Walking on Ice
On showing up even when you are frozen {Notes From the Dissertation Desk #1}
Hello,
As I write these words, I am listening to a song called “The Pit”, sung by the fictional band Mouse Rat (and the real Chris Pratt) from Parks and Rec. It’s a very silly song about an abandoned construction pit, but these lyrics speak to me in my own low place:
The pit
I was in it, the pit
You were in it, the pit
We all were in it, the pit
At the start of the new year, the paths in the forest by my house froze over with sheet ice. And so did my body at the dissertation desk.
I was stuck in a pit.
But I kept showing up anyway. To the woods, to the desk. The ice made my movement slow, frustrating, and precarious. Even with ice cleats, I fell.
There’s something about showing up to the same thing over and over and experiencing how it changes. The Pit felt all-consuming, infinite. But even in the dead of winter, the forest was alive and cycling. As I showed up to the path day after day, my frozen body absorbed the teachings of this materiality in perpetual motion.
In the wrestling with my stuck-ness, I started writing short notes #fromthedissertationdesk on Instagram1. Day after day, words flowed out of me with decreasing inhibition (I’ve entered an Age of Magical Underthinking2). I was surprised by the images that I kept coming back to: shadows and frozen paths and touch and the frustration of walking on ice.
Today I am sharing February’s notes from the dissertation desk. My hope is that these field notes from the freeze might be an invitation for you to explore the textures of any stuck-ness in your own life. What are the colors, temperatures, and sounds in The Pit? How must your body move through the space? What stories are you telling yourself? Where can you find aliveness, even here?
I am learning that it is possible to inhabit the experience of winter without redeeming it with spring. In the book Belonging, Toko-pa Turner writes, “Eventually we must take our life into our arms and call it our own”3. We don’t have to wait for the thaw, we can make our home in the freeze.
As Mouse Rat sings, “Sometimes life gonna get you down / Hit the ground runnin', take a look around”. Even in The Pit, we are fully alive. Let’s take a look around.
Warmly,
February 1
I wish I had capacity to put words to how exhilarating it was to facilitate The Art of Beginnings on Saturday, to hold space for a group of people to explore the sensations and anatomy of threshold experiences, to hold space for myself as I begin a new phase of my work.
But I don’t. I am diving in and out of THESIS.DOCX, coming up for air and tea and hugs, then going back under. It is taking all I’ve got.
My friend
February 2
I was texting my accountability friend, “It’s such a mystery, I keep getting distracted about 90 minutes into my work.” And she wrote back, “Have you tried blocking social media from your computer?” And I had a big moment of ooohhhh, as suddenly I became aware of myself posting this photo of me at 21 in my Instagram Stories… Some mysteries aren’t so mysterious if you turn on the lights.
So much of my work is building walls, sea walls around the waves of distraction and avoidance, keeping the container of my concentration strong and delineated. In the PhD Pocket, we write.
This photo made me happy to see while writing, though. This was the year I first met Paris, first lived in the neighbourhood I would later call home on a more permanent basis. Sometimes when I walk in the woods here in Quebec, I try to inhabit the Self who walked through crowded cobblestone sidewalks with power and sureness-of-place. That Self is welcome to join me at the dissertation desk.
February 5
The stickers are hokey until you feel like the only thing left to do is quit or when the work feels impossible. Then the stickers root you back into compassion real quick in a way that anything more complicated would fail: oh, all I have to do is JUST DON’T QUIT? Ok, I’ll just do that.
At least half of the work of this doctorate seems to be keeping the 8 year old version of myself sitting at this desk, focusing on my homework assignment. She responds to stationary and music and friends sitting (virtually) next to me at the table. She also needs limits, the kind I’m more comfortable giving my preschooler than myself.
My brain felt squirrelly today, but the walls around this work session were firm enough to keep her engaged in Thesis.docx all morning. But there was comfort in the container, and after my brain realized she couldn’t jump ship, she enjoyed the textures of weaving paragraphs with data and conceptual frameworks.
February 6
“This is what writing my dissertation feels like.”
I stood on a hill in the woods last night, as the last moments of golden winter sun warmed my cheeks before dipping below the horizon. I rubbed my hands all over my face and shoulders and hair. These were the textures of this chapter in time, where I show up to the work.
So much of my life feels tilted forward, like my center of gravity is in the Land of What-Comes-Next. My outlines feel hazy, like I won’t be solid until I know what will become of me when this thing is done. But that’s not true, I’m solid now, if I touch my cheeks they are warm and soft. I have a shape.
Today is a sticky day. Part of me wants to just give up. Part of me wants to put work on hold until everything is all of a sudden easy. Part of me is convinced I’ll stay stuck here forever. And part of me is covering all those other parts with a soft blanket and turning on the white noise machine to help them curl up for a nap, while gently typing away in Thesis.docx.
February 12
I’m used to writing about hard things retroactively. I learned young that it is only acceptable to be public with one’s struggles when the struggling is placed squarely in the middle of a narrative arc that bends towards getting one’s sh*t together. As an ambitious teenager, I was instructed to guard my Depression like a dirty secret. So to share publicly, “I am stuck, I am floundering” was
dangerous.
I sat at the dissertation desk this morning and wrote zero words. I swirled my notes and papers and pen around and around as my panic swirled so loudly in my brain I could not think.
I am stuck, I am floundering, I am struggling.
I am not writing this as a cry for help. I am writing this because I refuse to only show up in the world when things are going smoothly. I am writing this because my belonging does not belong to productivity or consistency or a positive attitude. I am writing this because I keep talking to people who think they are alone in their floundering.
I am also writing this because I am falling in love with the sound of the voice that pours out of me when all feels lost but, even here, I meet myself with softness.
February 20
I fell in the woods last night. A sneaky patch of ice and down I went, angry at the shock of it all.
And you know what I did next?
I started laughing,
belly laughing.
My hip was so sore, a bruise was already bubbling up. I work every day at the dissertation desk under a print of a famous bruised hip: Delacroix’s Jacob Wresting the Angel, a scene of human engaging with divine, wresting through the night under the trees until there’s a blessing, a new name… and a wounded hip socket.
And here, on this iteration of the daily walk where I digest the dissertation wrestling of the day, now brought to my knees by ice, I could feel in my (hip) bones that falling did not mean a dead end. I stood up, caressed my aching wrist and tender hip, and kept moving forward. I am not the first on this path and I will not be the last.
I gingerly made my way back home, towards dinner prep and the chalky smudge in the blue sky of the almost full moon.
February 28
I have become an ice walker. As we edge into spring, the paths have frozen over into sheet ice. I strap on my cleats and walk anyway.
Water melts and freezes and melts and freezes, building layer by layer, trapping leaves and twigs like fossils in resin. The freeze stretches from the paths of the forest all the way to my body at the dissertation desk.
I have not gleaned any lessons from the ice. I refuse. Every step feels like it holds the possibility of a bloody nose and broken teeth. The ice demands precision and patience when all I want is motion.
Even so. We the frozen, we keep moving. We strap on our cleats and show up to the waters. We walk with care, we trust in the inevitability of thaw.
In a new iteration of this autumn’s ‘Sister Texts’, the term I use for poetic writing that ‘sisters’ me as I write my dissertation. Read more here: Making Art, Even Here.
To paraphrase the title of
’s upcoming book The Age of Magical Overthinking, which borrows from Joan Didion.