Feb 20
the snow just won’t melt. this year’s shaping up be incredibly uncertain already. this is such an odd time but we have to keep on going without letting our heart break too much.
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the snow just won’t melt. this year’s shaping up be incredibly uncertain already. this is such an odd time but we have to keep on going without letting our heart break too much.
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another year, another acceptance, another go-around on the joyride of waiting for and eventually being denied funding. so much heartache. for what.
Cautiously, very cautiously, I’m reintroducing the idea of (help me) studying further into my life again, but with more clarity this time—in no small part, owing to the work done this summer. The timeline for this, of course, OF COURSE, is whack. Depending on where I end up, I will be 38 or 40 by the time I finish. If I finish. However, this clashes with my draft life plan per which I would also ideally like to become a parent around this exact time. But I don’t suppose the life of a fresh graduate is the most financially stable place to be in for that sort of an undertaking—which could then mean pushing this latter plan farther off into the future. Which is fine, yolo, etc., and lots of people become parents in their 40s, BUT I do worry about health and aging. About bandwidth and energy. I fret, I fret, I chew the insides of my lip and my brain over these matters with the full knowledge that this is not productive. That said, I’m trying to set myself up for not failing too miserably at these plans: I’m finally beginning to get my health across various domains in order. On good days, I can see that I’m growing in the sort of person I had wanted to become at this age, and while there’s some contentment in that, I’m still unsettled by the vaporousness of the future! Peers and even younger folk have settled in forms of domesticity and stability that I am still quite baffled by—but they probably knew themselves and what they wanted, and this, with my unwell mind, I did not, for the longest time.
But we’re here now! I know roughly what feels right. I definitely know what feels good. And re: PhD, I think I need to (obviously) do much more thinking, possibly in concert with people in my life. The wisest, calmest, adultest thing to do right now is to take it a week or a month at a time, build towards variations of the future, in incremental steps. And to try not to freak the fuck out. :)
ok time to hard launch the fact here too that i'm headed to grad school (again, womp womp) this fall. only for another masters, which is a bit of a bummer, but (between a fellowship and RA work) is effectively entirely funded! this, i am happy about. i dislike this country, but i endure boston reasonably well so we will do this! this will also be my first time doing academics full-time while being adequately medicated for my ADHD, so i have good feelings about what this may lead to.
(also, the UK refuses to offer me a funded PhD. and i refuse to pay £25k per year for 3-5 years as an "international student" for a fucking doctorate) (i have some sadness about this but i've got to delude myself into thinking getting an MIT degree will help me eventually with this goal) (++ i still refuse to take the GRE and without it, i could only apply to three programmes this past cycle that waived/did not have this requirement, which unfortunately, excluded all public policy and adjacent programmes and thus, here we are)
still utterly burned out — the vacation didn't help a whole lot, though it did make me feel more clear about quitting my current job — and a more recent symptom of this is completely lacking the will to respond to texts. i want to set an auto-responder that says, "sorry, i do not currently possess the neurotransmitter levels that would allow me to get back to you. please give me one to six business months and things should get better. maybe. i don't know."
speaking about the vacation though, one word: lovely. S: lovely. everything in my life right now (except for crippling, debilitating anxiety and exhaustion): lovely. it turns out that it's very possible to live both of these dichotomous realities at the same time.
the anxiety and ennui and depression is mostly centred around what the rest of this year (and by extension, the next) will look like. the burnout is just from work, especially G20 shenanigans. i'm still drained and depleted from it and i have no idea how to go about filling myself back up again. very few work events have gotten to me like this. but i'm glad that realising how extensively this fucked me over has pushed to me quit. i've been talking to S (and also to myself) about what this will mean. and what all of this will result in. i wish to keep my promises about shifting my approach radically and to prioritise joy and meaning above all things. i wish to draw meaning from the values i hold dear, not from externally focused outcomes. this has been incredible hard to do these past few months, where i was consumed by the anxiety of securing funding for studying further. said funding was not secured. and where does that leave me? i have been quite shaken by this whole thing, not least because the past cycle was so exhausting (especially, particularly, because i only applied to UK schools where a single programme requires up to three different, complete applications). i'm beginning to think i don't have it in me (as things stand right now) to apply again this cycle. and a while ago, this would have freaked me out. i'm beginning to allow this freedom to grow on me though. i must, must prioritise my health and wellbeing, which have been severely compromised this year. i want to spend time on cultivating joy, feeling love. I want to read — and write more if i can. i want to feel curiosity about the questions that propelled me to consider undertaking doctoral studies in the first place. there's a lot of healing that needs to take place, and i don't want to repeat the mistakes of my 20s: ignoring my body in the pursuit of some arbitrary goal, only to meet it and discover the hollowness of it because i, myself, had been hollowed out in making the effort.
if you don't change anything, nothing changes.
i am here. i have everything i need to be content. to feel joy. what a rare and lovely thing. what a shame to while away this time, fretting about non-essentials. no more, no more.
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big bad burnout from work lately, despite my best efforts to try and recoup energy and spirit. i cannot wait for g20 work to be over — this project has fully and utterly drained me — so i can move on to other, only marginally more interesting things. realising once again that i despise client-facing work, absolutely loathe working with this government, and relatedly, cannot hold down "regular" jobs. am about to hit the two-year mark here and it's beginning to feel quite(!!!) untenable now. i would very very very much like to leave please, but i'm not sure i can just yet. the dream would be to move to doing more academically oriented, honest, rigorous research elsewhere — but such opportunities are few and far between. and when they have appeared in the past few weeks, i have literally been too tied up working even on weekends to be able to apply to them.
i just have to get through this workweek and this coming weekend, i shall send out applications to any place that will have me!! another (very appealing) possibility is to join S in boston if a school there — any school, literally — will have me do research even for a pittance. all i need is an academic research gig on my CV so i can apply to doctoral programmes again in the coming cycle. at any rate, i need to get out of here one way or another. if i don't, it'll soon start to make me literally unwell.
uniquely painful to decline unconditional phd offers because funding failed to come through. this actually makes my chest ache. there is a very, very, very real possibility i may have to go through this again the next cycle. i am tired and this is hard.
Still don’t have a good literature synthesis workflow in place. It’s been years. I really ought to get my shit together. Either a PhD begins this year, which makes this even more critically important, or it doesn’t (and I apply again in the next cycle) and I need to clean up my act and improve my proposal drastically (and widen the pool of schools to apply to), which too will take work in this direction. Either way: lots of studying and figuring things out this year.