Why I can’t write a good personal essay

Written by Sarcozona

We have kindly been given permission to reproduce this from Tenure, She Wrote where you can find the original post.

I haven’t gotten a paycheck since my fellowship ran out in 2017. Funding is scarce for students in the end of their PhDs and scarcer still for international students with disabilities, so it’s not too surprising that I’ve been turned down for everything I’ve applied for.

Almost 5 years ago, I wrote with regard to applications for funding and otherwise:

"Use your story and the survival skills you’ve gained to succeed. I use my escape from rural poverty in personal statements to show that I have incredible drive, creativity, and independence."

But I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t make my life a funny, moving, educational story for someone else to judge.

I used to follow my own advice. I turned the ways in which I don’t fit neatly into the world into pat inspiration porn. I talked about disability, adverse childhood experiences, being queer in a culture of religious fundamentalism, childhood poverty, and sexism as obstacles for me to overcome in a story to inspire funders. And I received fellowships that helped me make it through several years of my PhD, a year and a half of unpaid medical leave and many uncovered medical expenses.

But now I’m too tired, too sad, too angry to twist my life into those kinds of narratives. Those things are structural problems reflecting deep prejudices, oppression, & exploitation. I can’t wrap up the things that hurt me the most in a cute package to make someone feel good about giving me money. Funders seem to want a story where cleverness and elbow grease make light work of disability and other “obstacles.” Ultimately, telling those stories was personally destructive because I kind of came to believe those stories over time. And they aren’t true.

A little smarts and hard work and luck can’t make my chronically ill body “productive.” Even if they did, it would only make it alright for me – and that’s not good or fair. Telling those stories for so long made dealing with the reality of living-with-chronic-illness-under-capitalism/being disabled and past traumas really difficult.

As soon as I decided the problem wasn’t me, but the response of people and systems to me, I stopped getting funding. As Dr. Sara Ahmed says, “when you expose a problem, you pose a problem.”

Chronic migraine isn’t an obstacle for me to overcome. It is an illness that I live with. It hurts, it’s unpredictable, and the symptoms are strange and varied. But most of my difficulties would not exist in a less ableist, racist, sexist, and capitalist society – the poor care, the financial anxiety, the relationship power dynamics.

• Migraine would have proper research and maybe even treatment – it wouldn’t be ignored, dismissed, and underfunded in large part because it predominantly affects women (and especially poor women).
• My disease wouldn’t be stigmatized and belittled in popular culture, despite severe migraine being categorized by the WHO in its most severe disability class along with such diseases and conditions as active psychosis, severe depression, quadriplegia, and terminal stage cancer.
• My disease would be less common – I might not even have developed it – if we had the political will to eliminate poverty and abuse and other such negative “social determinants of health”.
• Properly funded health care would ensure I received proper disease and pain management, saving me time, money, and suffering. I wouldn’t waste hours every week on insurance paperwork and scheduling with doctors, commuting and waiting at appointments, coordinating my medical care and researching treatments. I would have access to specialists for my disease. My medications would be covered along with physiotherapy and massage. I’d have funded access to therapy to deal with pain that cannot be treated.
• My PhD wouldn’t have such a short time limit on medical leaves. I wouldn’t lose my income when I am too sick to work. The number of hours I’m able to work wouldn’t determine whether or not I’m allowed to participate in science and research.
• My ability to financially support myself wouldn’t be tied to the number of hours I’m able to work or widgets I’m able to produce.
My immigration status wouldn’t be dependent on my relationship status.
• I wouldn’t be financially dependent on my partner because I could receive disability benefits while in a relationship with someone who had income. Or I would just get paid for working on my PhD.
• Disability support would be enough to live on instead of less than the median rent and I’d be eligible for it regardless of my work history and immigration status.
• I wouldn’t have to rely on friends and family when I’m too sick to care for myself, making it impossible or difficult for me to move or travel – I’d receive funding to employ people (or there would be government aid workers) to help me cook and clean and go about my daily activities.

