The piece aims to demonstrate that PhD life is an all-consuming task, one that, due to its constant maintained level of stress, invariably leads toward partial insanity.
This style specifically engages with my own project, in which I interviewed family members for their war stories. As such, the remaining person in my family not interviewed was myself. The examination of how life gets into a PhD is done through an interview between ‘Indy’ and ‘Indyana’. This difference in names draws upon the notion of imposter syndrome while allowing a gateway into the ‘life’ aspect of completing post-graduate study. This exact element is something examined within the piece.
In ‘Insanity Helps’ I engage an exasperated, yet humorous tone while exploring how I crafted my routines to fit around the minutiae of a PhD lifestyle. This tone’s purpose is to further the theme of dissonance within the piece, to drive the point that self-argumentation is a natural process within post-graduate work. The work also examines purpose, and the reason for completing such an academic endeavour.
‘Insanity Helps’ is a companion piece to my PhD project ‘Ginger Cake and Lemon Icing’ and its accompanying exegesis, as such it explains what my project cannot – how the project is everything, and yet life continues, like plants growing from gutters, when everything should be washed away.
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Indyana Horobin is a PhD candidate currently studying at Griffith, with major focusses in modern history and creative writing. He has had multiple publications within Griffith’s Talent Implied works, a publication in Drunken Boat’s 2020 anthology Meridian, and a short-story published in APWT’s Pratik: Fire and Rain, which launched at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival 2023.