On perfectionism

 What inspired me to write this post was also almost the reason I took down my "how to get into a science-based master's thesis in Canada" post. It was pointed out to me through a surprising format this morning (tiktok, of all places) that sometimes perfectionism can look like setting absurdly high standards for yourself to prevent yourself from moving forward. Standards like, oh, I don't know, not knowing exactly how something is going to pan out before doing it? Like, say, not knowing how to get into grad school or what to say in an email, so not saying anything at all or even bothering to really try? Having the few half-assed attempts I made be met with crushing defeat? Like.... never even bothering to really pour myself into novel writing, or experiment planning, or reading, or anything because I might not be good at it?

I've managed to make an annual habit of making goals for the year this time of year. I used to do this at the start and end of every school year, but since life doesn't really revolve that way anymore, now I do it in January. It's always interesting to look back and see what actually ended up being a priority for me. One of my goals a few years ago was to learn how to actually french braid my hair. Another one was to do a hike solo. Neither of those were accomplished, but it doesn't really bother me. It feels like part of the process of learning how to set good goals- what actually matters to you? Having nicely braided hair doesn't. What are you actually ready to do? Not hike solo. That's okay. I was ready to do other things, and I did them. This past year in particular, many goals were set that the pandemic disrupted. That sucks- they were things I actually wanted to try and manage doing, like going to conferences, and getting a picture of my fiancee and his parents and I all together. But I won't let myself be mad that I didn't magically find a way around them. I accepted my new reality and worked with it.

So this makes me think that this year a goal of mine is to make some number of mistakes. I've long thought about doing this, actually, trying to intentionally make more mistakes- not by going out of my way to do a bad job, but by making mistakes into something I want to happen to meet a goal, I give myself more freedom to try something I'd be bad at where I would make mistakes. I can very much see it being the case that someone suggests an activity or a hobby or literally anything, and I say "hell yeah- it might be a mistake! Then I can add it to the list." Assuming that makes sense. Even something like, say, doing a bolder experiment in the lab, or even just emailing someone to ask for help. If they're mad at me... then it was a mistake. Score! Another one to add to the list.

Maybe that will work and maybe it won't, but I feel like my life would be so much richer if I would just allow myself to fail or fuck up. If I was counting them, trying to accrue as many as possible. If that was my goal, instead of doing all these things perfectly or well... how much bigger could I be?

Something to think about, in any case. If you know me in real life, tell me... how does 52 sound? 120? I like to use nice round numbers so that I can figure out how many mistakes I should be making, but I also want to ease myself into it (or perhaps setting the wrong number will be another mistake I can cross off the list!)

-swegan

I have been Humbled.

 I'm going to open this by unceremoniously and immaturely letting you know I am writing this from within my office at school. One other grad student is here- one I have a complicated relationship with, whose life, as far as I can tell, consists ONLY of coming to school- and since I don't think she is leaving any time soon despite it being 9:15 PM, I'm going to hope she thinks I'm doing something useful, since I don't want her to like, Know Things about me.

I am in the process of going through my old lab books. When I started grad school, I had the benefit of having old lab books left here from previous years I'd been in the lab. I thought they'd be a gold mine! So many protocols I'd done already! What I failed to account for is that I'm an idiot. I NEVER included pertinent details and the books are a mess. Sometimes I could find some info, but it seems that past me just sort of used these as a log. Which, to be fair, is how I was taught to keep a lab book, excepting that stint in GENET 375 which clearly left my brain as quickly as it entered. How ridiculous! I thought at the time, as I'd spend HOURS in the library working on making sure my lab notebooks for this lab course contained everything required for the grade. This is an absurd amount of work! Well...

Look. This lab is like, 80% ukrainains. The thing about people who are recently from Eastern Europe, as far as I can tell, is that they are very harsh and don't have time for soft sentimentality (which definitely makes me the weepy one, given how weepy I am in relation to much softer kinds of people). They're not quite German in their efficiency, but they are intimidating. Back in February I sought help from one of them for an unrelated issue, and he saw fit to tear into me about my lab book being kept badly. I said nothing at the time. I mentioned it offhand to my (yes, also Ukrainian) supervisor and she said "we'll take a look at it." With her, I've learned, this means that it will not ever be looked at again unless someone else brings it to her attention. So nobody said anything.

Upon using an internet forum (facebook group) to ask my fellow grad students this question, I was rewarded with a lot of answers that said the same thing: Yes, you have been keeping your lab book wrong. Well, sure, said I, growing more flustered. That's what they think. But this system is working for me! It's just a bit disorganized, but it flows better. I need to write these things down. I need to write them down in this order. I know I'm including all the right details now, not like past me who was an idiot who kept her lab books the same way but this time is somehow different, better.

In case you haven't figure out where this is going: it's not different or better. For the past two and a half years I have been keeping my lab books exactly as poorly as I did in undergrad- in HIGH SCHOOL. I thought that because I was older now and had one degree under my belt, I was somehow Smarter and Better- but I'm not. I'm just as stupid as I ever was.

Much as the comment to me in February about my lab book could have been better phrased (even a modicum of kindness and empathy would have done wonders), it was correct. I have been keeping my lab books entirely wrong and that man was right to call me on it.

Today I finally embarked upon a journey into my lab books, thinking SURELY I could organize them into a system that would make sense to some future user in this new format. And I couldn't use them. Listen to me: I did the work, within the past 5 years, I have presented it at conferences, I have presented it in lab meetings, I have presented it to my committee, and I can't figure out what I did. There are calculations with no context attached to them. Which MTT assay was that for? There are so many wasted lines of pure garbage updates I should have been able to phase out within the first 6 months- about when I last split something, changed media, when something got infected... Let me tell you, for the past 6 months I have NOT been recording this information and my cells have stayed just as alive as ever. I have also saved myself a lot of page space.

This is, of course, really fucking embarrassing. I've changed the format I keep my lab books in now, and it does make more sense, while still giving me room to make notes for myself, do calculations, etc. I suppose this is part of the process of being a student, and if anything this is just proof that getting a PhD doesn't make me smart (even if I didn't get a master's in between), that thinking very logically and systematically doesn't always translate to my behavior being logical or systematic. I've been keeping a fucking journal at the bench for the past few years. And while yes, I caught it early enough to be able to produce some sort of guide for whatever sad sack has to use this book after me, and to fix the latter half of my research work so that it IS somewhat comprehensible... it's not a good look for me. 

At the end of the day, the format I'm using now still isn't even what I was told to do back in February. That format assumes that I do each experiment in a one-shot, and I'm not sure where that lab manager got it from, or whether he explained it badly, or whether it works for the kind of work he does, but I've adapted it so it will work for me, and I'm sure it will change over time. I've been lazy with details, keeping things in my head and letting them go when I'm done with them. And now I earnestly have to try to change the entire way I work.

I'm also not sure how to end this except to say if you too were thinking of Icarus, you're not the only one.

Not to be dramatic but I get the news fatigue now

 I know we're all like, fatigued of hearing about news fatigue, but I'm honestly surprised it took me this long. THIS long to finally acknowledge that a big goddamn drain on my energy is the pandemic and the way it, as it has done for everyone else globally, has leached its greedy little fingers down to every last bit of my life. I don't think I realized how much I, as an introvert, needed all that social interaction I was getting. All that stopping by my friend's house for dinner and hanging out, all that camping, all those trips with friends, the occasional parties where I could sit next to people on the couch and drink 5 hard ciders, the dances I didn't go to because I was burnt out by them then. I don't regret that, but you know... what I would give to go dancing now.