When I stopped writing narratives that recapitulated ideas about “hard work” and gumption and began talking about structural challenges, about integrating dismantling those structures into my work (or at least getting support to deal with them), I stopped getting funding.

And it didn’t just hurt my funding – my relationship with colleagues has suffered as my attitude has shifted. They like to say things like “you’re so brave” or “it’s so great you always have such a positive attitude” – but when it gets inconvenient or slows me down, if I ask for help advocating for accommodations, or get frustrated with the endless structural barriers my university throws up, they disappear or make excuses or defend those barriers. If I let my good-disabled-person facade drop and express anything but unrelenting cheerfulness, they start pushing me towards the door. It’s not everyone of course, but it’s enough, and it’s people with power, so it matters.

Being “successful” in academia when I’ve faced discrimination and structural barriers has meant parroting oppressive beliefs and mythologies, and I can’t do it anymore.

About the Author

Sarcozona is a graduate student doing research somewhere between ecology and evolution. Their blog chronicles their experiences being sick and queer in academia with lots of asides about the plants, shoes, and books they love. you might also want to follow them on twitter or read their posts on Tenure, She Wrote.

‘Not What I Paid For’: Ableism, Evaluations and the Academic Life

Written by Aparna Nair 

It was that time of year again.

The semester drew to an end and the university sent us enthusiastic email reminders to get students to evaluate our courses. ‘Evaluate NOW’, screamed the emails and signs posted all over campus. This semester, I caught myself instantly deleting that first notification as well as the later more urgent reminders. It was a futile gesture, since I nonetheless made sure to get my classes to fill in the evaluations. But for the first time in my academic career, I was genuinely anxious about the impending possibility of reading an evaluation report. Admittedly, 2017 was uniquely rough. A stressful year teaching seven courses was complicated by personal losses and the low hum of rising anti-immigrant sentiment, making it one of the most difficult of my life. I spent most of the year in a haze of auras, as my epilepsy had become rather recalcitrant.

And then I got these comments in my student evaluations:

I know she is sick. I know that she needs to sometimes bring her support dog into the class. I get it. But she missed classes. I know her TA took over, and that she caught up when she returned. But that is not what I paid for.

I expect more.

I don't want to hear about her illness. She gets paid to do this. WE are paying her to do this. She just needs to stop talking about it.

Even as I type the words, the shame rolls over me.

Evaluations like these raise the question of how academics who openly lay claim to disabled or chronically ill identities should respond when students demonstrate open, almost casual - certainly deliberate - ableism in evaluations. There is nothing in the faculty handbooks, endless trainings and workshops about being confronted with such blatant ableism.

I have lived with epilepsy for a very long time--I was diagnosed at the age of 11. In the deeply traditional and conservative South Asian cultures where I grew up, difference was neither encouraged nor tolerated and conformity was consistently rewarded. As a result of my illness, I experienced isolation, marginalization, derision, stigma and violence. After nearly two decades of concealment, I made a conscious decision to stop pretending that epilepsy was not a serious part of my life. Why, I thought, should I deny something that impinged on my every waking hour in ways that people rarely comprehended? Why did I need to pretend I was ‘normal’ (which my family had desperately wanted me to be) when I knew how illness marked me as different?

So, I ticked off the ‘Yes, I have a disability’ box when I applied for the position I have now, nervous and uncertain as to whether it made me just too marginal for a deeply conservative public university. I lay open claim to an epileptic identity as being part of the reason for my research agenda on disability studies and disability histories in South Asia. I design and conduct workshops on disability in university settings with a wonderful collaborator, and discuss what it means to be a chronically ill faculty member and how to ensure that our classrooms are accommodating and welcoming to disabled and chronically ill students. I publish autoethnographies on epilepsy in South India.

And every semester, my hands still shake when I tell students that I am epileptic in that first introductory session of every course. I strive for a matter-of-fact tone, and tell the classes that while this is not something I would usually share, there may be some times in the semester that my illness becomes uncontrollable and I might need to cancel a class. I then reassure them that this is factored into their syllabus and semester planning and that they will not lose out in terms of learning. Interestingly enough, my disclosure has consistently impelled students to share their own chronic illnesses or disabilities with me in private and I am very grateful for this, since it means I can make accommodations for them and design the class around their needs as well. But I have also come to realise that my initial fears about this act of public disclosure were not unwarranted.

