talking about my PhD

Over the past few weeks since I've been back in Cape Town I've had the opportunity (or maybe it's also the misfortune) of talking to people about my PhD. A while ago I made a conscious decision not to be negative about my experience and instead to promote its positive aspects, even if I wasn't having a particularly positive 'moment' at that specific time. But in Cape Town talking about your PhD takes on a whole new dimension. Usually in the UK, the only time a conversation about the PhD would come up is in a conversation with another PhD student. So the frame of the conversation, to start off with, is completely different. Invariably whether you want it or not competition, envy, ego, saving face, deception, trying to impress all start to play their cunning little roles in shaping the conversation. You always need to project a particular disposition in relation to how you are handling the PhD - real or imagined - so, it's almost always a somewhat stressful encounter. Generally I try to avoid such conversations because I simply don't want to go down the 'competition, envy, ego, saving face, deception, trying to impress' path and only talk to people I want to talk to about my PhD - people I can trust, people with whom I actually want to share my experiences.

In Cape Town, most people who ask about my PhD, aren't PhD students, often have little or limited engagement with academia, or they are my previous colleagues. In these conversations I don't want to disappoint people with my less than glowing account of my PhD experiences. Most people can't imagine that it isn't a fantastic, rewarding, thrilling and challenging experience - beyond one's wildest imagining - and to be honest, I don't want to burst their bubble. These conversations are challenging, stressful too - mostly because I'm trying my hardest not to suggest in any way that I'm ungrateful for being given this opportunity. I often wish my experiences have been more like a textbook case scenario where exposure to an educational or learning experience is only ever a positive one. Trying to fulfil someone else's expectations is difficult indeed.
It's easier to talk to people about this process who just seem to understand the complexity of it all, the variability of the experience, the difficulties and challenges (on an multitude of levels)  that the process evokes...people who simply accept that change, learning, development doesn't always equate with - forward, upward, linear, straight - but can also mean so many other things.