Lately it's really been too much to think about. Redbeard and I want to get married in about a year and a half and it feels impossible to plan. How many people can we even have there? If we want to do it in the summer, will things be easier? Do I have to capitulate to an outdoor wedding? What if it rains on the day of? Do I just send 100 people home? Do my extended relatives understand that this means I can't invite them anymore? That it's more important to me to have there the people who are close to me now? How do we book a venue? How do we plan to do a n y t h i n g this way? Will people be vaccinated then? How many guests do we think will be in that category? Fuck, I can't even figure out if we can have an engagement party this summer. Where would we do it? Who would we invite? No one can travel very far and we have so few friends here, and of those who can travel, so many are not in a position to be staying in a hotel just for one party. 

I used to talk a lot about how I didn't really picture my own wedding. I still don't. But the one thing I had started to picture was the reception. A big room with string lights, a room with music that increases in volume as the night goes on, a dance floor full of people I love absolutely getting the fuck down and not giving a shit about what they look like, getting lightly trashed with friends, my hair coming loose and sticking to sweat on the back of my neck, Redbeard smiling and laughing at me, wondering how many good candids our photographer will get. A bachelorette party, I had pictured... a weekend of playing dumb drinking games with friends, making big group meals, playing loud music and being stupid all together, introducing some friends to other friends. What do I get now? What do any of us get? A quiet meal together? Socially distanced partner dancing? Individually wrapped cupcakes? Do we ever get to do it normally or is this virus just here now? Like, forever?

And it's hard to just be like okay, I'll compartmentalize this and think about other things but I can't. Every last thing is tainted. I can't focus on lab work because I worry all the time the lab will be shut down again. I can't watch TV and unwind because nobody socially distances on TV and that's enough to break my immersion these days. I can't play sims because I get jealous of them and how they can just have friends over on a whim. The one time I managed to get away was going camping, but even THAT had the spectre of my return to a mom-imposed quarantine looming over it. Sometimes reading is enough, I guess, until I remember that I can't go to the damn library anymore. I can't go fucking anywhere these days, and even when I do, it doesn't feel the same. Is it ever going to be the same again? Did it take this long for the grief to hit me because I can't keep living in survival mode anymore?

All of it makes me think of the people on social media who rail against masks, against closures, against restrictions and limits. Maybe they're scared too. Maybe they're looking for any last little thing to hold onto that means this won't be forever, things aren't forever changed and altered, that this isn't just the way things are from now on- indefinitely and forever. Some little way we were wrong, that we overlooked something, that what we're doing isn't actually necessary, and I wonder if their ignorance is just some kind of protective mechanism so they don't have to stare their anxiety in the face and feel it, full force. I can't even say I'm doing that with the amount of avoidance I'm doing, but it's not like I get to take two weeks off to just like, grieve. We're all grieving. 

In the beginning I think I thought this wouldn't happen in the way people think no one they know will ever get cancer. Except then I met someone who has cancer. I mean, I guess a tumor isn't quite the same, but I digress. And then I fell in love with him and got engaged and I cannot tell you how much I have changed, living with that. Eventually it's just background noise, and you just accept there is nothing you can do and enjoy what you can while you can. The anxiety is shelved somewhere in the recesses of my brain- only pulled out when something happens that might give me cause to worry again. A seizure, a bad headache, a new MRI. The rest of the time I can't function with that worry open in my mind. 

I guess that's enough to give me some hope. Someday I might be able to shelve this too, to accept that this is how things are, and all I can do is work with it. But right now I'm angry, so fuck it.

-swegan

Is there actually a good space to exist online

 The first social media account I ever had was technically an MSN account. I wanted one so badly when I was 12, because all my friends had them and would talk for hours online after school. I don't actually even know if MSN counts as social media. There were no public posts or public profiles, you had to specifically add friends and then you could only talk to those people if they added you back, and if they removed you, you were SOL and couldn't do anything to them. I used MSN right through high school until it fell out of popularity and was eventually scrapped. Facebook adding an IM feature really killed it- and I really miss just having an IM platform nowadays. 

I've had a Youtube account for a long time too- I don't make any content, I just sometimes leave comments and like that I can have playlists and things saved. This is probably the least toxic one since I can't for the life of me figure out how to turn on notifications for replies to my comments, and I don't want to. I've refused to link it to my google account for years. I don't want it associated with my real name and I never will. This is maybe an okay place to exist at this point. It provides some nice content, I can choose what I want to see, and I've gone back to old playlists many times to amuse myself. 

Facebook was probably the next one. I was one of the last kids my age to get it- halfway through grade 12. My mom forbade us from getting an account until we were I think 15, and I had no interest in it until 16 or 17 when I realized that was the cool new place to hang out after school. In those days (around 2012) it was a very different place. We'd make posts and friends would add hundreds of comments, creating in-jokes that would have me in stitches that we'd reference the next day at school, or using it as a tool to collectivize work when IB got difficult. It was helpful when I left for university. But soon after that it changed- suddenly every company had a Facebook page, and now it feels like almost the entirety of my timeline is just posts from pages, or ads of posts from pages, and very little actual content, or people re-sharing viral posts made by one person about the latest hot-button topic. I mean, it's great that I can follow and engage with local politicians (at least, those that are with-the-times enough), but it's not personal anymore. One of my friends deleted her profile years ago, and though I know it's not even remotely necessary to have it anymore, I've been tempted for years.

I was on twitter very briefly between 2013 and 2014. All I did was get into arguments with companies and not understand how the platform worked. I followed a lot of people whose content I thought I was interested in, only to find that scrolling through twitter was actually really, really boring. I deleted it within a year and have never been tempted to go back. It gave me nothing.

Around this time I had just received an iPhone, which meant that Instagram and Snapchat were suddenly available to me. These ones have been pretty interesting because they both started with that same kind of only-interact-with-your-friends structure. Both have changed considerably since I first joined. Snapchat added stories and now has a whole page of Branded Content from companies. I've fallen down that Branded Content rabbit hole many times in a desperate attempt to escape my life and look at something on the internet in bed instead. But this only really happened when I wanted to get away from Instagram. Instagram for me still consists of a non-revealing name and a private account, but I've followed public brands and different public profiles from time to time. I'm starting to notice now that the majority of my feed is taken up by these people I don't even know, even if their content is really well done. That always comes because I'd unfollow everyone I didn't know personally and would be left with almost no content ever posted. In my desperate need for entertainment, I'd follow more people again. I'd spend hours on the explore page. When I tried to delete the app and take breaks from time to time, I'd just switch over to snapchat and do the same thing. For now they've both been replaced by another app that I'll get to later.

The next one was tumblr. This was my favourite and I still find myself scrolling through people's blogs. For a while Tumblr felt like the centre of the internet, the place to be. I'd see memes generated there trickling down to Facebook eventually, and I liked that I felt like I was seeing everything right as it happened. I felt like I was there to witness a lot of important moments in terms of internet culture. It also fed into some of my not-so-bright sides; I was suckered into believing far too many things and the people I was interacting with didn't view me as a person. I was just some blog. The way I left might sound embarrassing to some, but those aren't really my people anyway. I was being aggressively gaslit about a very basic facet of reality, and at the time I had just started grad school and was struggling through the refeeding portion of intuitive eating. I had just moved away from my boyfriend, was living at home again, had no idea how grad school was supposed to work, and was less than a year out of a planned suicide date. I had what I can only call a small breakdown, complete with self harm and all, and my boyfriend was becoming very concerned. He asked me to consider whether or not being on this platform was best for me. At the time, I was met with a lot of adrenaline whenever I opened the app or loaded the website as more and more people found my sideblog and decided I wasn't worthy of basic respect or humanization, and was instead worthy of wishes that I choke and die, that I be referred to as "it," all that classic tumblr stuff. In an impulsive move, I logged out, got rid of all the remember-my-password features, and decided to just NOT use the platform for a while. Two years later I signed in to prevent my account from being lost, clicked around for 5 minutes, and left. I remember how much it sucked.