For most of my teaching life, evaluations have always been the space where students expressed themselves anonymously and openly about their professors, without fear of reprisals. Evaluations can be funny and frivolous; trite and tough. Most of us who teach have been embarrassed at some point or the other by what seems to us sometimes unfair, occasionally inapposite ‘bon mots’—from comments on our sartorial choices (‘I loved his t-shirts’ to ‘He wore the same shoes all semester long’) to condemnations of our general affects (‘She is very opinionated! And expects you to agree with her’) to the student’s pondering what on earth we were doing in our chosen professions (‘I don’t know why he is teaching, clearly he is happier in the lab’). But evaluations can also be serious and help us adapt our teaching styles, our evaluation methods, our reading assignments and other pedagogical choices. I learnt that students liked blogging, but that they did not think that they had enough time to work on their exercises in class. I learnt that students will always have mixed opinions about group work, but that it is nonetheless useful. I learnt how the complicated courses I taught on race and empire and disability were received emotively and intellectually, and those responses were profoundly important in developing my courses in certain directions. So I had accustomed myself to opening my evaluations with the certainty that I would find useful information on my course design and assessments along with the more frivolous comments.

But I am at a loss as to how to respond to the casual ableism in my student evaluations, ableism which will become a part of every job application, every promotion and tenure application. It will be misinterpreted and decontextualised by committees and administrations and will eat into my teaching accomplishments or my research portfolio. For many people who see these comments, my epilepsy will circumscribe my abilities and skills.

How then do we respond to ableism in evaluations? I must admit, I am left only with questions. One option is to mention nothing of epilepsy at all in my classes. But it feels dishonest and just wrong.

So I can tell you how I have learnt to cope. I try to focus on the students with whom I seem to be connecting, the ones whose work is wonderful, who challenge me in class and whose presence in my classes is a true joy. And there are many of them. I have begun conducting my own evaluations in class, asking students what worked and what did not—and these are often more detailed feedback for adapting my pedagogical approach in different classes.

My methods do not always work. I sometimes feel like Sisyphus, and wonder if there is any point. I wonder if the affective (and physical) toll of being ‘out of the closet’ in academia is worth it at all.

And, in the meantime, it is more than a month since my evaluation reports were published. I still have not clicked on the link that takes me to the report.

Maybe next month? Or maybe not.

About the Author

Aparna Nair currently works as Assistant Professor in History of Science at the University of Oklahoma-Norman. She teaches on disability, race, empire, medicine and public health and her research explores colonialism and disability in British India as well as the meanings of chronic illness in modern south India. She blogs at disabilitystories.com.

You have MS

Written by Stephanie Zihms 

After 10 months of tingly arms & legs, a bout of optic neuritis, unexplained tiredness and brain fogs, as well as doubting my own sanity – I was finally diagnosed with MS (Multiple Sclerosis). Even though this was not entirely unexpected it was still a shock and at the same time a huge relief. My response turned out to be ‘full on research mode’. I searched the web high and low for information and anything related to MS – funnily enough my parents did the same – must be a family trait. Probably for a good month or so, I was in a haze of information, feelings, uncertainties, insecurities, strength – or to put it bluntly I was one big mess on the inside but very functional day-to-day.

After my family and some close friends, my supervisor was the next person I told, mostly because she was there when I had no clue what was going on and it just felt right to tell her. I also pretty quickly decided to tell HR because I wanted them to know in case things got worse unexpectedly. I recently came across this blog post from Heather on The Mighty. She also tweets as Dizzy the Donkey which is worth a follow. The first thing that struck me was that she decided not to tell people because of the fear of being judged – I had exactly the same fear of being judged or perceived as lazy, slacking or not working as hard, which was one of the reasons why I decided to be somewhat open at work about my MS diagnosis. I told close colleagues and office mates and others if it came up due to people noticing changes; most notably, I had to explain my new diet to my lunch club colleagues. This was followed by waves of "but if I admit that I have to change my working hours or ask for other adjustments, I would be considered not as good an academic". I have never really been a 24/7 academic and always valued my weekends and time off but this was never visible at work. Now, with adjusted hours, 1 day a week working from home and days where I looked like s*** it’s a bit more obvious that I’m not 100% fit all the time.

