For the second time in my PhD career, I’m taking a leave of absence for the spring semester. The moment I made the decision I immediately felt relief.
If there’s one constant in the six years—holy crap has it really been six years— that I’ve been trying to get this degree it’s that my parents are getting older and their medical needs are increasing. I have a collection of used hospital passes and I’m starting to recognize the staff at the gift store.
I definitely miss teaching. This fall I’m “on fellowship” in order to work on my dissertation, but due to the aforementioned medical issues my dissertation has taken a back burner. Every day that I do something that’s not my dissertation, I feel stress and guilt. My advisors are very supportive and I am extremely lucky to have them.
If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that change comes out you fast. In the second week of my second semester teaching, I received a text message from my mother saying that there was a fire at the house. Thankfully, it was contained to the furnace, but by the end of the day we were in a hotel trying to figure out what happens next.
Recently I saw two starkly different examples of how to live a life. I think we have two choices as we move through time: we can choose to face backward or face forward. W
hen we face backward, we’re constantly re-examining our life and seeing things that should’ve gone differently. It means we don’t see what’s up ahead. We just worry about it. We stumble and fall because we never direct our way forward. We have to blame somebody for the fact that we’re all turned around.
Or, we can look straight ahead, satisfied with who we are, knowing that everything behind us is:
1) responsible for our current satisfied self, and
B) behind us!
So I’m taking a semester off to focus on family and myself to prevent burnout, to prevent myself from turning around and looking backwards and wondering how I messed up.
I decide which way is forward.
I decide how I get there.
H.B. FLYTE 