Well-Read Herring

  In the final throes of 2020, my partner and I were talking about how sad we were both feeling. We attributed our low spirits in part to seasonal depression, in part to pandemic fatigue. We had been listening to Radiohead, a band whose sound is so reliably melancholy, that a data analyst recently used quantitative methods to determine the “ gloom index ” of each of their songs. In an attempt to manage the overall gloom index of our afternoon, I changed the music to something more uplifting. Understandably   perhaps, at the end of an objectively dreadful year, I could not bring myself to sit quietly with my sadness. But on my walk home that day, I wondered why our first instinct is so often to push our feelings to the side. I decided to give gloom another chance and, through my earphones, I heard Thom Yorke airily lament that he would laugh until his head came off. I am extremely late to the Radiohead party. So late that no one really remembers what music sounded like before it was

On two separate occasions in the past few days, I have hugged someone and realised they were hugging me harder than I was. By the time I noticed and tried to reciprocate, the moment had passed, the hug was over.  *** I dance, I laugh, I speak, I drink. But I am stuck. I need to trick myself into feeling it all again.  *** I have a picture of his arms. In the picture he is tearing up daffodil petals and arranging them around a cup on the green floor. I am the only one who can see the movement in the picture. I like thinking about his hands. *** I am no longer worried about making a singular, lasting contribution to human knowledge. I do sometimes worry about being alone.   *** Why am I feeling so hopeful right now? Everything is so incredibly shit in the world. But I am sitting outside, a few drops of rain are falling on my laptop, and I am smiling to myself.  *** I always thought I was too much of a hypochondriac to ever start smoking again. But addiction has a way of makin

Not long after I handed in my PhD thesis, one of my aunts asked me the dreaded question: “What now?”. I remember floating the idea that I might leave academia and being met with incredulity: “After all this? But… you’ve done  all this… ”. I understood where she was coming from. For years, my family and friends had watched me grind away at a thesis that almost no one would read. Surely, they thought, once the PhD was done, the hardest would be behind me and I would finally get to experience the glitz and glamour of being a university lecturer. As anyone who has worked in research already knows, they were seriously mistaken.  Today, almost a year after I officially became Dr. Herring, I resigned from my postdoc at Ghent University. There are several reasons that motivated this decision but the main one is that I no longer enjoy the work enough to justify how demanding it is. I already felt this way during my PhD. As a grad student, I could not take a weekend off without experiencing disp