I'm technically on Linkedin, but I use it so infrequently and find it so useless beyond having a resume available for anyone who googles me that I don't worry about how it impacts my life at all. I imagine when I graduate I might use it more for job-searching and some kind of weird networking, but for now it just exists as a professional public record of myself. The things I want to be attached to and associated with by people who might let me one day sell them my labor.

The same can be said for Pinterest. It's such a weird place at this point, but it's a nice place to gather pictures into categories. It never sucks me in for very long, but it has its uses. It's probably one of the least personal ones there is because it feels like so little of what's posted is actually from real people anymore, and the vast majority of users are just there to gather images. Half of the images I see are shitty weight loss ads, and the rest are professionally taken photographs that have trickled their way through the internet to be posted there. 

Reddit was the second to latest one. I was on it for less than a year. I'd been scrolling through it without an account for a while and noticed it was doing odd things to the voice inside my head. I'd been filled with self doubt, and decided if I really wanted to be on this platform, I'd make an account so I could visit less toxic subreddits. For a while, this was really nice. There's a decent intuitive eating/anti-diet/HAES community on there that's well-moderated. I finally got to engage in feminist discourse in a way other than memes. And then I started getting in arguments again. I'm not sure at this point if that's a natural skill I have, a natural flaw I have, or just how these platforms operate. Probably some mix of all three. It got to a point where it was the same as it had been with Tumblr. I took a couple of breaks, but the straw that broke the camel's back came this summer. I left a nice message for someone from the IE community I'd been privately messaging and signed out. I have no intention of opening that website again, unless I'm looking for reviews of something. 

The last one was TikTok. I know that's lame. I definitely resisted for a while, and their model sucks you in pretty well. This is one I've only been on since May or so, and it's provided me with a lot of entertainment and late nights. It gave me a window into a lot of different content I hadn't interacted with much on other platforms- particularly indigenous content. But I've noticed a lot of things lately that remind me of how Tumblr used to be, namely, the designations of different "sides" of the app and the overwhelming lack of critical thinking visible in a lot of content. On the one hand, I can follow people who remind me of me, who are going through similar journeys and struggles, and people who are trying to share help and advice who are further along in the same journey. I can watch people grow a lot of plants. I can watch people convert vans to live in them. I can learn about social issues going on in other parts of Canada that my CBC news app somehow hasn't covered yet. I can learn new recipes. I can find small businesses to support (I've bought one or two things from small businesses I found on this app). The privacy violations and angry teenagers calling me "Karen" for telling them not to cheat (and there's a whole host of thoughts behind the Karen thing, but for now I invite you to consider the implications behind the lack of a male equivalent for that term) have made me question whether or not this is something to use in the long term, especially combined with how it is rapidly turning into an app that led me to break down once upon a time.

And the thoughts on quitting each of these are complicated. I've logged out of Facebook and Instagram for short periods, and in not wanting to be "that person" who brags about taking time off, left without saying anything. This led to a lot of annoyance from people who had sent me things I didn't see, who assumed I'd still be there. I also did this with snapchat for a while. Snapchat is complicated because I've gotten a lot- and I mean a LOT- of compliments both from my friends and from my sister's friends that my snap stories made them laugh so hard. That kind of praise feels really, really good and is hard to get away from. Sometimes though I think creating it is my way of dealing with stressful situations, but it's not always the best way to deal. It also means that any time I create something to share that doesn't get that kind of reaction, I feel let down. It's an odd thing to navigate. 

There's also that changing-my-mind guilt that comes with any of this. At some point in the past, I thought each of these platforms were a good idea and recommended them to others. But nearly a decade and a half of being on these platforms is really making me start to think about whether I was right as everything becomes more commodified and alike. Some of these platforms has caused me to find ways to spend money I may not otherwise have spent. I think probably in terms of my immediate social circle, I use them more than anyone else I know, which is alienating in and of itself. Is it really a good idea to be this involved when I've taken a break from every single platform I've ever joined? Or is that normal- no one should be expected to use these things in the same way forever? I get some anxiety about quitting- it feels like cutting off a lot of connections, and beyond that, a lot of ways to know about ways to make new connections (things like volunteering opportunities, etc). Almost all the swing dance organization in my city is done over Facebook. I've learned a lot about racial inequality through Instagram. Pinterest is helping me get a handle on the very basic beginnings of wedding planning. And so on and so forth.

I heard a podcast episode about this book (a podcast I wouldn't have found without Instagram, of course) and got my hands on a copy of it from the library and read it. The book was "24/6" by Tiffany Schlain, and it really resonated with me. The author details how her family has done a "Tech Shabbat" for many years where they shut off all devices with screens on Friday night, have a nice dinner together, and spend then until Saturday evening completely unplugged. She also writes about the benefits of doing this, the dangers of being constantly connected, and gives some how-to advice. It made me think about all my anxiety about camping this summer. I was so afraid that in the few days I'd be off the grid, somehow the lab would be back up and running and I'd miss everything and have to scramble to catch up. I felt guilty about just not being accessible. I think some of the guilt associated with leaving social media is the same. Where do people reach me? How will I remain connected? How will I find new opportunities? How will I connect with my community? And as everyone is saying these days- this is all obviously way more difficult in an era where face to face communication is no longer the ideal, and it remains unknown when it will be ideal again. 

Maybe it would be worthwhile to set some limits- except that every time I do I almost always break them immediately. I think the issue is that I don't think of stuff to fill the void that not being on my phone leaves (and I know that's pathetic. I get it). I can't handle not having a place to turn to immediately distract myself from my anxiety or amuse myself when I'm bored or feel like I'm "having some fun" in a busy day before I go to bed only to have another busy day the next day. Or the most tricky void of all- the fact that social media feels like a break at my desk (which I should have known would signal to my brain that we aren't taking a break at all). I can just have a break and not worry about missing an important email! I'll be right here to answer it! And like.. the horror of that statement is not lost on me. 

It's all compounded too by the lack of time off I took this summer. I was operating under the impression that I had to be available to do lab work once we reopened in July because who knows when things might shut down again... but this means the last time I took a break longer than a long weekend was last Christmas. We all remember (or at least my blog does) how well I was doing mentally when last Christmas came around. I'm anxious right now that there's something I'm forgetting to do. The last time I took a full day away from screens was literally in June when I went camping and got engaged.

So I guess there is no good solution. I wish I'd been old enough to experience the web before social media, but by the time I was 10, Facebook already existed. I've grown up in a family that's been well-off enough to always have had a computer, and got my first computer at 12. I've picked up my phone probably 50 times while writing this whole thing, feeling uncomfortable as I do, since I know it's not perfect, and just wanting to escape into one of many apps. 

If anyone has a good solution, or wants to talk to me about this- leave a comment, message me irl, or just feel free to think about this for like, 243 days and then do any of those- all are fine. I'm willing to bed it's not just me who struggles with these things.

