I Knew My PhD Would Test My Patience; I Didn’t Think It Would Test My Entire Belief System
There’s a term that often crops up in Migration and Refugee Studies scholarship: temporal uncertainty. It describes the lack of information and clarity regarding one’s future, the way this impact a person’s ability to make plans, impacts how they exist in space and time. Two hours after finishing a draft of a PhD chapter that strongly draws on this topic, I received a call from my would-be future landlord, telling me that I could not, in fact, move into the place I was meant to be moving into four days later. He repeated a nonsensical excuse every time I asked him why. I stood up for myself, reminded him that I had repeatedly asked him to confirm that I could definitely move in. I had triple checked with him before I stopped looking for somewhere else, and he completely screwed me over. I have eight days left on my current lease, and no idea where I’m going to live after that.
As I run back and forth across London in the rain, filling my days with futile flat viewings, the weight of temporal uncertainty settles on my own shoulders. I haven’t felt this detached from my own future since the covid lockdowns five years ago. I try to imagine my life in just over a week from now, and I can’t. I don’t know which part of the city I’ll be living in, I don’t know whether I’ll have found somewhere permanent by then. I barely sleep; I barely eat. I am running on adrenaline and hot chocolate and a constant refrain of “I’m going to fucking kill myself”.
I have waited for September for so long. September, where I can finally stop living with my ex, five entire months after breaking up. It has been five months since I realised I was a lesbian and ended my relationship, and I have put parts of my life on hold during that time. I was so excited for a clean break, to finally close out a chapter of my life that I’d outgrown and move onto something more aligned. Instead, I am filled with dread. I can’t even distract myself with silly little fantasies, because there are gaping plot holes now. I imagine hanging out with a person I’m so excited to see, imagine talking to them as we walk to the tube station and hug goodbye. But which tube station, when I don’t know what my route home will look like in eight days from now? There is very little that I can control right now, and there are even fewer mental escapes.
At the same time, I am deeply aware that my problems aren’t that bad in the scheme of things. I see videos of Ukraine being bombed, of people losing their homes or their lives, and I feel guilty for wallowing in self-pity about my own living situation. As a PhD student researching refugees, I spend a disproportionate amount of my time reading about the worst experiences of people’s lives. I was able to compartmentalise for so long, to create this distance between my own outlook on the world and the work that I was doing. Then I started forming personal relationships with Ukrainian refugees.
I spent most of the past couple of weeks writing about the precarity of the Ukraine Visa Schemes. For anyone who doesn’t know, Ukrainians do not have refugee status, and they have no pathway to settled status or indefinite leave to remain. The visa schemes are part of a larger aid package, including things such as military aid, which means that they are a foreign policy/soft power tool rather than simply a refugee settlement policy. The British government is notoriously hostile towards refugees, and the Ukrainian government doesn’t want to permanently lose a significant part of its population, especially when the demographic is predominantly made up of women and children. It is 3.5 years into the full-scale invasion, there have been increasingly deadly bomb attacks on Ukraine this summer, and the supposed “peace talks” involve rolling out red carpets for the war criminal that started this, instead of sending him to the Hague or the morgue where he belongs. It is absolutely absurd that there are no longer-term protections in place for Ukrainian refugees after all this time.
On Monday last week, I worked on my chapter draft. But on the Sunday before, I went to a protest, and spent time with Ukrainians. For most of this year, the main feedback I’ve gotten from my PhD supervisors is that my writing lacks nuance, that I make generalised statements, that it needs reframing. This time, it was almost too nuanced. My supervisors told me it was too passionate, too critical. That if I am going to make this argument, it needs to be written in a dry, logical way rather than coming from a place of emotion. But all I am is emotion now. I can’t write about the precarity of the Ukraine Visa Schemes without picturing people I care about. I can’t make a single generalised statement, because I am drowning in the nuance of it all. The precarity isn’t distant anymore, it isn’t hypothetical. I imagine what could happen in a year from now if the Ukraine Visa Schemes aren’t extended. I picture the woman I spent time with the day before, her warm, infectious energy, the cartoon cat on her T-shirt, the deliberateness and care she takes when she speaks to me in Ukrainian. I picture a world where she has to leave, where she isn’t safe. It was all I could think about as I wrote. Frankly, I don’t think my chapter was passionate or critical enough. The Ukraine Visa Schemes are basically the subscription model of refugee policy. Everything is at your fingertips right away, but it’s temporary, removable at a whim. It is so paradoxical that these visa schemes have all the ingredients necessary for integration, for settlement, for rebuilding a life in this country, and offer no pathway to do so. What is the point of creating a system that is specifically designed to help people settle, and not allowing them any kind of security or guarantee for their future here? I have many thoughts on this subject (hence the PhD).
There is this concept in Philosophy of Religion called The Problem of Evil. It’s been a decade since I took A Level Philosophy, so my memory is patchy. But the crux of it is: how can a benevolent God exist, when there is so much evil in the world? I don’t believe in God, but I believe in something. Some universal energetic force, something that connects all of us. Throughout every shitty thing that’s happened in my life, I have trusted that things will work out in my favour. For twenty-seven-and-a-half years, I have held an unshakeable faith that I will always end up exactly where I’m meant to be. Even when I’m catastrophising and everything feels impossible, my instinct is to believe that things will always work out for me, that I am blessed. I don’t know how to reconcile that faith with the reality of the world. I don’t know what I believe anymore. If life always works in my favour, why didn’t it work in the favour of all the people who’ve been killed by Russian bombs this week? How can I read about the death of a little girl who was born during the full-scale invasion and was killed during the full-scale invasion, and go on to believe that I am uniquely safe from misfortune? How can I look at the kindest, sweetest people, and see all the ways that they have suffered, and choose to believe that the universe will spare me in particular? I’m not above cognitive dissonance, and delusion is my middle name, but you can’t spend a year researching people’s suffering and ignore the fact that bad things happen to good people all the time.
