My Phone is Off, and You Don't Need Me: A PhD Student Life

 Since 2014, I have been "on." 

What felt like every second of every day, I was checking my email, my texts, my work app texts. While this was partly self-imposed due to a paranoia that I would miss something, it was also very much expected that I would respond. That paranoia was confirmed, as those who did not respond immediately were chastised. Everywhere I looked, everywhere I went, I was surrounded by eyes and expectations. 

Being a salaried employee is wonderful and so secure, but it can go down a big hill on a little tractor so fast. There's a sense of ownership that comes alongside a steady paycheck that is inhuman. 

I even answered emails on my honeymoon. I answer emails at 1am in my bed. I answer phone calls in dead sleep two hours before the workday starts. I am dependable. 

I tried to create boundaries in my life, but after a certain point, where life begins and where work begins becomes so convoluted that you lose where you are in the world, outside of your worth to the system as a whole. 

My husband, in his kindness, allowed me to put trust in an opportunity. I left my job. The release was not immediate. Halfway through my graduate assistant orientation for my PhD program, I felt a sudden surge of joy when a meeting ran long: I work 20 hours a week. When those 20 hours conclude, c'est le fin. Time taken in one place is deducted in another. 

My mornings since the beginning of August have been spent drinking coffee with my husband in the soft sun of the morning. We cook lunches together before parting for our separate office spaces upstairs. Though it will soon be dark when we conclude our work projects, we will have been able to spend the best part of the day and the best parts of ourselves with one another--not the war-warn exhausted shells we have been able to give over at the end of the days. 

There is such joy in the freedom to learn. I can give of myself freely, but I am at no one's beck and call. I am not so naive to deny that a PhD might very well be brutal, but I will not deny the intensity of the freedom, the joy, the release that I have been granted so graciously.