What's an anxiety attack

 This isn't going to work. You're wasting time and money no shut up, let me try it. I will wash the blot I used for GAPDH before blocking it. just wasting buffer WELL WE WON'T KNOW UNTIL TOMORROW WILL WE. 

You have to send an update, what have you done? It's fine, I can tomorrow is the 28th. you don't have time But I just presented. Surely if I email and ask to be set free from this what and have it be like the last 8 updates you've sent where you always claimed something was going on, the dog was sick, the dog died, you were on vacation, you were busy, is school ever a priority to you? I have stuff going on. Someone is moving in. I'm basically moving no you're not stop lying my room is changing you don't have to pack. None of that has to happen that fast well that makes me anxious too fucking bad. stupid baby. makes you anxious. who the fuck cares. People are paying you money to get results I'm trying no you're not. stupid idiot. Why don't you know how RIPA works already I did it last 5 years ago. I can figure it out again oh and another month of troubleshooting, how will that look at your committee meeting my committee meeting doesn't have any bitter ukrainian men on it

why haven't you started the ic50 analysis yet what if it doesnt work what if I have to pay $30 a montha nd that doesn't motivate me to do it. why is the software so expensive. Why can't I get anything done I want to cry no don't cry don't let anyone see you doing that, that's weird, you can't do that remember what she said to you. no no no no don't cry you can't cry dry your face off and get better get tougher you can't cry just because you're 24 and unsure of everything and think about dying every minute of the day. tough it out. do better. nobody will believe you. some of the people who love you already don't believe you because they would only believe you if you were too sick for them to believe it was anything but laziness. do the analysis. and finish the paper. maybe i can pull 5 all nighters to finish it and then happy birthday to me. maybe i can build a pathway. oh god, I'll have to reread all the papers. how is the pathway different from the adult one, how long will it take me to understand all those pathways you have to make dinner. find time for fried rice. chop all the carrots celery fry them. fry eggs fry rice add soy sauce. add green onions. add ginger. wash the pan wash the plates wash the knife wash the board smooth out the paper, why isn't it smooth yet,

what if i'm not good enough what if i'm never enough is this a panic attack i can't tell i just need to get to my car and then you can cry why does this place always make me cry because this is the place you go to fail every day and nobody knows and everyone thinks everything is fine but none of my data is working and i don't know what i'm doing anymore and it's too much the ic50 software the figure the pathway the RNA-seq analysis and how you have no data from that and you don't know how it got run through the western blots aren't working should i be growing cells for protein what if that doesn't work what if my ic50 data is bad what if it shows i need to use a different concentration what do i need to include in my committee presentation what about my regular update gotta smooth out the paper why did you read that book it's too stressful why is your lab book not put together properly why why why are you like this why can't you be like the others and have your life perfectly arranged to run and eat salad and show up and drink coffee and design experiments that work and you never ever have to ask for help ever ever everyone else is too busy why don't you know how to do this do i look it up in a paper? is it there? god just get to your car don't cry don't cry odn't cry i can't breathe, my throat feels like it's swollen shut and it hurts and my breath comes in little gasps all the time 

but I deserve to be alive. So how am I going to make it work?

The things I'm truly afraid of

I'm sitting here with an engagement ring on my finger, 1 week shy of finally moving in with my recently-turned-fiancee, and having just read yet another in the endless list of surprisingly apt feminist thinkpieces littered across the internet (revealed only if one spends time in the right sort of spaces for them to enter your view). I'm having another glass of rose and maybe finally understanding why people drink alcohol so much. The defensive anxiety that tries to protect me from the idea that my thoughts might be bad is just... gone, and it's so nice to not have to deal with that for like, two hours.

The intent when I sat down was to do more work, but I think I only actually have like 4 good hours of work in me on any given day, and I can only stretch that if I know I need to (see: me before my transfer exam last year... and even then it was mostly just sitting in front of my computer). 

But what happens when we live together? What happens to my long, glorious stretches of time alone? Right now all our time together is these surreptitiously stolen weekends and long holidays, time when we can focus solely on being together and being a couple. Those are such deliciously happy moments. What happens when every moment is just... us being together? Neither of us has the time, and I don't have the energy, to be in that couple-focused space and to be living our own lives. What happens? I don't know.

I don't hear anything good, ever, of course. Everything you hear about living with men is bad. It kind of makes me wonder if I'm still a special kind of delusional for thinking that He Will Be Different. I know he's reading this too, maybe we will fight about it later, but then it's things like that that make me think maybe I'm right. Maybe knowing that posting this is a safe kind of transgression is a good sign. They say that that's a certain kind of safety in love, that you can get mad at the other person and know they still love you. It's not like this is the first he's hearing of this, either.

But suddenly it seems that a chapter of my life is closing, perhaps forever. Oh, sure, his hobby keeps him away on weekends and random chunks of time in the summer, keeps him hunched over a laptop poring over google earth and... sitting to count carabiners, I don't know. For all the bits and pieces of mountaineering I've absorbed over the past 5 years, I guess I still don't know that much about it. But those are weekends and random chunks of time. Every day I spend hours alone with my own thoughts, absorbed in work or play or whatever you classify mindless internet scrolling as. I spend it sipping wine and writing blog posts like this, or working on my novel that I really do want to publish, or finding more things to add to my to-do list. What happens when someone else needs my time more?

The article that triggered all this, if you were wondering, was about how there are so few great women creatives and geniuses because all those great men had women in the background taking care of all those stupid minor details of life. You think they were all washing dishes? No, they were making female servants and wives do that, they made their wives mind the children and make meals and tend to the house, busy work that leaves little time for an idle mind to create something. Not that I want to like, move into a shitty apartment and do nothing so I can write all day, but aside from the creativity aspect, there's the mental health one. I need time alone. That is not just me being dramatic. I don't want to meet who I am if I have to spend all my time with other people.  

Maybe this will work?

 It was very un-constructively pointed out to me at a meeting last week that I am Not Doing Enough, so I'm going to try to jumpstart motivation AGAIN with a night spent working on one, maybe two things.

1) my review paper. It needs smoothing.

2) Idk. like, project managing my thesis project or something. It's a big old mess and trying to get it to work in my head is clearly Not It.

The twist? I'm drinking. Not that much- I have stuff to do tomorrow- but enough to like,  make me more creative or whatever.

Shit, I just remembered I need to go over the assignment key for our lab before tomorrow. It's 7:45 PM- let me just do that before I get too into this rose.

All right. It's now 7:53. That didn't take long at all. This is why I like the teaching part of my degree... simple, low-nonsense (I can't say no-nonsense when second years behave the way they do), clearly defined tasks with definite guidelines. Not the chaos of charging into the unknown field of knowledge and trying to prove that I've shown what I say.

*sips wine*

Let's get started on that paper. It is now 7:54.

It's now 8:04. I've strung several things together and had more wine. All I see in this paper are gaping holes that require hours of research to fix (it takes so long to find the correct search terms, let alone finding papers that look relevant, let alone finding out if they ARE relevant, let alone citing them in this paper after reading and organizing them... but then again, how many hours did I spend reading blogs today?)

I'm putting on some lofi. It's too quiet and my thoughts are too noisy.

8:18 PM. I've hit a block. I have no motivation to reword a whole paragraph down into a sentence in a previous paragraph. I decided to see how many sources I have. 56. Pretty good I guess considering that there's still some more to be added, I think ~100 ish is typical for a review (like anywhere between 80-200 I'd say, and this is my first paper... like ever).

I don't know if the wine is helping or if I just decided to start working and that did it. But I can feel it in my legs, so it must be doing something. I'm gonna try to push through.