I knew my PhD would test my patience, but I didn’t think it would test my entire belief system.
If I can’t trust in some universal plan, what can I put my faith in? I think I have the answer, and it is so cliché: each other, each other, each other.
When I get yet another rejection from a potential landlord, I text a friend and ask to meet. I tell her I need a hug. We live on opposite sides of the city; it is a long way to travel to give someone a hug. Yet I don’t hesitate to ask. It’s only later, when we’re sitting by the window in Damsel Collective, drinking ube lattes as she makes me recite a list of all the things that make me an amazing person, that I realise this is the first time I’ve done this since moving to London. The first time I’ve done this since my best friend moved away from Glasgow in March 2020. For the first time in five years, I was able to tell someone exactly what I needed, and know that they would drop everything and be there for me. I tell her she’s my best friend in this city, and she tells me the same. I am still terrified about finding somewhere to live, but relief floods through me. Because having a best friend is a safety net. Having a best friend means that even if the universe is not on your side, someone is.
I have met a handful of people since moving to London who felt destined to be in my life. The woman crying outside the Anthropology building in January, who became the rock that kept me sane throughout this tumultuous year, even when she was on the other side of the world. The woman I met in some remote corner of UCL in November, both lost after an event and all the gates were closed. How we helped each other find our way out of the university (there is a metaphor there somewhere), how months later, talking to her for two hours fundamentally changed my relationship to my research, shook me out of my inertia and unlocked a level of care in me that I don’t know how to restrain. Sometimes you meet people and it feels like the hand of destiny has picked them up and put them on your path. It’s easy to call it fate when you meet people who are warm and affectionate and feel like sunshine, but to call it fate would mean that every bad thing that happened in their life to bring them into yours was also fate. I don’t want to believe in a world like that. I don’t want to believe that good people were meant to suffer just so I could have the joy of their company.
Many years ago, I had a friend who didn’t believe in fate. I believed in destiny and soulmates and everything fantastical, and he told me that it’s more beautiful to believe that loving people is a choice. That you choose people over and over again, that love is an action. Perhaps every ‘fated’ meeting was the natural conclusion of a series of choices. It feels unnatural for me to say it, because deep down I do still believe in some degree of fate, but I don’t like what that implies.
Two days ago, I set a reminder in my calendar to spend yesterday practicing Ukrainian. I imagined this would involve crying into my grammar textbook and scrolling through Instagram reels every five minutes. I will admit that it felt like fate when I saw that my favourite Ukrainian café was looking for volunteers to help with their renovation. But it was a choice to do a 3-hour round trip to paint chairs for 5 hours. I was desperate for a distraction from my housing situation; I longed for any task that would prevent me from looking at my phone for a few hours. I went there in search of manual labour and Ukrainian language immersion. I spent hours kneeling on the floor, painting chairs and absorbing the ambient Ukrainian around me, noticing the subtle differences between their Kryvyi Rih dialect and the Zaporizhzhian one I have grown used to. Later, we sit outside on foldable chairs, eating cherry pie and buckwheat with stew as the sun begins to set, and I make a choice. I tell them about my research. The café, Cream Dream, was founded by a woman called Lisa, who is a Ukrainian refugee. She came here when she was 23, she did not speak any English at the time, and she managed to found this amazing business all on her own. When I told her about my research, I was almost apologetic. I emphasised that I don’t know if my research will have any impact on government policy, that I don’t know if it will do any good in the world, in spite of my best intentions. She told me that what matters is that I chose to do this, that it shows I care. She said she didn’t have the words in English to fully express her emotions, but later, she gives me the longest, warmest hug. We make heart shapes with our hands, and the heart in my chest is full of gratitude and emotion.
On Saturday, when I was having a London rental market-related breakdown, I told my friend that I feel like I have no control over my life. She told me that’s not true, that I have control over my PhD. I laughed and laughed and laughed. It often feels like I’m failing at my PhD, that I’m never doing enough. My writing feels like a mess, I barely speak Ukrainian. I feel like I’m behind on deadlines I didn’t even know existed. Then I spend time with Ukrainian people, feel their warmth and kindness, their sweetness and encouragement of even my most basic attempts to speak their language. And I see that I have chosen to spend 3 years of my life doing work that makes people feel seen, makes people feel supported. There are plenty of things in my life that I could ascribe to fate, but my PhD isn’t one of them. It is the product of consistent choices and relentless determination. This work has always come from a place of care.
In a city like London, it is easy to isolate yourself. You can complain about the lack of community, the alienation of a city this size. Community isn’t something you fall into. It requires effort, it requires consistency, and it requires choosing to show up. You can choose to be the person who goes out of their way for others. You can choose to live your life from a place of care. You can send the “I’m thinking of you” messages, you can travel half way across the city to support your friend when they’re having a bad day, you can paint chairs for your favourite café, you can devote years of your life to a PhD in Ukrainian Studies as penance for your former interest in Russia. Being a person who cares ‘too much’ produces far more tangible results that leaving it up to fate. You get to choose your community. I have spent most of this year hovering on the edge of Ukrainian spaces, feeling like I shouldn’t be there, awkward in my linguistic limitations. I may lurk on the sidelines, but I show up consistently. I learn the memes and the references and the protest chants and the national anthem. Every hour I have spent in a Ukrainian café— tucked away in a corner, letting the language wash over me—every protest I went to, every Ukrainian event, was me choosing a community and showing up for them. Choosing to let myself be seen, forming real, meaningful relationships with the Ukrainians in my life is one of the most important choices I have made. It has cost me my belief system, but I have gained something far more tangible than faith and fate.