The first thing my supervisor told me was “now you have a reason to take care of yourself”, which is kind of sad because we all should take of ourselves in whatever form that happens. But for me this means I have to be more sensible about how I plan my work, how I set deadlines, what activities I agree to etc. To be fair, at the beginning that didn’t seem to be too big an issue. I agreed to work 1 day from home and adjust my hours as needed; on a good day work a bit more, on a bad day leave early. Outside of work, this meant changing my diet and exercise regime, as well as starting my day with a 10 minute stretch (which I actually manage most mornings).

It took a field trip in mid-February to realise that I have to treat a good day as a normal day and not work more. We went to a geological site that I was excited to show a visiting researcher from Brazil. I had been feeling great – diet and exercise seemed to be working so off we went. The day was very cold, windy and we ended up on site for 6 hours with only a break for lunch. That evening, I felt tired but not necessarily more than after similar days like this – however I couldn’t get any heat in my legs. In hindsight I now know this was a tell-tale sign that something was not right. I ended up off work for 2 days due to severe fatigue. Well done me! By Friday I started to feel better again and another week later I think I am fully back to “normal”. This was quite a big shock to my system and it really highlighted some other issues creeping up – particularly the realisation of "that’s it now – You have MS – life is not going to the same"! For a wee while it felt as if this meant Life is also going to be rubbish. This is, of course, not true but at that time it felt like it.

During these pretty shitty weeks of feeling super low, the counselling sessions really helped. These were offered to me from my employer after I told them about the diagnosis. It took me a while to go and I had to reach a low point where I didn't know what else to do to get me to go. I had my first session on 8th February, about 3 months after my diagnosis. I have now had 4 sessions. They have helped so much and I am glad that they were available to me from work because I had access quickly. HR set up the initial contact and told me to call them if and when I needed it – after calling them I had an appointment 3 days later. Since I did pick up the phone at a low point, this quick access was so important because the first 3 weeks in February were particularly difficult and if I had not had counselling, it could probably have been a lot worse. Unfortunately, I have to say that this, together with an occupational health assessment and reasonable adjustments, is all that my university offered – tick box requirements. There is a disability service but this is aimed at students, there is access to assistive technology – but this is not widely advertised – and again does not really help with the impact on mental health, feeling of belonging and emotional aspects of a recent diagnosis. Through contacts, I found out that there is a type of peer support group but this was not publicised in a way that I knew about it when I needed it. I also found out that we don’t have a working group for disabled or chronically ill staff or a representative on any working group related to staff. I don’t think this is ok and I want to make sure that members of staff that go through something similar in the future have these services available and are aware that they exist. This can only really happen through openness about my own diagnosis and a little bit of lobbying.

Through some existing connections at university I should be able to get some of these things rolling and I’m hoping to get more involved. A key factor in deciding to be open and get more involved has been the Chronically Academic network. This was one of the first forums or networks I joined and I felt very welcome and supported.

About the Author

Image of Stephanie on fieldwork
overlooking a rural landscape

Stephanie Zihms is currently working as a postdoc in Carbonate Geomechanics in the Institute of Petroleum Engineering at Heriot-Watt University. Her research tries to understand why rocks deform the way they do and what controls this deformation – crystal size, crystal shape, pore size or pore shape? Or is it the mineralogy or how the rocks formed in the first place? By deforming different rocks under different conditions in the lab she is trying to find some answers. This research and the findings are relevant for a range of subsurface processes like hydrocarbon extraction, geothermal energy production or Carbon Capture & Storage applications. Basically anytime a liquid or gas is put into the subsurface or extracted from the subsurface the conditions change and the rocks will response to this change – by understanding what controls this response within the rocks (grains , pores) we can predict the behaviour in the subsurface. Stephanie was diagnosed with MS in November 2016. To read more about her life as a Chronically Academic also check out her blog: stephaniezihms.wordpress.com.

