCE
DEPRESSION Time: 5:30pm, 12th December 2014; last seconds of my PhD defence. I was standing in front of my PhD committee and praying for the pedel to come and rescue me. The next thing I knew was the chairman saying ‘Congratulations, Doctor Rohani!’. Despite a successful PhD and a job lined up next to it, I had a ‘so what?’ kind of feeling. That uncertainty drowned me further and further every day and after one month, I underwent a ‘clinical depression’.
T
he fact is that after having worked for so long on one thing, the PhD dissertation in our case, our identity begins to revolve around it. Thus, when the dissertation is finished our identity slides into limbo. It is the same slump that some celebrities experience after retiring from their career. ‘I can not find anything to fill this void in my life’, said Jeremy Clarkson after his career unexpectedly ended in ‘Top Gear’ show. A while ago I was reading an article from Mark Manson, the author of ‘Models’. In this brilliant article he talks about the danger of deriving the majority of your ‘validity’ and ‘selfworth’ from only one source and how your entire sense of self will be vanished when that source is finished. A mistake that some PhD students makes is to invest all of their time in their research, especially international students who may feel insecure because of cultural differences. That is when their entire identity might be defined by a completion of their dissertation. And if you are one of those students, I have good and bad news for you: the bad news is that once the dissertation is finished, so is your entire
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identity. The good news is that there is a safety net here, identity diversification. Choose new areas of interest and invest in them during your PhD. Go to the sport centre and make an athlete out of yourself. Join the culture centre and pick an activity completely out of your comfort zone. And do not just do these, care about them and dedicate yourself to them. I was lucky enough to recognise the roots of my depression and get my feet back on the ground again. Now what if my current job grinds to a halt? Well, I will conquer the daunting feeling by putting a record on my running track which I have been practicing for months, doing a cross-country gliding which I have started taking lessons (a super cool thing by the way), or by catching up with some of those awesome friends I have found recently. Nothing can make me feel broken again, because if one of my identities goe down, I will stay standing by holding on to another part. Ensure that you have made a diverse identity for yourself, before it becomes too late. Otherwise, one day the cruel reality will slap you in the face and say, ‘Really?! four years and just a PhD!?’ |
Nothing can make me feel broken again