“It Feels Good to Bleed in Front of People”

I was listening to one of my dear friends do a live poetry reading in 2018, and this line has stuck in my head ever since. It is impossible not to be seen, but we try to find the right lighting so no one sees us for who we are: humans. Injured, brutalized, and traumatized, we float through life already ghosts with no other goal than surviving. But ghosts don’t bleed; that bleeding makes us human. I want to be human and bleed, and that’s what this is about; writing and bleeding are the same thing.

Why The Life and Times of a Burnt Out PhD Student?

Because it is a fact, I am burnt out and cannot do more than what is assigned. I feel like a shell of myself on the good days and a rotting mass of anxiety on the bad ones. My professor told me that my PhD was 5% of my life, yet it takes up 110% of who I am daily. So, I journal about it. I bleed into pages that people will never see, and then I craft the essays and poems onto this substack to be witnessed in a curated way. A way that makes me feel more free, liberated, and unhinged. I get to write unabashedly and know that the critique is not reviewer number two. I get to be a rogue researcher and be more than the 110%. This is a risk for my reclimation when bending to be something else. Thanks for witnessing me.

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