Achieving Greater Acceptance in Academia

Based on an interview with Ian Shipsey 

I grew up in a working class district on a notorious council estate (housing project) in London's East End. I was hearing at that time. My high school had 180 students per year. Only two of us went to university. My parents had left school at 16. As far as I am aware none of my fellow students had parents who had attended university either. I went to the local university; Queen Mary, in London to study physics. I then took a PhD in particle physics at Edinburgh where Peter Higgs was one of my teachers. Shortly after arriving at CERN, the main particle physics lab in Europe, I fell in love with a wonderful Italian physics student who was heading to the US for a PhD so we began a transatlantic relationship until I had completed my PhD then I went to America to join Daniela. Daniela and I married and have one child. Shortly after getting married, while Daniela was still a student and I was a postdoc and both of us were working on the CLEO scientific collaboration at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) a particle accelerator at Cornell University, I contracted acute myelogenous leukemia and was treated by a remarkable team of doctors and nurses at the Cornell University Medical School in NYC for more than one year. An industrial strength dose of chemotherapy beat the cancer but left me without an immune system and a medically necessary dose of broad spectrum antibiotics protected me until my own immune system had returned. A side effect off the antibiotics was irreparable damage to the hair cells in both cochleae resulting in severe sensorineural hearing loss.

Although still a postdoc I had already accepted a tenure track assistant professorship before becoming ill. I was very fortunate, had the timing been different and I had become ill before job season had commenced I would not have had that position and would have been regarded as unemployable by many. I accepted the job about a week before any symptoms appeared. The postdoc was at Syracuse University and the faculty position at Purdue University. After recovering enough to take up my new position about a year later, I then moved to Purdue which is about 120 miles (180 km) south of Chicago in Indiana and Daniela came too as a postdoc.

The unconscious assumption of able-bodied people is that deaf people are less able to teach or conduct research. Being underestimated is OK up to a point. In my field in the US it is typical to take one or two postdocs, each of 3 to 4 years duration, before becoming an assistant professor. I had only been a postdoc for 2.5 years when I was offered the job at Purdue (and jobs at other schools) so I was considered very promising. Purdue was a big physics department with about 60 faculty and about 57 of them had never met me as hearing person. They thought life had been dealt a very tough hand, they were kind and empathetic but they found it hard to consider me any longer as promising.

It was assumed I could not teach and nobody was quite sure what to do so I was left to my own devices. I did some research partly funded by the start-up given to me by Purdue and then wrote three proposals for young scientists, two of which were successful and resulted in very significant funding. One was the National Science Foundation National Young Investigator Award which that year only two people in the US were given in my area. Having won the awards, it is customary to be considered for early promotion to tenure to pre-empt other universities from poaching but in my case I had no teaching record so I could not be promoted. To fix that I was given an opportunity to teach which I had no experience of doing. The teaching experience was wonderful. Being deaf served to make me a better teacher because I strived harder to be especially clear so that the number of questions students had tended to build and extend the material I was explaining rather than asking for further explanation of what I had already "explained". At the end of the semester I received the physics professor of the year award. The award is given by the physics students at Purdue including those I had taught. It means to this day a great deal to have received it. The award helped to establish my ability as a teacher and I was promoted to tenure. Meanwhile Daniela became an Assistant Professor and our daughter Francesca was born.

When I moved to Purdue I continued to work at Cornell for most of my research. A small network of friends on CLEO, all able-bodied, took it in turns to help me by taking notes at meeting. They said that in front of their eyes they saw a transformation in my ability to contribute, often decisively, to discussions. Eventually this led to I and several others developing some new ideas, and to me being elected the scientific leader of the collaboration and the award of very substantial funds to conduct a new program in particle physics at Cornell. It was while leader of CLEO that I explored cochlear implants and received one.

