Sinister Resistance

Okay, so things feel like they’re getting right out of hand. It’s been on the slow burn for a month or two, but I’m totally starting to get backed-up into the same misery-hole that caused me a lot of grief around twelve months ago. It’s partly down to my less-than-stellar progress at work and partly down to massive feelings of low self-esteem; both of which encircle each other and spiral things right out of control. I recently tweeted a rather unsubtle cry for help, much of which was in an effort to understand who I really ‘am’, because somewhere along the line I think I’ve forgotten. I don’t know whether it’s the PhD that’s instigated these particular thoughts or not, but the documentation is being appended to the PhD Fraud series because I think it’s relevant.

Perhaps it’s the ever-approaching conclusion to the PhD journey that’s making me evaluate what sort of person I am, and what I want to be. Far from using this time to be reflective and figure out what I can do to make improvements to my life and where, it’s merely opened a whole can of self-doubt, self-criticism and self-loathing: it seems that whenever I’m face with difficulty or disappointments in my life, I turn that anger inward and blame myself rather than just getting on with fixing what’s wrong. Case in point: at the moment I feel like I’m some kind of repulsive, unattractive whale, but instead of doing something about either my looks or my weight, I turn the disgust inward and blame myself for not looking like Johnny Depp, or Davey Havok circa the video for ‘Beautiful Thieves’. What efforts I’ve made in the past to try and improve my appearance have invariably failed and left me in just the same situation of loathing my appearance, that I’ve kind of lost the energy to try any more. Self-confidence can have a massive impact on appearance, but when (almost) every day you look in the mirror and wish there was just some way of rearranging your face into anything else, you need a lot more of it than I have the capacity for.

I feel like I have zero motivation to  do anything right now, from pursuing my current work, to doing social things or even doing things I usually enjoy in my spare time. Right now, the only motivation for work is to just get it finished, but I sort of feel like I’m so far down the rabbit-hole that I currently have no idea where the end might actually be. I’m also finding it harder and harder to enjoy my hobbies and suchlike: I seem to have misplaced a lot of the passion that used to drive various aspects of my life, and I have zero energy to either try and track down where it’s gone missing or recoup some new passion from somewhere else. I can barely get myself fired up at all in the morning, and likewise when I get home: I’d just prefer to go to sleep (not that there’s been a lot of that recently) than to spend the free time socialising with friends or chilling out with a movie/video game and whatnot.

The outreach stuff I’m also doing is cool and taking my mind of the worries, but it only takes my mind off them but doesn’t eliminate them altogether. I’ve been putting off looking at a lot of my simulation results for a long time now, and recently came to the startling conclusion that it’s do-or-die time, and I desperately need to focus on that work because of the pressing need to publish results in journal papers and the final thesis. Over the past few weeks, I’ve managed to find other, equally-pressing things that I’ve needed to do and have focussed on those – however, that particular well has finally run dry and I don’t have anything legitimately important to otherwise do.  I need to hunker down to get intimate with the actual meat of my research, and it’s bloody terrifying because the time pressure alone is immense; let alone all of the other commitments that I’ve got going on with work this summer. I’ve also got a massive complex about the quality of my work and whether it’s to the standard that it should be at my stage of my career (hint: probably not), and feel almost perpetually on the edge of giving the whole thing up altogether and claiming defeat. That last comment may be exaggerated somewhat, but it’s perhaps not as far from the mark as you’d think.

I finally got round to submitting my first journal paper around a week or so ago, and was feeling relatively good about it (I’d just about got it into a state I was happy with), but heard this morning that it’s been rejected from the special issue I submitted. The editor did give pretty good feedback and suggested that the reason it was declined was not fault in the paper itself, but more that it didn’t quite fit with the aims of that particular issue: he indicated that if I fix a couple of things and submit to the regular journal, then it’d be in with a very strong shout of getting published, but it’s still a bit of a kick in the stomach for my mood levels. Current motivation for conducting research is rock-bottom as it is, without having further barriers being placed in the way such as journal rejections and whatnot. Even my leisure-time efforts seem to be met with just about as much success: musical proficiency doesn’t seem to be improving, friendships seem like they’re drifting away from me and maintaining a regular blog presence appears impossible.

So who am I? What makes ‘me’ me? At the moment, I’m having real trouble in pinning that down. I pretty much just feel like a huge, hulking ball of mass that’s actually no use to anyone and brings little joy to anyone else’s existence. Again, that might be a reactionary comment and slightly exaggerative, but ‘ball of mass’ is about as nondescript as I feel at the moment. Hopefully I can see out the rest of this week, struggle through the bits of work I need and then go on a week’s holiday to reset my circuits. Just feel epic low right now, and any assistance/encourage/feedback anyone can give is gratefully received. Dunno, maybe just a few kind words and a reminder of how awesome everyone is that’s around me might jolt my system into returning to a normal state; as it is, I’m floating in a most peculiar way.

[Zinar7]