A shift in perspective

I’ve been quiet on the internet lately because I’ve been in full writing mode, and dealing with a rolling constancy of health issues, both of which leave little time or energy for anything else. But two weeks ago I reached a major thesis milestone, and now I’m embarking on some course-correction, so I thought I’d share a little update here.

I now have a first draft of all my thesis chapters except my intro and conclusion. Six substantive thesis chapters, a total of 58,307 words, done. And although I persist in calling them ‘shitty first drafts’, they’re not too shabby and I’m pleased with where my writing has led my thinking so far. Last week I took a much-needed break, spending a week in Pembrokeshire in a little hut in the middle of nowhere with my partner. We hiked the coastal path, delighted in the spring flowers and swooping swifts, stargazed in astonishment (no light pollution there!), ate some fabulous seafood and generally had a restorative time and a mental reset.

Now I’m back and my task is to revise my manuscript, write the intro and conclusion, and aim towards having a full thesis draft in September. But this revision is not merely proofreading and copyediting. The writing so far has been my process of wrestling with the data, with the theory, and working out what I’m thinking. To decide who I am in conversation with in this thesis, and to advance knowledge using my own empirical findings. Often I didn’t know where each chapter was going until I got to the final quarter and realised what I wanted to say. And what has emerged is that I have found I am not quite answering the question I asked myself at the beginning of the PhD. So an adjustment of direction is in order.

The thing about a PhD thesis is that it is supposed to be making an argument. And my viva voce will be an oral defence of my thesis. So generally a thesis is written in a defensive way. You are answering your research question and every chapter, paragraph, sentence is contributing to that, building your argument. Thus far, I have been writing each chapter in relative isolation, riffing on a theme that has come from my research. Now that I have taken a step back from it all and can see the bigger picture, I can see that I’m not quite on the right track.

People talk about the ‘red thread’ of the thesis. The one thing that runs throughout, and which you build as you write. I had thought my ‘red thread’ was about the remaking of the self after cancer. I started with a chapter about how cancer ‘unmakes’ the self, how it impacts our lives, and then I explored the three themes of pleasure, embodiment and creativity, with each chapter drawing towards how people were remaking their sense of self. However, now that I can see the thesis as a whole, and what I am actually trying to say, I have realised that, in reality, I am investigating pleasure more broadly, how cancer impacts our ability to experience pleasure, in all areas of our lives, and how people reclaim that pleasure in different ways. When recruiting my participants, I had framed my study as ‘reclaiming pleasure after cancer’, (indeed that’s the title of this blog!), yet in my writing I have still been trying to answer how people go about ‘remaking the self after cancer’. The two are subtly, but very definitely, different.

Looking back at my research journal, I think I knew this all along, but for some reason I have been resisting it. Perhaps I felt that ‘remaking the self’ was more in my comfort zone, more aligned with what I already knew and had researched. Perhaps I felt that it’s not my place to write about pleasure. Perhaps I fell foul of the ‘taboo’ nature of pleasure in social and cultural discourse, and in cancer survivorship in particular.

But pleasure is vital to our sense of self. A dignosis of cancer, or indeed any major diagnosis, impacts our ability to experience pleasure in our life, our body, our work, our relationships, our sexuality, our identity. This is what led me to this research in the first place. And in the process of writing, I have somewhat lost my way.

All is not wasted, however, and I feel confident I can wrestle with my 60,000 words so far, shaping it into the thesis I want to make. But this is quite a task. Not as simple as spending a week polishing each chapter. So now that I have had a restorative break, I need to crack on with it.

Sadly, my funding is coming to an end, and from July this year my stipend payments will stop. I’ve been trying not to take on too much paid work, as I know that writing and revising will need my full focus, so I’ll be using up my savings (which is why they are there!) for my final few months and setting myself up for some good work gigs in the autumn once I have submitted (fingers crossed).

In the meantime, I’ll try to update on here, but posts are likely to be sparse as I complete my manuscript.