After graduate school, I felt like I needed a break from all that. I reveled in working in the garden, exercising, cleaning my house, dreaming over design blogs, taking pictures, watching TV (on DVD--the only way to do it).
And that was good for a while, but now I'm feeling lazy.
Time to think about ways to change that (ways that don't involve revising any more of my thesis chapters for publication--still not up to that).
5 comments:
You could grade my papers...
I struggled with similar feelings a few years ago. But then I realized that I was much happier than I was in graduate school, just in different ways. I think the hardest thing for me was adjusting to being able to validate my own sense of self-worth, rather than being dependent on high grades or compliments on my intellectual prowess.
I must say, however, that teaching at Purdue has kept some of those intellectual bits of my brain going. But really, I've found myself so much more fulfilled and happy in spending time with my children, doing fun things for my house, developing different talents that I've ignored my entire life in favor of academia, etc. I think it's gotten easier to find meaning in these things as my children have gotten older and I've begun to see the real effects of my efforts as a mother.
But I understand where you're coming from. :-) I hope you find a balance soon that makes you feel challenged and fulfilled! (Although sometimes with a new baby, the fulfillment part is WAY harder than the challenged part.)
I should also say that one thing that has really helped me is to learn about different things--things that challenge me and that get me all passionate and excited like I did in grad school. A lot of these have been more tactile or physical goals than intellectual, which was different and an adjustment at first, but also very satisfying for me personally. (And I still read at least a book a day, but I've found myself tending towards reading things that make me feel happy and inspired rather than depressed about the state of the world, which was how I generally felt reading whatever I was reading in grad school. I can only read so much Faulkner and McCarthy before I feel stuck in the doldrums and sort of mope around the rest of the day.
I swear it has something to do with pregnancy hormones. I feel like I am just in a total mental fog when I am pregnant. Maybe its just clearing now?
I feel kind of a weird, backwards version of intellectually lazy since going back to school. After I finished my last degree, I started reading a lot of non-fiction for pleasure and it was great! It kept me thinking and interested in the world around me.
Then, I went to business school and all of my reading was under a time constraint and subject to appear on an exam. Instead of thinking, "How interesting!" I would think, "How can I create a mnemonic device for this information that I can use on the final?"
I think happiness is taking pleasure in what you do and doing it for its own sake, whether it's lazy or intellectual or both or neither.
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