Into the storm

Yep, things are looking gloomy around here. Did I mention I hate this time of the year? It feels like everything conspires to go wrong around this time of year and it just happens to be when my depression and anxiety are cranked up to 11 pretty much all day every day. I don’t enjoy it and I wish I could just hide until the new year rolls around and the feeling passes, but here we are another year where I am super anxious and another year where everything seems to be going wrong.

Okay nothing has gone wrong yet, it’s just ramping up to go wrong. It’s to the point that my PhD may be in jeopardy and I’m not thrilled about the prospect. Yesterday (here) I covered the seemingly unconnected occurrences that lead me to this point. It was a rough overview and even then there were still what, a few dozen things that had to happen to get me here. Now I have two very different people who are pulling me in two very different directions and something has got to give.

Let’s just be honest, I am an anxious person to start with. I need to be 15 minutes early to something or I will stress out about it to no end. I do not like to be late, I do not like to let people down, and I do not like to make commitments that I cannot follow through with. That last one, that’s the issue I’m currently facing. What do you do when you have two commitments that you’ve made and you are forced to pick between them?

The answer isn’t clear unfortunately. I would rather do it all and deal with that stress, because it would be far less stress than having to pick. And frankly I could do it all, I really could. It’s what I’ve been doing, but hospital-PI has put his foot down and I am forced to choose. Yes, this is largely a repeat of yesterday’s post, but it’s still the current in my face topic so I’m trying to work through all this.

I met yesterday with hospital-PI to go over all the details of the project he’s offering to fund. The project would ideally meet the requirements for my graduation and the, and I use this term loosely, exciting bit of it is that I could theoretically finish this project quickly. I would most likely be graduating the end of next year, a full term sooner than I had planned and just 4.5 years into my PhD. That’s the only good news I have here is that I have funding now, more funding than I know what to do with at this point!

Since I am having to choose, I need to meet with school-PI to see what he thinks of all this. To say he will not be thrilled will be an understatement and I have no idea when I will be discussing it with him, but it will probably need to happen soon. Since we’re all working together on a joint paper, I’m not even sure how that will go. It’s a lot of unknowns at this point and everyone has an idea of what I should or shouldn’t be doing.

Without a clear way to make everyone happy, I’m left waiting to see what happens. I hate waiting I would rather just get it over with and rip the bandaid off. Anyway not much of an update I guess, but that’s the problem really.

Did I mention I hate this time of the year?