Congrats on Your PhD! Welcome to the PhD Postpartum
You’ve just finished a PhD — congratulations, Doctor! You’ve distilled the fruit of all that arduous cogitation into a sparkling dissertation that represents an original contribution to knowledge. You’ve earned those gorgeous doctoral robes!
What no one told you is what happens after the PhD.
Birthing a dissertation is physically, emotionally, and spiritually exhausting, so if you find yourself experiencing post-PhD blues, you are not crazy and you are definitely not alone. Here’s how to recognize the signs of the PhD postpartum.
You start questioning your life choices.
In the dissertating years, at least you had a purpose — even if that purpose was to become the world’s leading authority on a pinprick of knowledge that for you is of outsize importance. Now you find yourself wondering who gives a shit about your itty bit of expertise. (No one but you cares about the aerodynamics of fricatives or its relevance to poetry. Tough.)
You find yourself having a crisis of identity.
Having poured your whole existence into the dissertation, being done is like falling into an abyss. You’re confronted with existential questions: “Now that this thing that consumed me is over, who am I now? What is my purpose? How do I go on?” Earlier, the dissertation had kept the demons at bay. Now that you realize the dissertation was an elaborate ruse, you have nowhere to hide.
You suddenly realize how much better it is to be a ‘real person.’
The lifeguard at the YMCA swimming pool. Your car mechanic. Your acupuncturist housemate. The guy unloading deliveries at the grocery store. You wonder whether the guy fixing your roof doesn’t, in fact, have a life that is more real, more connected to the world, more meaningful and worthwhile than you do as an expert in some obscure nonsense that even your committee members only half understood.
You find yourself squinting at the bright light of day.
After dwelling so long in the dissertation dungeon, you can only look at shadows, like Plato’s cave-dwellers, unable to adjust to the light of the real world. If someone posts pictures on Facebook from their morning run in the park, you think, “Wow! Trees! Grass! Nature!” You thank your Facebook friend profusely for bringing trees, grass, and nature into your life because actually going to the park yourself would overwhelm your enfeebled senses.
Instead of pride in your accomplishment, you experience survivor’s guilt for comrades who fell along the way.
Only 60% of people who start a PhD program actually graduate (50% in the humanities). If you’re lucky enough to make it, you’ll be haunted by those who didn’t. Surely if they had made it instead of you, they would have confidently embraced the life of the mind and launched into distinguished careers of teaching and scholarship. Fate somehow cruelly denied them, and instead brought you to this wretched pass.
You have nightmares and flashbacks.
You experience PTSD from the ex-committee member who decided retroactively, two months before your intended defense date, that the chapters she had seen earlier were unsatisfactory after all, even though they had seemed fine before, because now she realizes that the concept, methodology, and conclusions are all suddenly unconvincing. Didn’t your advisor tell you any of this? she asks, incredulous. Secretly, you believe she was right and your advisor wrong. You develop a bad case of Impostor Syndrome.
You experience premature menopause as a result of the intense and prolonged stress making your hormones go haywire.
You feel a slight sense of loss, but you recognize that cultivating the life of the mind is also to disavow the vitality of the body. Just as well since you won’t be able to afford having kids on adjunct wages.
So if the post-PhD blues have got you down, don’t worry, it won’t last forever. The academic job market being what it is, you may end up as a lifeguard, grocery receiver or roofer anyway. The Real World will eventually forgive and reabsorb you, and you’ll get to be a ‘real person’ after all. In the meantime, congratulations on the PhD!
