Something came up recently in my Momentum PhD community that highlighted one of the most frustrating things about PhD life. One of our members asked whether anyone else had ever felt a bit foolish for not realising quite how difficult doing a PhD would be…

Summer can be kind of weird if you’re a PhD researcher. You might have imagined that everything slowing down would magically create loads of lovely empty space for you to crack on with the PhD, except your busy adult life doesn’t necessarily get the memo.

Theory can be a strange thing when you’re doing a qualitative study for your PhD, it can really boggle your brain. Trying to come up with a theoretical framework will send you down all kinds of rabbit holes and you’ll lose hours and days of your life that you’ll never get back.

One of the most common PhD writing blocks is sitting in front of a blank page thinking, “I can’t write this yet because I haven’t worked it out in my head.”

Has your relationship with your supervisor kind of...shifted recently? Maybe you sent them a draft, made all the changes they suggested, then the next round of comments somehow steered you back towards your original version. Or perhaps they seem to contradict advice they gave you six months ago.

Have you noticed that your PhD seems to become more confusing the longer you do it? The confusion was wholly expected in the early days, because you were a newbie, right? Things are supposed to be a bit foggy then. You get to blunder around for a few months with everyone saying, “Aww, baby PhDer!”. But months (or even years) in, the confusion hasn't really gone away.

In those blissfully naive early days of your early PhD journey, the literature review seemed like a fairly innocuous part of the doctoral process. Perhaps it was even one you were looking forward to…

Is your literature review starting to make you feel a bit… anxious?

You might be worrying that there are papers (or books) out there that are absolutely central to your research and you haven’t found them yet. Indeed, one thing that plagues your dreams is the scene from your viva when your examiner says…

I’m guessing you’re here because you’ve chosen to do a qualitative study for your PhD but things have started to feel a bit… slippery. You like how qualitative approaches value people’s lived experiences and you’re researching something you genuinely care about so that’s why you felt drawn to it. However, recently you seem to have unlocked a whole new level of confusing and it’s all gone a bit Alice in Wonderland.

Yes, the “graveyard of PDFs”. Where’s yours? Is it on your desktop so it makes you feel guilty every time you sit in front of your computer? Is it tucked away in a “to read” folder somewhere so you don’t have to feel bad about it too often?

As a PhD researcher, you do a lot of reading. It comes with the territory, obviously. There are things about academic literature that you didn’t quite understand until you started studying for a PhD…

“The discussion chapter is where I started wondering whether I actually understood my own PhD” - actual words from a member of my PhD community recently. The qualitative PhD discussion chapter is where a lot of doctoral researchers suddenly start feeling as though their brain has stopped cooperating.

Did you expect the discussion and writing up phase of the PhD to be a little bit… more chill than it is? That the, “Oh, so that’s what my argument is!” lightbulb moment should have happened quite some time ago, and you’re still waiting for it?

Were you hoping that by the time you got to the discussion chapter writing stage, things would be a lot clearer? But they’re… kind of not. Like an exhausted hiker who’s just arrived at the only cafe in a 10-mile radius only to discover it’s closed. Or that it’s run out of cake - equally devastating.

As you’re writing your discussion chapter, maybe you’re wondering why your study appears to have become more complicated rather than less as you’ve got further into it. Perhaps you’re thinking, “What if I’ve done all these years of work and I still can’t put my finger on exactly what my argument is?”

People told you it was a good idea to read other people’s published PhD theses, so you could see what doctoral research “looks like” when it’s written up. It sounded like a sensible idea at the time, didn’t it? Then you went and read a few PhD theses.

Perhaps you’re looking at your discussion chapter document and wondering, “Have I actually understood what my PhD is saying?”.

Despite having collected a library’s worth of literature and written tens of thousands of words, your argument feels slippery, the chapters feel disconnected and your literature review seems to belong to a completely different thesis season than your findings chapter.

“I can feel there’s an argument in here somewhere. I just can’t get hold of it yet.” Said thousands of people across the globe trying to finish a qualitative doctoral thesis…

Maybe you’re questioning your analysis right now. “Is this good enough?”, “Are my themes strong enough?”. One of the most uncomfortable parts of qualitative analysis is that nobody can give you a neat, reassuring answer to your question: “Is this right?”

You might feel like you’re doing your PhD wrong. You’re probably not. What’s likely happening instead is this:

You’re looking at the things you’re doing - which feel like metaphorical academic faceplants - and interpreting them as evidence your research isn’t “good enough”.