Today, I am going to talk about executive dysfunction. No, not the kind you immediately thought of! And not the kind that recently slid into Jeffrey Goldberg’s DMs. This kind.
I can hear you now: oh no, Christine, please don’t become one of those people who starts writing about their unique brain all the time. Don’t worry, I won’t. My dog’s breakfast is just today’s Very Special Guest Star and will not be a recurring character. (Also it is not terribly unique.)
But as the spectre of death looms closer, I am more inclined to advise people to just talk about what is bothering them instead of doing the obvious thing, i.e., not talk about what is bothering them, and so here I am going to admit: the continued not-finishedness of MPH thesis is really bothering me.
Friends, do you ever have that thing where you put something off because you don’t want to deal with it, and then you make one small step towards dealing with it and you’re like that was so easy! This won’t actually take any time at all, so I can keep procrastinating and do it all really fast sometime later! Then, shame creeps in and you feel bad about yourself again. And then, you make another small step, only this time you hit an obstacle and think oh shit, this might actually be hard, and look at all the time I’ve wasted thinking it was going to be easy! I am a terrible person and everyone hates me.
If you never get like this, congratulations, your life must be very easy. I am perfectly mossy with envy.
What I’ve been trying out lately is reframing my internal monologue from second-person singular (“you are a very gross loser”) to first-person plural (“we are going to work on this together!”) Like I am pretending that in addition to the gin-soaked flibbertigibbet who’s emotionally arrested at age 25 there is also a wise old mentor in there who’s going to gently steer us in the right direction. I will say: this helps, but also rather gives off Morla the Ancient One vibes:
In case this salient point has been lost amid the whingeing: my thesis is on menopause policy in the workplace. One reason it took me so long to get here is because I thought that maybe, just maybe, I had it in me to do some original research on the effects of pipeline programs on admission and graduation rates for medical students from poor and marginalized communities. But it turns out I don’t have it in me at present, even though it’s something I feel very strongly about. [For context, please see Study finds medical students disproportionately come from affluent backgrounds].
But I do have it in me to become an expert in the existing (and growing) body of literature on a trending topic, which will become even more important as something like 11% of the US population moves into its menopausal phase over the next decade. (Ngl, I am hoping that Millennial women running out of estrogen and fucks will be our sleeper weapon against the bumbling doofuserie of the so-called broligarchy.)
So, even though we have committed several deadline flagrant fouls, we are going to do our best to finish, and our best is really the only thing we can do.
Stay awesome, friends, and be good to each other.
—CB