A Monday morning, and a gray one: appropriate for these vague feelings of not being caught up, of not being ready, of not having done what needs to be done. Several administrative e-mails arrived Friday, and I haven't done anything about them; my digestion is unhappy, the back of my mind is turning over whether or not it's worth going in to the office today.
It's that Sunday-evening feeling of not having done work that's due, something that comes from school days. I was a smart but lazy child – which contributes to this disturbing dread of facing deadlines and consequences. I remember a PhD dissertation support group when I was working on my master's thesis – I was the only master's student desperate enough to join it – where we agreed that we were all in the group because things had been too easy for us when we were younger, because schoolwork had always been something we could toss off at the last minute, and we had never learned to actually work at it. A fault of the American system probably, as I suspect that the British system challenges students more.
As an academic who has created his reputation for twenty years on striking but fairly rapidly written articles, and who has never finished a monograph, that feeling of the consequences of not-working-enough has taken over much of the feeling tone of my life. In the past five years, since 'the Australian debacle' (a personal/legal immigration disaster of lost position, lost money, having to leave a partner and come here to a land where I am never really glad to be), I've gotten even less sensible about these things – to the point where I can't stand novels and films at the point where they become dark and stressful, at the place where the protagonist(s) are overcome with the enormity of whatever conflict is going to run the show. When things start to go wrong, when a student says something vicious about me to someone else, when I read about dreadful or miserable things in the news - I've become a real creampuff in these situations, and can't bear to think about such things, and retreat to my apartment, to lie on this couch....
Pathetic of course. Symptomatic of depression I suppose. Surprising what strength the feelings have, though.
A downer of a post. Sorry about that; the difficulty of negotiating between simply saying what is, as opposed to presenting my new blog in some more engaging way, is one of performance – am I supposed to be charming, or honest? Hopefully it will all, eventually, come out in the wash....
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