[phd logs, 1] a domestic ghost
why this series? intro & setting the stage
It isn't that we dream too wild a dream :
The trouble is we do not make it seem
Sufficiently unlikely; for the most
We can think up is a domestic ghost.
-- Vladimir Nabokov in Pale Fire
In April 2025, I had 3-4 days to make a life altering decision: do I accept the offer? I remember the time constraint more clearly than the decision itself. I am more than halfway through Spring semester of Year 1 as I write this, in the snowiest city in the US, watching the first glimpses of green growth as winter slowly comes to an end. Only in moments of reflection, now, I think of how much living I was missing out on.
In Missing Out, Adam Phillips talks of the lives we've chosen to not live, "a kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence." For two years, I had chosen to delay the life I wanted, the life I knew was coming, the future time that would save me from my current time. I lived in anticipation: the face of anticipation was shaped out of direction and preparation. I was carefully not living a life.
Picture 1: I wake up at 10:55a, crawl towards my wooden desk. At 10:59a, I open my laptop. I haven't seen sunlight yet. I don't know if I will today, or tomorrow – there are no windows in my room. It is 11a, I log into my work email, open my daily tasks doc and work-WhatsApp that's also a constant source of anxiety. I look at my calendar for the day and sigh. 2 meetings with rich fuckers I need to work for, to get them into a university [out of 8 others]. and 1 meeting with a monster of a boss who might make me cry, who makes my hand shake with anxiety before each call. I sigh. I order a coffee from Third Wave.
It's now 7p, I close my laptop. I look at my room. The sun outside has probably gone down. I am tired, I want to lay on bed, I want to do nothing. And that's exactly what I do: nothing.
Our solutions tell us what our problems are; our fantasy lives are not - or not necessarily - alternatives to, or refuges from, those real lives but an essential part of them [Phillips]
Picture 2: I wake up at 8:30a. I look up towards my window to see what the weather is like: I see trees, may be a squirrel, some wind; my wardrobe has morning light falling on it. I sit up and drink water, I look forward to the day. I get dressed, check bus schedule. I am excited to meet my professor to discuss my paper ideas. I listen to music on the bus ride, and the first thing I do after I reach my office is make coffee. I go to classes, think & talk about language and landscape and memories and technology and wars. Laugh a little, share my tears a little. I come out of the class energized.
I go to a cafe on campus to read and research and write some more without ordering anything. Meet people, look out to see hills far away. I take the bus to the public library, work some more. It's getting dark outside. I walk back home, talk and laugh with my roommates while cooking dinner I so look forward to eating with a YouTube video and Balatro.
Nothing I have written is exaggerated: this is the change that I have gone through in 2025 [among other things I might write about]. There are very few days I don't think about this. I wish I could say I am glad I experienced the corporate life – for the experience, y'know? – but I cannot. It was terrible, it was necessary.
i am trusted
I am still getting used to this one. The professors I assist trust my teaching, grading, knowledge, work flow and writing. May be this is a normal thing people experience, but for two years I lived in an anxiety of what if about my work [which I did terribly, to be fair] – but it spread out to my language, my reasonings, my ability to guess and think. And so, the current circumstances feels, at moments, like something provisional, something that could be taken back.
The other day, the professor I am the Teaching Assistant for, said, "I completely trust you with your feedback and grading of students' essays – you know and teach writing better." When he came to my teaching class to observe me, I didn't have to plan to do something I wouldn't usually do or change how I presented to my students. When I walk into that classroom now, and my students are already there, waiting, I feel something I did not expect: not confidence, exactly, but recognition. I feel, briefly and without qualification, at home.
I do not prepare thinking "how will I be evaluated/corrected if I do this?", rather I think "is this the best way I can present this thought?" – it is a small shift in phrasing, and not a small shift in structure.
outdoors & real conversations
How did I go days without seeing the sun? When I see deer basking in the sun out the window behind my desk in my room, my thoughts return to the room I lived in for 2 years. The deer is still, unbothered, as if exposure itself were natural. How did I do that? How did I go about not having a real conversation, face to face, with someone for days? How do I replenish what I have lost? What, exactly, does one do with that kind of absence afterwards?
I love Delhi, I really do. If I get a chance to live there again, I would. I am grateful I got to experience South Delhi in my early 20s. But I wish the experience was a little less rough. It was also a life structured around endurance. And I don’t know how to separate the city from that structure without lying a little.
What I notice now are small things. I like that the people at the public library, at the local cafe, at the campus cafe, at the office recognize my face. They know the name for my order, the table I like to sit at.
After a life in which I could disappear for days without consequence, it feels, quietly, persistently, like proof that I am here.
give a reason, break a rule
I love writing, it is my favorite thing to experience and do. The satisfaction, thrill and love I feel when writing? unmatched.
A decently large part of my job was writing. Don't let the phrasing fool you though. I was writing for students who could afford to outsource their voices, which means I was using my precious precious act to do something I am morally disgusted by. What's more, there were strict templates to follow: how to use certain words, how to start how to end, how to describe how to write about experiences what words to use what words not to, inject the kid's made-up personality, none of your own – uninvited creativity is as good as an indecipherable sentence made up of baby words – an error, even. fonts, color schemes, line spacing, paragraph breaks, letter size – all standardized, all thought out, no exceptions. Thinking felt unnecessary.
I thought it would take me a while to get my language back, I was losing my brain muscles for it. More than that, I was losing the ability to think for it. I didn't, couldn't, think about how to approach a piece of writing for two years.
A month back, my professor saw my helvetica freak tattoo and said, "you should write your academic papers in helvetica!" It was a permission I didn't think to give myself.
I needed to begin here. Not because this is the most important part, but because without it, everything that follows risks sounding like progress without cost. I don’t know if it would have been better or worse if I had not understood why I was doing what I was doing then: if it had simply been work, and not something I had to justify to myself every day.
But I do know this: for a long time, I saw no point in developing myself. Not because I did not want to, but because I could not locate a future in which that development would matter. Everything I did was oriented elsewhere, toward a version of my life that had not yet begun. The present was something to get through, not something to build within. And so I did not.
Everything that comes forth in this series will be grounded in the fact that I changed something drastic after being in suspension.
thanks for reading! i will be developing 'phd logs' as a series that will focus on my academic & life developments, schools of thoughts [academic & otherwise] i am following, change of direction in focus areas, papers i am writing – and more. all entangled with my personal experiences. some serious, some not, all of it from my heart <3
