I'm a writer and international lecturer.
I have two First Class degrees, and
I never thought
I needed anything more. But in the US, PhDs are like common currency. So
I had to do one, and give up everything in my life to get it done. It's been three years of penury.
I should have done it in my 20s - but
I was writing my husband's PhD.
I should have done it in my 40s, but
I was overseeing my son's Oxford Double First.
Never too late, BG.
My IQ is still 169.
I'm still 14th in the world top academics on verbal reasoning tests (and
I just LERV stream of consciousness although
I can't add up in double digits - dyscalculia). My bank balance is minus £30k.
I've sold everything that moves to do this PhD.
My auntie is 100, and still lives alone and fends for herself.
My totally uneducated paternal grandmother (who left school at 13) was reading Emile Zola in her 90s. Her daughter got A level French at the age of 85.
I'm not going to die anytime soon. So
I'd better use the brain
I have before
I snuff it or get dementia like my evil mum, who, despite her diagnosis, still challenges
me and can almost keep up with
me, on the rote stuff she made me learn when
I was 7/8 - like 'Lord Ullin's Daughter' and 'Young Lochinvar' and 'Sir Patrick Spens', and the entire works of Keats, and the total text of 'Merchant of Venice' which she made me learn when
I was 14 and about to do my 'O' Levels.
Fortunately, her prioritising of rote memory, although useless for exams, is now helpful to
me as
I have to read and memorise academic papers on minicolumns, local versus global processing through the evidence of fMRIs, mirror neuron evidence in the construction of self and other, child development and Dennett's 'intentional stance', the importance of the pre-frontal cortex in cognitive saliency, the GABA chain and its effect on dopamine , the effect of cortisol on the hippocampus, the Triad of Impairments, Broca's area, white versus grey matter in autistic macrocephaly, myelination, neural pruning, and yadda yadda yadda. It's boring.
But in among the boring stuff,
I care for real people. One is a mother of 14 children on the autism spectrum, in Leicester, and the biggest cluster ever identified.
My mate Debs, in Cornwall, is a mother of 5, caring for a further 10 families dependent on her input through me to keep them going for the help they need.
I have a mother identified as 'Borderline' who isn't, but is deeply Asperger, never diagnosed, and who is looking after and trying to sort out the education of her son who is so deep on the spectrum that he can't, even at the age of 17, come out of his bedroom, and has to be taught through a partially-opened door.
Yeah,
I know the stuff.
I have to do this PhD. But I want to get over it, and back into what I do best - helping parents and kids.
With any luck, the PhD will be finished in June.
I really haven't got the money to take it any further than that. Like,
I don't have money to play Season Ticket games. What
I'm doing is,
I think, important, otherwise
I wouldn't have given up my entire career to do it.
I now haven't got anything else
I can sell.
Thanks for your interest BG.
I really do appreciate it.
Last year you claimed that you'd been examinined and that you would have it by that December.
