Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing

I’m just over two months into this PhD and I’m gaining a few perspectives into the world, as you do, and myself too.

Yesterday I read an article by Angela McRobbie and it made me think in new ways about the world and what we do to each other. This is the title of the article:

Notes on ‘What Not To Wear’ and post-feminist symbolic violence, Angela McRobbie, The Editorial Board of the Sociological Review, 2004, Vol 52, supplementary issue. (McRobbie, 2004)

It’s not the first article that got me thinking either or feeing emotional or just mind blown. Yet it was the first time I felt that I could do the methodological analysis required. Something slipped into place. McRobbie uses Bourdieu’s cultural capital to assess the changes in TV and the way females exist in this day and age. I need to understand Bourdieu and apply his framework to my own work. Now I think that’s possible. This article only came up when I googled Bourdieu and Popular Culture. It hadn’t stumbled upon it elsewhere.

The other realization I had this week was about pacing myself. I’m an intensely focused over achiever, well I tend in that direction. I can’t do that every day. I just can’t. Not for the next three years. I realized that I had to try and moderate myself. PhDs are self-directed and unstructured. You have a supervisor to provide advice and some direction, but basically it’s up to you to get the work done. For me that means trying to get it all done in a month, maybe two with constant reminders that I have three years. Three years doesn’t seem long enough sometimes. I’m enjoying it. But I don’t want to over do it and end up not enjoying it.

So the hardest lesson will be striking a balance of too much and too little and let myself breathe a bit.

Going to uni most of the week is really helpful. I thought it wouldn’t be but I find I come here and work and I’m not tempted to do housework. It will surprise you to know that I haven’t cleaned the house since I started this. My partner, Matthew, thought I’d go on a cleaning frenzy but I’m just too exhausted when I get home to do that. I’m even cooking less. Some chronic pain issues aren’t helping there either.

Guilt about attending the Jane Austen Festival over the weekend and Thursday and Friday, has lessened now that I come to this realization. I must pace myself. A little bit crammed in each day, is better than shoving heaps of info into my head and then having a brain explosion.

Balancing out the technical with reading retro Mills & Boon is helping too. That doesn’t feel like work at all. Filling out my spreadsheet is work though!