Doing PhD is a "black box." While inputs, outputs, and milestones are visible, there is a sizeable gap in our understanding of candidates’ lived experiences. This may cause some academic advisors to erroneously assume their students’ experiences are necessarily comparable to their own, and to proceed accordingly. But lived experiences vary enormously, and this autoethnographic study aims to problematize and pluralize the PhD experience by offering a look into the "black box" of one mature-age distance-education student’s lived experience in Australia. Methodologically, the paper innovates by blending reflective, autoethnographic writing with critical analysis of contemporary, self-authored travel zines (akin to low-tech blogging). This exemplifies a suggested middle way between Anderson’s evocative and analytic dichotomy in autoethnography. While the candidate’s development of criticality and confidence are evident, the zines also document confidence-crushing anxiety and burnout as underexplored embodied effects of PhD study, and intersections of candidature and embodiment are also considered.