I feel as if I’m reaching a breaking point.

As Matt characterised the state of our beings, I am like an elastic band that has had all the stretch taken out of me.

The sheer repetitiveness and unending nature of this PhD exercise are killing me. There are very few intermediate goals with tangible results. Even the chapters that I write are but mere drafts. Nothing is complete, nothing is final, until the thesis is submitted - a point in time that would probably mark four years since I first began on this trajectory. That’s four years of this repetitive, somewhat monotonous, seemingly endless mental torture.

It’s partially the length of the requisite document that makes it oh so very hard… It’s one thing churning out 30,000 words for my masters thesis but 100,000 words for the PhD is so very much more… not only is there just more quantity involved but the depth and quality of the argument that is expected is also so much more. The bar is just so much higher at this level…

I wasn’t naive. I knew it was going to be hard… I just didn’t know it was going to be *this* hard.

Meanwhile, the boyfriend has gone away on a long, almost nine week holiday. He has been away for five weeks now. I miss him terribly, and it isn’t getting any easier with the passing of time. There’s a constant dull ache at the pit of my heart that pines for him, a yearning is most acute at the end of the day, as I lay in bed waiting for sleep to take over me, with nothing left to distract my mind. I miss him ever so much and wished that he was closer…

It is all doing my head in right now.

Posted on July 27th, 2008 by jl
Filed under: Life!, work | No Comments »

My life is driven by, and built around, fear at the moment.

There have been many a moment and days where I literally can’t work because I am paralysed by fear. I sit at my desk with my hands under my thighs. My body is catatonic with absolute fear of never ever being able to complete this humongous task ahead of me in the time that I am allotted… The work that is required for this thesis is immense and on more than one occasion I have seriously questioned how realistic it is to expect the work to be completed in the time that is available… Confronted by the mountain of work ahead of me, I literally stop in my steps, filled with dread of the effort and energy required…

And then there are moments where I am so scared shitless that I actually put myself to work… so much so that I don’t actually stop working. I become too afraid of the consequences to stop work… So I end up pulling cycles of all-nighters followed by whole days where I sleep off the exhaustion. The thing is, at the end of these long sleeps, the fear that paralyses returns and catches hold of me. I crawl under the doona, refusing to wake up to face the harsh reality that is the nightmare of my life. Productivity is replaced by paralysis and denial…

My hours awake have become one big nightmare. My mind runneth over with thoughts that bring nothing but fear and apprehension. My hours asleep, conversely, are the only things that keep me sane and alive - it is only in sleep that I think of nothing and find solace… provided I fall asleep that is… the transition from alertness to slumber has become an issue.

In the past three or four nights, I found myself crying spontaneously. There is nothing specific that prompts these combustive bawling sessions. Just everything in general. I go through my days with eyes swollen with tears threatening to flow. This is not good. This is not “normal”.

I am in such darkness that I don’t know if I am in a tunnel heading in one direction (hopefully the right one) or in a box going around in circles…

My life at the moment is one big cycle driven by fear.

Stop and stare
I think I’m moving but I go nowhere
Yeah I know that everyone gets scared
But I’ve become what I can’t be, oh
Stop and stare
You start to wonder why you’re ‘here’ not there
And you’d give anything to get what’s fair
But fair ain’t what you really need
Oh, can you see what I see
- “Stop and Stare”, One Republic

Posted on July 22nd, 2008 by jl
Filed under: Life!, work | 3 Comments »