I did it. I made it work. It's 8:31 now and my brain is just not processing words anymore, so I think I'll take a little break. I will do my very best to keep it little.

Oops it's 9:02 but I caught myself ladies. No worries.

It's 9:28 and in the process of trying to make sense of some notes I took after reading a paper (they're suitably concise, but unsuitably confusing and dense with waaaay too many acronyms) to add to this review paper and reshaping, smoothing, and streamlining like 1/3 of it... I'm realizing the depths of my depression.

No, it's not because this work is unbearably miserable. I actually don't mind this writing and analyzing kind of stuff. It's because I keep thinking I don't want to do this, but when I ask my brain for a suitable alternative activity, it gives me nothing. Playing the sims? nope. Too much effort. Writing? I'm not in the mood. Reading? Boring. Eating? I mean you could but intuitive eating has proven that doesn't really work they way you want it to, and I'm not really hungry in the first place (I have a little of the wine munchies, but that's it). Go to bed? Is that really my best option? To just let today be over? and going to the lab seems like this unbearable task- I avoid it the way I did in my fourth year.

You want to know what happened in my fourth year? I was suicidal. I was miserable. I was convinced there was nothing for me. 

What's changed? Well, I no longer feel guilty for feeling this way. Being diagnosed by an actual psychologist allows me to shift the blame onto something beyond my control, which is good and bad. Good because it's not my fault. Bad because sometimes that makes me feel hopeless. If this was just a character flaw, then I could fix it, right? But then I think no, people learn how to cope with all kinds of disorders all the time. I cope with my asthma by just carrying an inhaler around constantly. But how do I cope with this?

I don't want to do anything. Nothing sounds exciting anymore, much less going to the lab, an environment that has enough toxic people to make it draining and brings up so much unconscious shit I believe about my worth that just existing in that space and navigating it is exhausting. Plus I did a 16 hour day on Saturday, which I think burnt me out a little.

I feel stuck. I don't know what to do next in the lab and I'm out of things I can do myself. I feel like a baby for needing so much help and advice from others. Everyone else in the lab is up to their eyeballs in work and I feel like I'm either drowning, or just... drifting. Directionless, not wanting to be a bother. It's something I'm working on. It did not help today when my mom asked "well how are you going to do those things without asking for help?" and then scoffed at my answer of "keep going to therapy to work out why I know the solutions but am afraid to do them." Fuck you. I know you don't believe I'm depressed and it haunts every cell in my body.

I don't even know what I see in the future for me anymore. Sometimes I can imagine it, always in a different way, a potential path stretching out in front of me. Today it's just a big question mark. What's the point? I just keep waking up all the time. 

I will figure it out. I will figure it out. I will figure it out. This came to me in the bathroom about halfway into my 16 hour day, when nothing was working and I was frustrated to still "just be troubleshooting western blots" as an asshole of a ukrainian postdoc so crudely and unhelpfully phrased it when I presented all the data my depressed ass had amassed from July until now on Friday. Fuck him, but as I was sitting there I hit some kind of weird mental second wind. "There has to be a way to solve this," I thought, wiping tears off my face with a scrunchie since the paper towel dispenser was too far away. "I just have to keep trying." I spent the rest of the day, while exhausted, managing to get a lot more done and dancing and knowing I'd get a day off afterwards.

Grad school is exhausting for constantly needing to prove yourself. It is a hyper-competitive environment of people who are the best of the best of the best. I know logically that people only ask me all these questions because they want me to know I need to answer them to make my research sound and good, and they know I might not know this because I am a student. But god does it wear at your worth and your resilience and your patience and your motivation to always know that nothing you ever produce will be good enough at any meeting you have, that any presentation of your results is the most literal, terrifying sense of submitting to the mortifying ordeal of being known (a phrase I cannot claim to have invented but have since lost the source of). Every time I present my work I am ranked and compared and questioned and questioned and questioned as everyone at the table pulls apart all the threads of the tapestry I've so carefully assembled. Then I'm just supposed to put it together some other way again, find and weave in new threads to make the picture more complete, only to have it torn apart again 6 months later? golly gee, wonder why I'm so depressed and tired and sick of everything. I wonder why teaching work is easy for me to do when it's stable and predictable and basic and easy and clearly defined. 

So is it really surprising that I'm constantly now doubting and second guessing myself and my own work and have no confidence in it anymore? I don't think I've ever been good at believing in myself. That fact is so burned into the core of my being that sometimes I don't even believe in my own worth, and the work of making myself believe it is never seen as the serious, exhausting work it is. Work only good if it produce result for capitalism, or for your thesis committee, or whatever. Every time I send an email it is me affirming that I'm worth that person's time. That what I need matters and I deserve to get help and my work is not automatically less important than everyone else's. The RAs and techs and postdocs in the lab will be there for like... a while. I need to leave this place eventually. I need to get a degree. The university will not let me stay here forever.

I'm trying my best, I promise.

It's 9:49.

What is a Blog anyway

 I doubt anyone has noticed since I have a readership of like, maybe 10 people on a good day (not counting the Russian bots), but recently I went back and unpublished all the posts I made before I started my undergrad- so everything before September 2013. Reading those old entries was painful. Mostly because they were so badly written and clearly stream-of-consciousness, not because I was going through a lot at the time. I didn't really want those out there associated with me anymore, and I don't really want other people to be able to go back and read them even if they're able to picture a much younger version of myself writing them.

I've also been thinking a lot lately about actually using this blog for something. I don't know where I got this idea, but I have this sort of... itch in my brain to do something creative, and this has always been a really easy outlet for me. I have a lot of different ideas for things I could do, some of which work much better as a podcast, but the end goal is just to have a kind of project to work on that isn't related to grad school or therapy (even if I make a lot of blog posts about those things anyway).

Recently I've drafted several posts about little how-to guides, similar to the one I made a while back about getting into a master's degree. The motivation for that post was basically that I wish that guide had existed for me somewhere, so I made it assuming that other people were also in my shoes. The posts I have drafted are also similar- the goal with them is to use my own personal experience to help others and write the guides I wish I could have had. It's a bit like writing to my past self, in a way. Sometimes it's kind of comforting to think that if only I could have the wisdom of me from a year, five years, ten years, 20 years from now, I'd feel better, more capable, more confident, more secure, more trusting of goodness in my life. I also found at those points in my life that advice online never felt quite right, it never took into account the things I wanted it to. Sometimes the way I figure out how to do something new is by asking what I wish already existed but doesn't, and then asking if I can create that myself. In this case, the answer is obviously yes.

Sometimes it's tempting to think that I wouldn't be as depressed as I am now if I'd had those guides, whether that's because I wouldn't have made mistakes that led me to the wrong place or because I would have just been able to trust that things work out. Of course, I don't need to have guidance from my future self to have faith in those things anyway. I just really, really wish that having faith in them was easy, and it's not.

Ideally I'd like some more engagement- my mind runs wild with grandiose ideas that I could get a good patreon going and make an insane monthly salary just for producing content, but I have enough experience getting new things off the ground to know that even if that were a reality for me, it's a ways away. Groundwork has to be laid first, and then I have to build on that to get to a place where trying for something like that is even possible. But I can put in groundwork and building work, so really... it's not impossible.

I've been taking in a lot of stories of creative people lately- mostly from tiktok, don't judge- who have little etsy stores and work hard on them only to see them suddenly take off with a stroke of good, viral luck, and have that allow them to fulfill a dream. I see these little creators who are not rich by any stretch of the imagination, nor the best of their kind ever, happy because they are doing what they wanted to do, able to support themselves a bit with it, and also getting better at their craft every day. I'd like to think that's possible in writing through blogging.

