The fallacy of preparing + other observations

I'm rewriting this entire post. I need to be less.. structured here, I think. So here goes.

Part 1: I got a job.

The job is teaching kids science at a summer camp. As I am wont to do, I immediately thought of all the reasons this is a bad idea after getting it. What if there's lab meetings again? What if my supervisor reneges on her promise to back me up with this idea? Have I just tanked another summer after spending the last one studying and being sick? Am I just going to be exhausted all the time? What if I need to have a committee meeting? What if the kids hate me? What if the week of vacation that I get only if my prep is done on time isn't really contingent on my prep, but everyone's prep, and then some lazy fuck denies us all vacation time? What if I'm bad at this? What if I hate it?

And of course I have rebuttals to all of this. Just attend the one meeting you have to present at. She's never done that before, you have no reason to expect it now. I'd hardly call a summer of meaningful employment including some travel and meeting new people and going to the university pool twice a week at "tanked" summer when you compare it to 6-weeks of TRUE full time studying and stress. You will get used to it and can mitigate this. Again, you can probably take a day off. I highly doubt all of them will do that but you've had students hate you before, so this isn't new. Well, you went into this thinking you'd get NO vacation, so honestly the shot at SOME is still better. Then you'll find out. Then you'll know.

BUT. there is another pathway that often gets activated in my brain. One that I've discussed in therapy. It's the Preparation Pathway, which normally makes me very organized and calm (I have Gas-X, Reactine, Advil, Tylenol, Pepto-Bismol, and antiperspirant in my purse or backpack at all times, so I never have to fret when I have a random malady far from home, but also I mean this in the sense of I prepared for this job interview and got the job). But sometimes it backfires, which is when I end up doing things like imagining how sad it would be if my husband and I broke up because I couldn't get a job anywhere cool and we had to move somewhere he doesn't want to live (aka anywhere without serious mountains) and he is sad and resentful and it destroys our relationship to the point that I'm sobbing in bed alone. Or, right now, the kind of prep that has me saying I should start walking 10K steps a day and waking up at 6AM on purpose to get used to how horrible it will be later.

This doesn't work, of course. If you're the kind of person who likes doing this, far be it from me to stop you, but I always do this to myself and it never works for me. Part of it is just assuming I'll be a different person than I am, part of it is that I'm incorrectly predicting what something will be like. I don't actually know how much standing will be involved. I don't know how exhausting I'll find all that standing. I probably won't wake up a little earlier Just Because when I've never been able to sustain that ever before in my life. But also: there's little to no point.

Thing #2739846591 that I've learned in grad school is that You Have To Take Things As They Come And Not Make Them Harder. There are times, like right now, when there isn't a lot to do, and I can take it easy. I can be a bit more casual with getting things done, there's not too much pressure, and any deadlines are far, far away. There are other times when I spend 8 hours a day in cell culture (which, as I said before, is exhausting in a fairly equivalent way to driving) for a week straight and have 0 energy to do literally anything else. There will be a time when I'm running a camp all week with a particularly exhausting set of campers and also doing some experiments in the lab after all that and my whole life will just be work. Or maybe there won't. I don't know. 

The point is: I have to just work with what I actually know. I know I'll need to be used to standing more, so I could fit some more walks in. I know I have to get up early, but that doesn't matter right now, so I might as well enjoy my random wake-up times. I know from past experience that 9-5s eat up lots of my energy and time, so I'll have to be careful to prioritize things that give me energy, say no, and manage what I can manage. I'll have to meal-prep to save myself time and energy and make sure I'm eating good meals that keep my digestion normal. I can do all those things. I can make routines and manage situations to care for myself without preparing in advance. Some of the learning on the job will be off the job, that's normal.

So despite my urge to lean into that preparatory mode, I'm forcing myself to just work on what I have in front of me right now. I can't predict the future. Maybe a meteor hits the building I work and study in tomorrow. I don't know. Should I prepare for that, just in case? Obviously not. But I'll still have all those meds in my bag, even if it means I can never take a smaller purse.

Part 2: I must either be on social media or off of it, and also my phone plays a role

I have been reading individual tumblr blogs for a few days now. It consumes just as much of my time as being an active participant on social media used to. Worst of all, I now have the urge to actually re-join again and make posts, but I know it will go the same way it always does: I'll keep getting angry and getting in fights and spending all my time on them and I won't actually just get to have fun. I always go in with those intentions and I never leave with them. A part of me wants to keep reading them, but another part of me knows I have to let them go. That I want to let them go.

The blogs themselves were also refreshing, though, in that I saw some opinions contrasting those I've spent time reading about. Fortunately, this made me think again. I think I'm kind of bad at coming up with my own opinions. I have a lot of them, but I think more of them are influenced by outside sources than I thought. I also think this is not a unique problem to me, and probably not something I can ever fully resolve. Much as we wish humans were just computers taking in evidence and using it to form Ideas And Thoughts, we aren't. All of us are biased and have stuff in the way. 

I had hoped that going off social media would help me form my own opinions, but I don't think that's all of it. Now that I think about this twice though, I don't think it's necessarily that spending more time reading opinions I disagree with made me agree with them. It was a different experience. It was more uncomfortable. The format was different, the arguments were different, the evidence they pointed from was different, and when it wasn't, the interpretations were. But I think in the course of all that I forgot that the point was I could read all this stuff and still disagree. I'm not writing a book report on the internet for a grade or anything, I'm just living my life. I care about the truth, but I think I'll have to concede that sometimes it's hard, if not impossible, to determine what the truth is about things. And I'll sometimes need or want or just have an opinion anyway, and that's fine. We all have them. I still have them. I just haven't been thinking about them too hard.

With regard to going back: I looked at facebook again today and it was all right. I got some important updates about events I'm going to and stuff going on locally. I didn't really look at much else, and I won't be putting the app on my phone. My dad posted 18 trillion things from our recent trip. I think I'll probably put snapchat back in with some severe restrictions and see how that goes. I'm determined to stay off instagram, perhaps forever. I don't feel like I was getting much out of it now that I'm gone, it was really just pictures of people I know that were almost always cross-posted to facebook anyway, and memes on memes on memes sent primarily by my husband. I won't log back into tumblr, because I just know how it goes. I may delete my account. I probably should officially delete my reddit account, just because.

Part of why I don't want to go back is that I don't want to waste time on those things when I will have so much less time to myself. I'd rather try and spend some time this summer enjoying summer for what it is. Or just at least doing things that actually bring me some inner joy, especially now that I know that life is actually just fine off the apps.

Maybe I'll even convince my husband to join me. Who can say. 

Until next time.