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.