I also ran this idea past some friends last night over drinks and dinner (this is something we can do where we are- servers and staff are required to wear masks, the menus are disposable, and the entire restaurant is set up to facilitate social distancing). It was so refreshing to realize it's not just me who thinks about things like starting a podcast, writing a book, doing something creative and putting it out there. Maybe that's just a feature of being in your 20s. The conversation wasn't necessarily super hopeful, but it was a good one nonetheless (a friend even suggested what I think is a good contender for a blog name).

People make blogs all the time to document, like, their eating disorders, or their struggle through college, or being a young parent. I'm a graduate student constantly riding that line of having problems but not really, even in retrospect. I have a lot of advice I wish I could give to my previous self- mostly concrete at the moment, and I really like to think there's someone out there who could benefit from either feeling like they're not the only one struggling now, at a similar place in life as I am, or feeling like they have another guide or more advice that I like to think is different or offers something new.

In all honesty it would be nice to get contributions from others. So if you are seeing this, I ask you this: think about a struggle you went through in your past where you felt like you couldn't find the right advice, or any good advice. It can be anything, it can be very concrete (getting into grad school, buying a car, etc) or more abstract (figuring out what to do with your life, realizing your mental health is a problem, etc). Write the guide you wish you had found when looking for help, advice, guidance, whatever. What do you wish was added to the considerations? What specifically did you learn only through experience? Who else do you think might have gone through something similar? Can your advice be tailored to them?

Those are basically the questions I go through, albeit more informally. When I wrote the post about getting into grad school, I remembered feeling frustrated that nothing seemed to be about a master's program. All the advice I could find about contacting professors felt stale, scripted, and useless. Most of the information was American. It did not take into account that I didn't have a stellar GPA, even if it was still good, so the advice about having a bad GPA didn't work either. It assumed that I was not depressed. It assumed that I was trying to get into a PhD program (this was actually the biggest problem). It assumed that I'd already done a lot of things- in high school, undergrad, whatever- that I maybe hadn't done. And then I started to think about my ideal guide- something that would have carried me perfectly through the process. And then I wrote it.

I think I'll stick to that theme for now. If anybody I know is reading this- message me with your thoughts if you're so inclined. If you want to comment, comment. I'd love to hear some thoughts.

Funny how those things work

Like, I don't want to call this a trigger, but I don't have a better word for what just happened to me this morning so let's lay it all out here.

For context: I have been seeing a therapist since October started (so 10 months now) and working on high-functioning depression and some level of underlying anxiety. This isn't a clinical diagnosis so much as... that language helps me sort out what's going on and helps me talk with my therapist (who is a psychologist). I also have to pass a comprehensive exam as part of my PhD exam. I was told that this had to occur sometime between 12-18 months after I entered the PhD program, which would be between January and June 2021. So I'd been planning my life around that basically. I also hadn't seen any other graduate students in the lab since March 19 until this week, including the two that started at the same time as me, who I saw today. These two are both 10+ years my senior and have MDs and have been to grad school already.

Today one of them shared with me that she passed her comprehensive exam. Only 6 months after passing her transfer exam. And as soon as I found this out I spiralled REAL bad into a full-blown mental breakdown (as I define it, which is basically just to say I could not get this thought out of my head and had to leave the lab as quickly as possible to cry all the way home in my car, desperately reaching for strategies to sort out what the fuck was happening to me. I tried first with something I've been working on with my therapist for anxiety, of identifying my feelings, identifying the what ifs, figuring out what it would mean about me if those what-ifs were true, and then sorting out the root belief that is causing me pain... but the problem was this wasn't an anxiety feeling. These were depression thoughts. Anxiety, for me, is anticipating the worst. Depression is believing the worst is already true. 

Why didn't you think of that? You could have been done this already. Why can't you manage your graduate program like she can? Now she just has 3 years to focus and research. Why aren't you proactive like that? You're not meant to be here, you have no idea what's really going on which as I sat and analyzed and analyzed and analyzed on the way home boiled down into Why the fuck are there all these rules and guidelines if nobody is going to follow or enforce them, like do any of them actually matter or am I making myself crazy following them which I then identified as an enneagram thing- hear me out- because as an enneagram 6, I know that I constantly look for guidance externally and my whole life is basically just evaluating authority figures to decide whether to trust them or not and then trusting them with sometimes damaging blind loyalty, and being really confused and uncomfortable with the fact that people are just a mix of good and bad, all the time, in all aspects of their life. 

I connected that to the fact that I am getting next to no guidance on this journey. I am trying to learn and follow the rules after figuring out that my supervisor isn't going to keep tabs on me, and trying to keep tabs on myself, only to learn sometimes the tabs don't even matter, or that I'm the only one that cares about them. Except sometimes they DO seem to matter, and how things are enforced is very arbitrary to me and it is exhausting trying to figure out which rules are going to be used against me and which rules I am using against myself for following them for no damn reason.

Example: I am required to have two committee meetings a year. I did not think this was a hard and fast rule. Except when I tried to transfer and the SGS tried to say I wasn't in good standing (while simultaneously deciding I would get an $11,000 award that SAME semester which I wouldn't find out about until THIS semester) because I had only had one committee meeting that year, so I pulled together some data, sent it to my committee members, and got them to sign the form. The rule didn't matter insofar as I needed to have an actual committee meeting. I just needed my committee members to sign a form saying "yeah, she's fine, she's doing well" and give that to the SGS. 

Example: I had to undergo an hour of training for this pandemic specifically, and sign a form saying I understood the lab safety rules after an hour long meeting of being told to wear a mask, wear goggles, avoid coming in at the same time, don't spend more than 4 hours on campus, etc... only to find people not wearing masks (nor goggles- but somehow I sussed out that that rule was bs) nor doing all this scheduling they said they were going to be doing to make sure we weren't coming in at the same time. The person who had me sign the form I witnessed an hour later having a maskless conversation in a small room he did not have a reason to be in with another maskless person. Many times I come into the lab to see maskless people who only put on their mask once they see me with mine. 

And countless other tiny examples of little rules I thought were real only to find out I was stressing myself out about following them for no reason or little rules I thought were bs only to find out they were being enforced for no reason and me not following them had severe consequences. 

So that's how a colleague sharing good news led to me having to fight back thoughts of you'll never figure this out or be good enough, just kill yourself, it's never going to get better to get to the understanding that I HATE WHEN PEOPLE DON'T FOLLOW THE RULES EVENLY. Why bother having rules that aren't enforced or followed alongside ones that are? How are people supposed to exist in that environment??? And somehow I'm the stupid one for not magically knowing which is which? This is what I mean when I say I feel like everyone else in the world knows something about being an adult that I missed the memo on. How the fuck are you all sorting through this??? I CANNOT FIGURE IT OUT.

And I'm angry. As far as I can tell I'm the only one in the lab struggling with this. It is so much work to pull my stupid ass brain back from the edge of the cliff every goddamn day. I am so tired of it. It's so stupid! Other people's brains don't do this!!!!! Why does mine?

But because I can't change that fact, I am instead deciding that from here on out I am making a habit of asking myself "Does this feel right to me?" before I make decisions where I feel uncertain. Wearing a mask all the time in the lab. Yep, feels right. Doing my comprehensive exam over the summer? Feels like a bad idea. My original plan of doing it in the winter works better for me. I've planned out my life around that. It's not going to negatively impact my degree. It's just going to be different.

