i took a mental health day

on the heels of my old roommate going back to work after 5 months of mental health leave. I don't know if she knows that I notice, but I'm glad she's happy. She was one of the pretty, popular, normal girls that was always kind to me in a very genuine way, who seemed to really want to know me as a person. People who treat other people that way always go very far in life. I wish I had been able to tell her that two and a half years ago. I guess she maybe needed it.

In the past two weeks, two different people I know have broken their legs, so let's start at my last therapy appointment two weeks ago, when I was feeling good: I was in survival mode. I just had to get through the grind until Thursday and then I could be done and go see my sister for the weekend. I stayed up until 3 am that night, grading, because I thought it had to be done by Thursday, and I wanted to have a good chunk done for the lab meeting on wednesday morning.

When I arrived to this meeting, on 5 hours of sleep (which I understand is a lot for some people, but I do not function well on less than 6), the coordinator was on the ground. Which is a very odd place to see a male authority figure. Turns out he had slipped and broken his ankle, and he tried his very best to give us instructions for the week. One of his notes was that he sure as hell wouldn't be able to finish grading now, so it was okay if the rest of us couldn't. Please let me bring you back to the fact that I had, just prior to this meeting, awoken from what was essentially a nap after grading for something like 15 hours (which involved a lot of breaks, don't get me wrong). So we- the TAs- made plans for how to cover for it, one of the TAs ended up teaching every day that week, which only made me admire her more, and we dealt with it. And I didn't do any more grading. I still have grading. Our students understood; they had a midterm on Friday and wanted to be able to study, and were happy to not have an assignment.

On Friday I drove for 6 hours, twice past a bus that said "Marriage is permanent, to separate before death part is ADULTRY" which so efficiently encapsulates the Vibe of the rural areas of my province, and saw my sister. It was a good weekend, actually- I bought new shoes that are actually waterproof, and some new bras so I didn't have to keep wearing just one, and I saw 3 dear, dear friends I had not seen in a very long time. While I was there, Redbeard decided to head down to the mountains as per usual. So I did not see him.

I brought my sister home, which was another 6 hours of driving and idle chatting, and three days were just normal, except for how badly I wanted to be alone at the end of the day, leading me to stay at school until 10 pm because I just did not want to come home and have to make conversation and watch stupid movies and eat the horrible vegetarian lasagna recipe my mother had found and made since my sister is vegetarian. On Wednesday, I emailed my supervisor.

The previous week, I had sent her a copy of my new thesis proposal, which needs to be submitted to my transfer committee two weeks before my transfer exam. I was told, and my supervisor and I both genuinely believed this, that my transfer exam had to take place before December. She told me my committee was settling on a date in late November. If you do the math, last week was two weeks before that deadline. She gave me the notes on Wednesday, which included adding a whole new section on a whole new tumor. I realized I was going to have to do the best I could by Friday, and told my family I wouldn't be up for socializing too much. They understood. I got out of cleaning out the basement. I told Redbeard to delay visiting me until Friday so he wouldn't distract me. I stayed up until 3 am on Thursday night.

Two things happened between the hours of 9 pm Thursday night and 9 am Friday morning which really fueled my current collapse. The first was a call from Redbeard on Thursday night, which was not actually from Redbeard, but from a friend phoning to tell me he had broken his leg quite badly and was in the hospital in a little mountain town a few hours away. The friend told me he was otherwise fine, and that I was not to come visit that instant. I did not. I planned to visit the next day, after I had submitted my proposal. I stayed up until 3 am reading papers, adjusting the proposal, reading more papers, and finally giving in to sleep. I woke up at 7:30 am.

In the morning, my parents informed me very kindly that they had booked a hotel room for me for two days so that I could go see him, a great kindness considering the expense of booking in hotels in that area. Shortly afterwards, I received an email from the school of graduate studies. Congratulations. Your transfer exam has been set for December 11.

AKA two weeks after it was supposed to be set.

Needless to say I have not read any papers since I got that email, and aside from putting my cells in a buttload of media (aka food for cells), I have not gone back to the lab. On 4.5 hours of sleep, I drank coffee for the very first time as I made another long drive in the dark, alone. I sat with my boyfriend in the hospital as he came off the numbing from his surgery and suffered in a 6/10 bout of pain for two hours until I finally told him that they ought to give him more painkillers, he finally asked, and was given morphine. The next day I went in in the morning and helped him leave the hospital once they'd gone through all the how-tos and given him prescriptions for some very powerful painkillers. I paid for his crutches. I carried all his things to his car and drove him to the hotel and parked in a very stupid spot. I set him up in the room and asked for a shower chair and a second parking pass and got garbage bags and ice and lunch, all while my new boots I'd bought the previous weekend worked themselves further into the already- bleeding blisters on my ankles. I convinced him to just go to the hotel restaurant and asked for a special table and carried a pillow and a garbage bag full of ice and guarded his foot as others walked by. I moved almost all of his gear into my car and took it home with me.

In the morning, I drove his car to a nearby town with considerably better free parking, and got a ride back from a friend of his I'd never met, at 7:30 in the morning. I packed my car even more full with our remaining things and he insisted on helping, and therefore carried one backpack. We got brunch and did a very painful (on his part physically, on my part emotionally as he refused to let me get the car so he could stop walking) short hike and had a small snack. I dropped him off at his car, picked up another friend, and helped move things between cars again, before getting into my own car and driving 3.5 hours to a gas station where I had to pull over because I could not stop crying and thinking about walking in front of a truck.


This morning I woke up and sincerely, truly did not want to have woken up. I knew what was in store for me today: marking, marking, and more marking, restarting experiments that take a ton of time, starting other new ones that are physically exhausting and often disappointing. I stayed in bed until almost noon just crying.


And then I just went... okay, if this isn't the kind of day where I can say no, what is? What will the limit be? Will it be the day I actually try to walk in front of traffic? Will it be the day I try to swallow a bunch of pills? Will it be the day I don't even eat? If I am really, truly, living my life right now as everything happens around me so much, why am I not allowed to say no?

So I did.

I have not done any work today. The only person I have talked to is my mother. I have unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher, cleaned old dishes out of my room, drank copious amounts of water, watched eat pray love in its entirety despite the fact that I do not care for julia roberts, and I am working my way through the laundry so I have pants to wear again. I will have a shower and take out some trash later. I will probably get to marking.

All of this is to say that I'm not sure I can call myself depressed so much as I can call myself overwhelmed. And maybe this isn't what other people's mental health days look like, but I thought... if I can't have one FUCKING day to myself to do all the things i have been putting off in service of things that were "more important" then do I really want to live this life? The answer was no. So I took one fucking day.

I will go back to work tomorrow. I don't have the luxury of taking 5 months off right now. But I will go back with clean sheets and clean clothes and a slightly cleaner room. I will go back with just a little more energy to tackle what needs tackling. I will have had one day to not deal with all the problems in my life- the marking, the reading, the proposal, the boyfriend with a broken leg, the fact that I can't move out of my house until my boyfriend graduates, and now that he can't finish his clinical rotations he probably can't graduate on time which adds another 8 months to our long distance, the transfer exam, the fact that I can't tell what time of day it is anymore sometimes, let alone what day it is.

I kept thinking that was avoidance. But I realized: the only way I can tackle these problems is if I have the energy to deal with them. I don't have any energy. I need to find some first.

So tomorrow I have another therapy appointment, and today I took a mental health day. I hope anyone reading this is having fewer crises than me.