Prior to my cochlear implant, communication with students especially in large classes was difficult. To solve the problem I asked students to write questions down on paper and pass them up to the front of the class. Students in large-enrollment physics courses are often very shy about standing up and asking questions; writing the question made it anonymous and hence easier for students to ask questions. The method was subsequently tried out by some hearing faculty to good effect. I sometimes communicated with my own doctoral students through bone conduction; the student and I both leaned our heads against a wall and the student talked into the wall and I could sometimes comprehend what was being said though the vibrations combined with lip reading. In any situation where I was not a focus (such as in the audience at a conference) understanding what was happening was very difficult so I avoided conferences and did not in general network. Conversations were difficult. Hearing people feel awkward speaking to deaf people first because nobody enjoys saying something and not being understood and second very few hearing people have had any experience of talking to a completely deaf person.

There were two turning points in my ability to communicate. The first was that physicists in general are very interested in the research of other physicists. In the CLEO collaboration at Cornell, everyone knew me as a hearing person who became deaf. This meant that the deaf stereotype was not applied to me so strongly by that group and there were several faculty at Cornell who proactively began to help me with communication, offering to take notes for me. In addition, I began to request stenographers at Purdue and Cornell.

At conferences today, I simply sit in the front row and if I cannot understand I ask people to speak louder and slower and to repeat what they have said but I would not have had the confidence to do that in the early days.

I did not find it easy to gain access to stenographers as they are few and expensive. In principle the deaf students and I had the right to a stenographer, but there were more of us than there were stenographers. I used stenographers occasionally until 2003 when I had the cochlear implant. It’s quite likely that there are many parts of the world where students who are unable to hear do not have sufficient access to stenographers today.

In my field, some of my postdocs and students will typically be based at CERN. Communication remotely was very difficult before I received the implant. It was mostly text based (shared electronic logbooks) and email. Now we communicate via Skype and video conferencing. On experiments in particle physics everybody takes it in turn to run shifts operating the experiment. After I lost my hearing, but before I received a cochlea implant running shifts was hard for me, as although we have a lot of visual information when we run shifts, there are also purely audio cues such as alarms that it would not be possible for me to hear. However, colleagues happily and kindly installed visual equivalents (warnings on a computer screen when the alarm sounds). This enabled me to feel comfortable taking the shifts as with the accommodations that had been made I could now do the job as well as when I could hear and as well as other physicists. Much of the work I do is in my office, but when in the laboratory the work is visual and I have many wonderful students and postdocs and engineers and technicians working with me and helping me, almost all are able-bodied.

I find it difficult to understand amplified voices. This is because amplification distorts voice as well as making it louder. For hearing people, the noticeable effect is the volume increase whereas the distortion is usually unnoticeable or at least not distracting. For many with a cochlear implant the distortion dominates any gain in volume. This is because cochlear implantees have less sense elements than those with natural hearing so our auditory pattern recognition is inferior. If the auditorium is small I request people do not use a microphone to ask questions but if the auditorium is large I ask the audience to write down their questions.

Before I had my hearing restored I was elected three times to be the leader of the CLEO Collaboration, a group of 21 universities and about 180 scientists at Cornell. After I received a cochlear implant, I became Head of the LHC Physics Center at FNAL and was elected Chair of the Collaboration Board of CMS (one of the two experiments at CERN that discovered the Higgs). I was hired at Oxford to become Head of the sub-department of Particle Physics in 2013 many years after I became deaf and had a cochlear implant.

I need no special resources now except the cochlear implant. I do ask people to look at me when they are speaking to me, and when people mutter I ask them to speak clearly. I do not participate in the sign language community because nobody I knew professionally or outside work could sign. I have met with signers though to talk about my experiences with the aid of SL interpreters. Since receiving the implant, I have found that I am much more likely to be placed on committees and more frequently asked to give talks and more generally given opportunities as it has become easier to communicate. Throughout my career in the US and UK my colleagues have always been very supportive.