Micro decisions about when I work and how much I do in the lab day to day? Remains to be seen. But I'm coming to realize if I don't grow even a SHRED of self confidence in the way I'm doing things I'm going to lose my mind, so I'm doing them my way from now on and I'm gonna be obnoxious about it until it becomes a habit. Maybe it takes me a year to write a review paper before it's ready to be submitted! Maybe it takes me an extra day to do a western blot because I don't feel like staying an extra 4 hours in the lab! Who the fuck cares!!!! It's not their project! It's not their degree! It's not their SANITY on the line! GOD I'm done.

-swegan

I'm also not like, blind to what's going on, in case anyone was wondering

Like I guess this counts as my "platform" but considering the only readers I have are like, weird russian bots and people I know in real life, and the fact that I have never in any way, shape, or form tried to make this profitable, readable, popular, etc and have NO interest in that being the case, I do not and will not put myself in the category of someone with a platform. I don't have influence to the point that it's a job, or a side hustle, or some kind of moral necessity. And yet... I'm still here writing this.

This whole month has given me the gift of people opening up about their experiences to me. Talking to me about this. Making new connections. It's helped me see which of my friends cares about this enough to say "you know what, even if it's uncomfortable for me, I should probably share a thing or two that resonated with me"and which of my friends seem to be of the opinion that "I won't share, but I will be open about this personally with people I am close to" and which of my friends are still saying "I just don't wanna." It's white privilege to be able to ignore this and just continue your life, you know. Society is built for you to ignore it. You're okay being complacent in that? I also don't want to say there's some overlap with friends who have said absolutely nothing in any capacity and friends who attended a "ghetto" themed party in high school (DESPITE me protesting that the theme was OVERTLY and CLEARLY racist) but like... there is. (I also know some people just don't post on social media at all, really, and I've seen nothing from them for months- I know that people use that kind of stuff differently).

And also honestly like.. the world does NOT need my opinion on this. I'm a highly privileged white woman and while I'm intelligent and empathetic, we can all see how this problem does not affect my life. I live in a majority white city in a majority white neighbourhood. I didn't see any real diversity in skin tone until I attended a major university. The vast majority of my friends are white. At least half my colleagues are white, and I can see fields around me that are vastly majority white. And this is the point where I'm supposed to say that's not a bad thing, bla bla white people are good, but there is literally an entire social system here set up for them to think that as a default so I'm not going to bother. It should be obvious that I don't hate myself for being born white- I obviously can't help that, nobody can. But is the whiteness of all that a good thing? Objectively not. It makes me more comfortable because everybody assumes I belong... but I don't think I deserve to feel comfortable for that. I deserve to feel like I belong in that space because I do- I earned my way there (aware of how some of that was unearned as well), I want to be there, I am there, I'm contributing. Not because I'm fucking white and "of course white people do science!" Literally FUCK that attitude. That's what I mean when I say whiteness in the space I work in is objectively bad. That's what it is.

That's something I've been trying to check in myself lately. It's literally the smallest thing I can do, and I know that. but when I drive through an unfamiliar neighbourhood, I know nobody will call the police or give me funny looks, because I'm white. I know that if I'm on campus late and it's dark and I'm walking to my car with my hood up, people just assume I'm a student who belongs there, because I'm white. When people see pictures of me they will be less likely to assume I'm not capable, that I was given something unfairly, that I didn't earn my way to where I am (of course sexism still impacts me, but that's pretty much the only ism). People assume I belong, I'm right, I'm good, I'm smart, etc. I'm never the only person of my race in ANY space I'm in, ever. Nobody questions my presence in a space and if they do, I know they won't become aggressive. Nobody calls the police because I play music VERY loudly in my neighbourhood just because I like it. I am at the point where I flat out feel that I may have been given better treatment- more attention, more care, less hostility- as a graduate student in my program because I am white. Everybody looks at me and assumes I speak English and doesn't ask where I came from because of course I came from this part of the world. People look at me and assume I am capable, smart, and will do good things, that I am a good person doing good things, that I will be easier to deal with, etc. I'm not naive enough to think that doesn't affect how people treat me. If the colour of my skin means things to people before I ever say a word, it affects how they treat me. This isn't hard.

So when people tell me things have happened to them because of their race or describe their racial experience to me, I trust them, and I remember what they said, and I make the mental effort to think about how situations are different for me because I am white. I also make the mental effort to try and question my assumptions. I can't stop whatever automatic thoughts have been coerced into my brain, but I can try to examine them- therapy is already teaching me how to do this. Is there evidence to back this up? What is really going on here? Where did I learn this story? Sometimes the answer still eludes me, but I feel morally called to do that work, inside myself, all the time. Again: literally the tiniest thing I can do. I'd like to imagine the power it could have if every white person could do it, though. Question their assumptions about race. Look for the evidence. Be critical. Be open. Be curious. Hold themselves to a higher standard and accept that sometimes the answers don't come to you immediately or that you will resist them because they are so uncomfortable. 

Between that, reading some books, reading and sharing a lot of instagram posts, and donating money, I'm trying to help. Maybe this is performative, I don't know, but I also want to be part of the reason you can't ignore this issue anywhere you go, including your opinionated feminist friend's personal blog. So here it is.

-swegan

We're really testing my ability to call myself a homebody

Let me weave you a tale of me in mid-March: stressed. Very stressed. As always. It was marking time and I had a lot of lab reports to get through again, and I knew the last lab report, consisting of the two longest sections, was something I was going to have to mark next. I was juggling bridesmaids drama- namely that one of the bridesmaids was, if not definitively a piece of shit person, decidedly acting like one, and the other helpful bridesmaids and I were trying to put together a bachelorette party 3 weekends before the wedding in mid-April. I was going to the gym twice a week, which had a positive effect on my mental health that cannot be understated (and for 25% the price of therapy, too!), and was looking forward to my teaching duties being done early so I could start to get some real work done on my project. I was going to try Baby's First Apoptosis Assay once marking was really, truly done, get some positive controls for my CB1 western blots, find a way to isolate protein with a broken sonicator, finish my RNA experiments, and see about ordering a new cell line. 

I met with my supervisor on Wednesday, something akin to seeing Bigfoot in the woods, and taught all day on Thursday, something akin to having a hangnail that you just KNOW you can't trim until you get home even though it keeps getting caught on your sleeve. With a fellow graduate student and TA, I shared that I thought that the university would really try to wrap up the remaining two weeks of the semester before shutting down. There were only two weeks left. Only two other major institutions in the country had shut down at this point. I was silently mustering strength in the background to get through the next month of my life, which was going to be extremely busy and require delicate time management.

And then they brought the hammer down.

Classes- cancelled. Labs, including the one I taught- cancelled. In-person meetings cancelled. Suddenly we had to tell the PIs exactly when we'd be in the lab and for how long, and I was instructed to wear a mask when in the lab at all times- despite me only going in at 7pm or later and being completely alone the entire time. A week later I was advised by the same PIs to freeze my cells and not return to campus. I keep kicking myself for having left a bunch of stuff in my "office"- a charging cord, several types of tea, some snacks, a little cactus that is actually just a painted rock, a sense of normalcy- you know. But at the time I don't think anyone could have predicted just how long we'd be gone. I still haven't been back- that marks almost three full months out of the lab- the same amount of time I lost to the move to the new building last summer. Given how much more slowly we're going to have to proceed when we get back, I'm thinking it's safe to say I've now lost a lot more time than just three months.

