Unexpected parallels

On the similar struggles of raising a baby and writing a dissertation

It’s been so long since I posted here, but in fairness, it’s been so long since I did many things I tend to enjoy: drawing comics, reading novels for hours on end, playing in my sketchbook, not being a weepy wreck, sleeping in. Wah!

My excuse is that I am in my final couple months of my dissertation and it has been all-consuming in a way that I was warned about yet did not truly understand until it happened to me. (Sound familiar?) I have just finished up five weeks of completely revising my first draft from beginning to end, including substantial carving down and rearranging and it has been hard. Now I have a two-week gap in which I am planning and hosting a workshop, painting a few commissions, doing a little comics diary work, and re-skimming the mountain of reading piled up in my office before I dig back in for a final six-week round of revising.

All this revising has been exhausting and weirdly emotional; so much of this PhD process has reminded me of both pregnancy and the early months with a new baby and, in my case, severe postpartum depression. These strange parallels are a topic I look forward to digging into more once my dissertation is done. For now, I’ve drawn two pages of diary comics thinking about how the anxiety that comes with trimming my draft down in revision has reactivated my memories of one of the first harrowing parental tasks people rarely warn you about: getting baby “back to birth weight.”