It is a real phenomenon that many scientists feel conflicted about acting publicly as a scientist with a disability because there is a risk they might become less known for their science and more known for their activism. The same thing happens when an academic engages significantly in outreach to the public or to school kids. One starts to become known for outreach and academic colleagues will question if you are a devoted academic. My strategy to deal with this is as follows: if I am invited to an event to give a talk because I am deaf, I concentrate mostly on my work, what I have accomplished and how rather than concentrating on the disability. The result is that people see an example of a practicing scientist passionate about their work who happens to be deaf. With this strategy I am not trying to trivialize the disability, I am trying to show that its effects can be overcome.

One of my doctoral students had a very severe speech impediment. He was an outstanding student with outstanding grades, yet he had difficulty to find a professor to supervise his thesis. He was very bright and we did great work together. Looking back now it seems to me a person with a disability is sometimes more sensitive to the difficulties faced by others with disabilities, and in some cases this makes them better prepared and more confident they can effectively help and supervise the student. That is certainly the reason I took the student. I did not see the disability as anything other than surmountable.

I generally disclose my deafness. I am proud of it. O Course, I would prefer to have natural hearing but I am inspired by the incredible technology of a cochlear implants that, when married to a human brain, can enable an implantee to understand much of the auditory world. To achieve greater acceptance of disabled people in academia, we need more role models. We need access to the right types of support so that people with a disability are not disadvantaged by that disability to the extent possible.

 About the Author

Ian Shipsey is the Henry Moseley Centennial Professor of Experimental Physics and Head of the Sub-Department of Particle Physics at the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford.

Taking medical Leave: What I would tell myself now

Written by Stephanie

Let me start by saying I have no professional qualifications whatsoever to give anyone advice as to making a decision about taking medical leave. So I won’t. What I will do is tell you what I would have told myself when I was faced with this very decision in my own career, not so long ago.

First, here’s the brief backstory of how I found myself at the point of medical leave.

I was in the second year of my PhD. Anyone from the outside looking in would have said things were going very well. I had completed and passed my qualifying exam (called various things in different country contexts, but essentially the big exam in which you defend your research proposal). This meant I had the green light to go ahead and actually start doing the research I planned for so long and was excited about. I had publications in the works and a slew of upcoming conferences. I was working as a teaching assistant for a course on a subject matter I loved.

But one morning a disastrous thought floated through my head and it was downhill from there. I didn’t know what was happening at the time, but later was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD. You can read more about my experience here: https://thesecretillness.com/2015/09/01/stephanie-33-ontario-canada/. All this to say, I reached a point where I was pretty much debilitated, but I was actually able to keep up with work (for a while), and even still do it well. I think that’s one of our best guises in academia—we can keep up appearances and sustain unhealthy practices dressed up as success—but that’s another story. I probably could have kept plugging away like this, miserably, for some time. But I realized that if I were to actually get better, I needed to dedicate my attention and energy to treatment. Treatment alone needed to be my priority. This could not happen in the (off)balance of my PhD life. Of course, knowing what you need to do and actually doing it are two different things and I wrestled with the decision to a medical leave of absence from my PhD program. In the end I took a 4-month leave and it was the best decision of my life.

Looking back now, here are a few things I would have told myself at that difficult moment in time that might have eased my angst about taking the leap into medical leave.

If you can’t be happy and healthy enough to enjoy your professional success, it’s just not worth it.

Sure, in academia there are tough moments when we all grin and bear it and our work-life balance may get temporarily out of whack. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. When I was in the deepest, darkest grips of my OCD, I received the incredible news that I had been awarded an extremely competitive multi-year federal doctoral research award. This was something I had worked so hard for. This was an achievement that could not only step up my career trajectory, but it would make my life so much easier for the next few years. My funding was secure. No more applying for grants and the award included money for research expenses, meaning no more conferences out of my own pocket! When I got this news, I should have been jumping for joy. Instead, it was like…thud. In fact, it almost made me feel worse. I felt like I didn’t deserve it. I was so consumed by the doom of my OCD fears I could not even enjoy and savour this moment of success. And we all know that these can be few and far between in academia! That’s when I knew how far gone I was—that I couldn’t take pleasure in an accomplishment that I had worked so hard for and that was so important to me. It was at that point that I knew I could not continue to just push ahead in my PhD. I had to get well again or there was no point in continuing. If I couldn’t take pleasure in such an achievement, what was I doing in this PhD?