The bachelorette party never happened. The wedding did. I attended it on zoom, something I cannot recommend against enough. There are few things more painful than watching one of your best friends get married over a low-quality web stream in which their other friends and relatives will not stop spamming the chat with smart ass comments and you can't hear any of the vows, but CAN clearly hear the officiant say "well, at least the people who really mattered were able to be here with you today." I imagine one of the things more painful is having to try and reschedule your wedding in the context of a major global pandemic, just to be clear. While I'll still be able to party it up in my bridesmaids dress I paid $100 extra to rush-order which is currently the most ironic thing that has ever happened to me, I'm still processing the pain of that experience in private, on my own time. I think a lot of us are doing that right now.

Oh, by the by- I'm engaged now too. Redbeard and I will someday get married- also someday we will live together BEFORE getting married, but of course the two-posts-ago-mentioned breaking of his leg delayed his program by a semester, so now we get to move in January during the same semester of my comprehensive exam, and before you say that we could just live with my parents for a semester, you haven't been living with my parents, which I would advise you to keep in mind. I would much rather throw away money on rent than listen to my parents talk for one more second about how rent is just throwing away money.

That's the kicker, too- I went to see Redbeard in person, so fortunately my engagement was not via low-quality web stream, but was instead by a high quality real life stream, with a ring gently nestled inside of a container of flyfishing flies, right between my favourites- the hoppers (which I used this weekend knowing full well it was way too early for fish to be interested in anything that juicy). However, my ever-paranoid mother has insisted upon my return both that I have to get tested (which will happen in about 24 hours and inevitably come back negative) and that I have to quarantine in my room for 14 days. Now I am about one week into that, and I feel as though my sister is about one more time preparing a meal for me away from just hugging me in full view of our parents so we can be quarantined together. It really is something to come home from getting engaged and not feeling a single human touch for two weeks. Probably also on that list of things more painful than attending your best friend's wedding over a low-quality web stream, along with having to live apart from your fiancee for another 6.5 months. This is despite the fact that neither Redbeard nor any of his outdoorsy friends he's been in contact with have reported having The Virus (and I know he would tell me if he was quarantining for that reason, if not because he knows I'd want to know, then because it would mean two weeks not being in the mountains and that would be quite difficult for him). Let me repeat: there is literally no basis to having me do this besides the fact that my mother does not see that she clearly has an anxiety disorder and needs to go to therapy so the rest of us can stop tiptoeing around her feelings lest we trigger another passive aggressive silent treatment.

And then comes the fun realization that this pandemic has fucked us all up, to the point that I'm almost certain I'm not the only one that can't watch movies anymore because any scene containing two or more people from different households in close proximity activates my fight-or-flight response and seems extremely unrealistic. We all took it as a given that it was safe to be social and enjoy the company of others, and that was ripped away, and we all know we can't move to some kind of online pod society where we never interact with others in person because humans are social creatures by nature and as such we now must find a way to end this situation such that we can like, hug each other again, or collectively we're going to lose it.

So for once I'm using some of the tags for this blog that I made when I was like, 13, and never bothered to change because I figured those were all the classifications I'd ever need, and then stopped using when I inevitably didn't need them anymore. Because you know what? This fully classifies as :(, dread and the like, low points, and sad stuff. Thanks, 13 year old me. I hope you all out there are okay.

reflections on burnout

I passed my transfer exam. I don't think anybody reading this is a real, genuine stranger, just friends who sometimes remember that this blog exists and kindly take a gander (hello, friends). But I felt it relevant to get that out there. I'm a PhD student now.

After the exam I went home and slept, and then later got a text from the postdoc asking when my RNA would be ready for sequencing. I told her I had 30 samples and would get them done by the end of the week. Of course then I ran out of tubes, so I only did 15. I farted around until Sunday, when I did all of my Christmas shopping in one day (mostly), then on Tuesday I went back in and did the rest of the RNA via borrowed tubes. On Wednesday morning I passed that off to the tech in the lab who is the RNA master, and then I left to get my sister from the airport. I have not been in the lab since December 18. And for a whole entire week and a half, I didn't do anything related to school.

Now I realize how severely and completely burnt the fuck out I was. Sleeping in until 10 AM even though I was waking up at like, 6:30, spending another hour or two scrolling on my phone, eating some small, pathetic breakfast around noon, going into the lab at like 2:30 after watching movies for two hours, puttering around being pathetic and leaving at like 5, coming home intending to work and ending up just watching TV with my parents and eating dinner until I'd inevitably shower or go to bed. And that was all the days. Going into the lab took so much convincing, and I hated it so much (reminds me of my fourth year when experiments failed because I couldn't be bothered to go in and check on my stupid flies on the weekend).

How did I think that was me at my best? Looking back, there are so many signs that I was desperate for a break, including but not limited to my own therapist telling me I was working too hard and needed a break. Why do you think you were scrolling for 2 hours every day? Why do you think you couldn't even talk about your transfer exam for 48 hours after without openly and fully weeping? Why do you think you spent study days just watching netflix for 6 hours only to finally feel and be productive at 7 pm? YOU NEEDED A FUCKING BREAK.

I think the truth is this: I do not work to earn a break, I take breaks to store up energy to do work. Sometimes I don't have time to take breaks, and I have to power through, and in some ways I think last semester was one of those times. But YOU DO NOT WORK TO EARN A BREAK. That is not how it works. That is nonsensical. You can't work without energy, and you gain energy from breaks. It's literally That Simple.

Of course, real life is complicated and people are demanding and people who are in charge of me or my peers who don't have high functioning depression (that is an actual real diagnosis-of-sorts from an actual psychologist now, so I'm just going to say it) set the bar where they think it's reasonable to set it. And I guess sometimes that's just not where I can set the bar.

I've said SO MANY TIMES that my real life is happening while I'm in graduate school too. I'm not just pausing it to get a degree. I'm in a relationship, making friendships, pursuing self growth aggressively, getting older, etc... all while in grad school. But I don't think I was really taking that seriously enough last semester, or maybe I just didn't have the option to do so.

At least the truth is this now: in terms of workload, I will basically repeat last semester, but without the stress of applying to transfer, and I will be making more money (the offer I got for my PhD was just to teach one lab per YEAR- let me let it be known that previously I was teaching 4 per year, 2 in the fall and 2 in the winter- but they need me to teach genetics labs so badly that someone is writing the Dean on my behalf to say "you need to pay this grad student more because nobody else can cover this slot, and these undergrad students need to be taught", which is AMAZING- this is on top of my stipend increasing slightly as I am not a master's student anymore). That is... quite an opportunity, if I've ever seen one. I mean, I now have until 2023 to be at school, getting this degree- though I don't necessarily want to stay that long- but this semester is a definite chance to just like... figure out how to work efficiently. I've been here almost 2 years, and I honestly can't tell if that's enough time to figure out how to do grad school at all or not. Oh well.


And the reason I always write shit like this, that's unfiltered and real, is that I find a lot of things written about grad school are ... they spare a lot of detail, so to speak. They just say "oh I was depressed, not leaving my house a lot" etc, which I guess is maybe helpful for some people, and it's certainly better than nothing. But if any of you are struggling in the way where you still get shit done and pass exams but feel horrible inside and have no self care and never fucking prioritize rest at all so you get things done but they drain you so much and you can't say anything because nobody would see it... I feel you. That's my reality. And for the love of GOD there is nothing wrong with you, please take your nearest exit from work and stay out of it as long as you feasibly can and chill for a while.