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.