For a few days now (… weeks), I’ve been trying to escape an intense feeling of discomfort to do with the writing of my thesis. I thought numerous times that I’d put my finger on the problem (‘maybe this isn’t what I want to do’, ‘I’m lonely’, ‘this is weirdly difficult’) and this may just be another one of those times, but I’m definitely getting closer with this suggestion: I’ve been experiencing severe and taxing cognitive dissonance between more than one instance of conflicting realities.

Cognitive dissonance is “the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioural decisions and attitude change,” according to Google. The first instance of cognitive dissonance I’ve been experiencing has to do with the action of writing itself. So I spend all of my days doing it, I lose track of time, my hips are tired of sitting so much, I really want to see my friends, I keep rewriting and rewriting and rewriting the same ideas with different words to suit my imaginary audience and my brain is becoming a big baby. This is both what I really really want and what I really really don’t want. I am a social being and the nature of my work (which focuses a lot on sociology) drags me away from friends. Perhaps it’s situational irony, perhaps it’s cognitive dissonance, either way the conflict it causes in my brain chews up glucose and keeps me awake at night, making me tired and anxious, further decreasing my capacity to deal with it/write good.

The second instance of cognitive dissonance I’ve been experiencing is in the content itself. I’m currently writing a chapter that focuses on the personal experiences of individual women I met in Kepri. The purpose of doing this is to ‘amplify’ their voices in the literature pertaining to Malay/Kepri, as part of the broader effort to validate the cultural knowledge of women. The dissonance arises in the fact that I won’t be able to quote these women directly because I’m not skilled enough in Indonesian, thus rendering their metaphorical ‘voice’ a mere Chinese whisper distorted through my conspicuously biased ‘Western feminist’ lens. I don’t know enough about them to represent them without feeling a little bit guilty. There’s a dissonance between my ‘women experience subjugation in every culture’ attitude and my uncomfortably inadequate perception of the actual lived experiences of these women. I needed more time with them than I could afford.

So HOW on earth does one DEAL with this? A common reaction is to rationalise the perceived dissonance by inventing a ‘comfortable illusion’ (see comic), which is both my cup of tea and against all of my values. I’m not one for oversimplifying things but I do create whole universes in my spare time. I’ve been waiting for my subconscious to come up with something but it’s been too long now. It’s going to take conscious and consistent effort, like I’ve been doing, only double or triple. I need to accept that finding solutions will be uncomfortable, that this discomfort is inevitable and even necessary, and I’ve got to find enjoyment in the process and difficulty of it all.

Is this it, then? To just continue the way I was going? I suppose so, albeit with a heightened awareness of the situation. Besides, one must imagine Sisyphus happy.

– Albert Camus 1942