Oh My God I Need To Do Things...
Turns out having a full time job and being busy on your feet all the time means you can't pontificate endlessly on the meaning of life or whatever. Particularly the kind of job where you are actually legally exempt from the regulations about breaks (I don't get a half hour paid break after 5 hours because of my job, which means I do not get any breaks at all, all day. I am working over lunch). Someone is always asking me to do something and when work finishes, my experiments start, or I need to put time into my marriage, or a friendship. Bonus: I make money now. I have earned more money than I have spent in the past two months, and while doing it I've made new friends. Serious, actual friends in some cases- and some who will be around to Do Things With even once the summer ends and with it, the summer job.
Do you know what I was doing before? Fucking nothing, most of the time. I didn't want to work on my research because it was boring and there was no structure or deadlines to keep me going. There's no mental health boost of feeling useful or hardworking when it doesn't matter if you get something done today or tomorrow or next week or next month or next year. And those things I have to do are difficult and painful because I keep failing at them and that's just normal and expected. Why would I do them?
You can't get the mental health boost of doing a good job if the job doesn't matter at all. That's all I'm saying. But having a job where it does matter if I show up and give my best effort, and get things done, and have a good attitude, and need to prepare food and some other stuff in advance... a job where other people are relying on me... it feels good. It feels nice. I needed the reminder that I have something to offer the world. It's a very potent depression-zapper. You can't be useless because you solved a fire at work. Actually you solved about 18 of them. YOU did. By yourself, with sometimes no support from coworkers, and not even because they suck, but because there was another fire at the same time that they had to deal with. That means I'm part of a team, that means I can be integral to that team's best functioning, which again, means I cannot possibly be useless and my brain really WAS lying to me.
Some people have legitimately said to me that this $17 an hour entry level job is beneath me as a PhD candidate, particularly because it's only tangentially related to my field. My job can be done- and is being done quite well- by a coworker who didn't even take high school biology. That coworker is one of my favourites because we collaborate so well. We fill in the gaps for each other. And in the meantime- I feel useful. I am being paid for my work. People care that I show up both because I said I would and because they care about me as a person. How is that beneath me? Am I above feeling... useful and important? The prestige associated with getting a PhD doesn't fulfill that for me, even though it is a nice ego boost to have people constantly assume you are very smart. That's fun and all, but it obviously wasn't preventing me from feeling like shit.
Like no, it's not a full time job that's going to allow me to move out of my parents' house with my husband just yet, but it's something. It's a reference letter. It's experience. It's some fun money. It's the potential ability to find a job later that will let us move out and buy property. That's not nothing, and it certainly feels worth it to me. Given that I have to live with the consequences of my decisions, I think I'll take it.