Things can and will wait.

Academic timelines are brutal. Often everything has a sense of urgency. We are an overworked bunch, for sure. The truth is 4 months, 1 year, whatever it is, will not make that much of a difference, if any, in the long run and the investment in your health will pay off with much greater returns. Yes, I’m scheduled now to finish my PhD 4 months later than I would have if I had been healthy. But the reality for me is that if I hadn’t taken leave for treatment I may not have finished at all and now that I am back to work, I can tell you that the leave did not have a significant impact on my trajectory. There were no critical opportunities in that time that I missed out on—even if there were, I know there would have been others in the future. All of the publications I had in the works still made their way out the door. My career went on.

Medical leave is not time off.

As academics we are notorious for not giving ourselves a break, and when we do we’re often ridden with guilt that we should be working but it is important to remember that medical leave is not time off. It is not a break. Medical leave has an objective—and that is to improve and attend to your health, whatever your needs may be. For me, it provided me the dedicated time I needed to focus on treatment. I was finally able to see a psychiatrist for assessment and diagnosis. I had the time I needed to read and educate myself about my condition. And the kind of treatment I underwent (ironically!) had plenty of homework. Whether your condition is physical or psychological, it is important to remember that the purpose of medical leave is to get better. And that is not something we should allow ourselves feel guilty about!

Don’t half-ass it.

For a time, I toyed with the idea of not taking a formal leave of absence and just sort of “taking it easy” over the summer. But thankfully a wise mentor said to me, “I know you, and you won’t stop working or feel like you should be working if you don’t take a formal leave” and she was right. I can see now that I would not have properly prioritized my treatment if I didn’t make it formal. Maybe this is also a by-product of our academic formalities and habit self-induced guilt—formalizing my leave gave it the legitimacy I needed to allow myself to prioritize it. As an academic I was so used to giving 110% to everything, but I almost thought about giving myself a half-assed leave!

Don’t let the red tape scare you.

There is paperwork but it is doable and you might have to be your own advocate to navigate some of it or perhaps you have a supervisor or partner who can help. In my case, I did have to do some manoeuvring through the bureaucracy, and this was not without some stress and uncertainty. For example, my university initially told me they would withhold my funding during my leave. But I reviewed the policies of the funding agency granting my scholarship and learned they actually had policy for paid medical leave, which superseded my university’s policy. I then had to present this information back to my university. I also had to request leave both from my university and from the granting agency. In the end, it all got sorted out and my university was actually very supportive, which I give them a lot of credit for. All this to say, don’t let any red tape deter you. It’s just part and parcel of the ridiculousness of some university bureaucracies. And as academics we’re used to that.

It’s nobody’s business if you don’t want it to be.

Yes, you need to communicate with your supervisor and the appropriate administration. But actually, very few people need to know, if at all, that you are taking medical leave. And really no one other than probably one high-level administrator who actually receives the confidential note from your doctor needs to know the reason for your leave. I was very open with some people about my leave, and didn’t even bother telling others. You should not feel pressure to disclose anything you’re not comfortable with.

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I can tell you in no uncertain terms now that if I didn’t take leave and treat my OCD I may have left academia altogether. This realization helped me to cement a new-found commitment to put my wellness first. Everything else stems from that. I’m pleased to say that having returned to my PhD post-treatment, I’ve been able to more than simply re-connect with the passion for my research that brought me there in the first place—I’ve been able to experience what it’s like to be healthy AND pursue a PhD I’m passionate about. That’s a powerful combination. I have more passion to go around. I take pleasure in discovery. And I even enjoy some of my successes. I now engage with my career on my terms. And those terms prioritize my OCD recovery and living well.

About me

Stephanie is a PhD Candidate at a University in Ontario.