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Office Hours with Dr. Lacy

I help doctoral students finish their dissertations in 12 months or less so they can graduate and become DOCTOR!
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Office Hours with Dr. Lacy
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Now displaying: Page 1
Jul 3, 2019

Episode Transcript:

Hey friends, the time has come to finish your dissertation, graduate and become doctor. Welcome to "Office Hours with Dr Lacy", where we talk about finishing your dissertation with joy and peace. Let's get started on today's episode.

So today I am just going to talk. I'm getting my notes. I have my wine and I just need to get this episode out because I've been procrastinating too much and we're not about perfection over here, so I'm just gonna talk. Um, I hope it makes sense. You'll let me know if it all makes sense or if you have questions and we'll go from there. So I've been um, singing this meme floating around Facebook. Let me pull it up. So I'm sure you have seen, it's a tweet. It says, you know how you'll see those things. It'll be like somebody says, and then there's a response was this one says like "Nobody:" and it's blank. And then it says "Black women: I'm going to get another degree". And the caption just says "black women get bored and just decide to go get their doctorate."

And every time I see it, no matter where it pops up, if it's a private Facebook group or just somebody sharing it to their personal pages, you'll just see all these black women like, "yes". And "I feel attacked" and "I can relate to this. so much" and, "This spoke to me on a personal level" and like, so many people are resonating with this And at first it's like at first glance it's like, Haha that's funny. But as I like started to think about it a little bit more, I just one so, on one hand I see like that power, right? Like because black women, you can put your mind to anything and you're like, Yep, I'm doing this. Um, and I, and it gives the impression like we're so used to doing all the things, you'd being all the things to people that it almost comes off effortless as if it's not difficult.

Like, oh, I'm bored girl, I'm just going to go apply to this PhD program and do this cause I ain't got nothing else to do and it takes away from the other part of the story of how difficult it is. How much work actually goes into it. It also doesn't give space to really talk about, for a lot of us, what's behind that? Like this need to stack up all of these achievements because we're trying to be seen, and once again, we're, when we're used to doing all these things and going after all of these goals where a lot of other people are just like, they're just trying to do one of the many things that we accomplished in a year. Right? And I'm not trying to diminish like where you should feel bad. Cause you know, black girl magic is a real thing, and...

There's another side to that, right? It's not just magical. It's not just something that we didn't work hard for, or we're not putting in work or effort. And it also doesn't leave space for the hard parts of it. The loneliness, the isolation, the constantly running out of steam and energy, not having the privilege to just be, to just sit still. Right. It doesn't speak to those parts. And that that's a really, that's a real thing, a really real thing, um, that we have to contend with, right? It's like, Oh, you just do it. It's fine. But there's so many of us that are having such a difficult time in our phd processes. There's so many of us feeling like, oh, there's something wrong with me because, this is too hard. I'm lonely, my health is being affected. I won all of these medications. I'm going back and forth to doctor visits and I'm stressed and I'm burnt out. But I can't tell anybody because black women are supposed to be strong. We're supposed to have it all together were magical, right? So I can't let anybody else know that I need some help. I'm too busy. Like I'm supposed to be there for everyone else. I'm supposed to hold everybody else up. I'm supposed to help everyone else.

I'm not supposed to be the one to asking for help. That's not allowed. And so, so many of us struggle in silence because we're not supposed to. We're just supposed to do everything right.

And then some of us even get to a point where somehow we kept this up, right? We got to the end, we're supposed to write our dissertation and we did everything right. We did everything we were

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