You have to put a lot of time into work, and you have to accept that it takes a lot of time. I have to reject the advice of that Emeritus Professor and several others, that one must work as superficially and as quickly as one can. That only translates to rushing, suffering, fatigue, and to having to make repairs later on. You have to pace yourself — not torture yourself.
While you work, you cannot torture yourself about work in any other way — and from Reeducation on I tortured myself a great deal about work, in ways I have described before and that I do not even wish to begin to list at this point. You also cannot allow yourself to be tortured in life while you are working. You have to nurture yourself. This and not torture, as I was taught at several points, is the necessary ticket to survival.
Also, to nurture yourself is not immoral, selfish, or wrong, as I was taught at one time. Nor is it a symptom of “denial,” as I was taught in Reeducation. It is in fact a sine qua non for life and it is what one teaches children to do — or intends to teach them. I was learning these things quite well and was derailed, but I am still quite determined to assimilate them.
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I have a related comment on what many of us were always taught about abuse, bullying and harassment, namely that we should “just ignore it.” There is in fact almost everything wrong with this advice. It may indeed be best not to engage, or not to let the perpetrator know they have succeeded, but that is as far as the “just ignore it” advice goes.
To the contrary, one should pay very close attention. One should understand what is happening and take it seriously. One should take steps to end one’s exposure to the situation. One should absolutely not pretend it is not happening and expect oneself to carry on. That is what I would call a very good example of “denial.”
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
It’s very important to wait and not to rush ahead with things until you feel right about them — particulary with something so very complex as academic thought. It’s simply not like tidying the house, or entering data into a data-base. There’s so much more to consider.
Somehow I have acquired the macho attitude of just wanting to get things done. But that has to be resisted by a much stronger will.
It’s like this — I have just received comments for two chapters from my supervisor. I received them many days ago, but only looked at the yesterday.
Part of me was saying, “What’s the matter with you? Are you scared of something, some possible negativity?”
It’s that kind of taunting voice that can get you to rush ahead, tackling things prematurely.
I eventually learned what the real issue was from another part of my mind: “You have just come up with something very, very important, a whole new paradigm for your introductory chapter, and you are still very tired from the effort. You wonder how that paradigm will gel with the other parts of your thesis, now that certain things have altered. You really need time to process that. It’s fundamental to who you are as an intellectual, and to what you are trying to say in your thesis.”
So, it turns out that “fear of negativity” (the common-sensical meaning of my delay) was not what was holding me back at all, but rather a desire to protect a sense of progress that had only been born a day or so before. Until that sense of progress was better consolidated, I felt that I could not move on to think as clearly as I must do about chapter amendments.
It was my deepest sense of intellectual rigour and creative drive that was holding me back, making me delay for a while, whatever it was I had to do.
The simple macho compulsion to confront everything as soon as it appears was not on my side. It’s easy to exercise fight or flight. In intellectual work one has to exercise a different sort of discipline.
What is still hard to allow for, I guess because of the way we have been conditioned, is that thinking takes up so much energy. When I was trying to crack the shamanistic paradigm, I felt like I had little energy for almost anything else. Whatever else I was doing, my brain was running circuits, trying to link all the pieces of data together, so that I was always semi-preoccupied with just one thing. I couldn’t use my full attention in socialising, improving my sparring, or anything else. It is remarkable to think that this is how things were, now that I’ve come out the other end of the whole process and am once again complete in mind and body. But that is how it happened.
Yes, I agree heartily with all of this.
I find it telling that I didn’t start getting all of these severe warnings until it became truly evident I would succeed.