living with stress
I'm going on the academic job market this year, and it's stressful. No surprise there. I mention this only as context for the following set of observations:
I realized a number of years ago now that in some ways I am too good at coping with stress on a day-to-day basis. I use "good" with fairly heavy irony, because my coping mechanism has traditionally been to ignore the stress, as if it will go away by itself. I don't actually deal with it in the sense of processing its causes; I just suppress the symptoms and continue to function as if I'm not under stress.
This strategy works very well for a while - sometimes quite a long while - until one day it fails to work and I have a complete meltdown.
Meltdowns are unpleasant. They're messy and time-consuming. I don't have time for one this year.
So: I've been trying, with mixed success, to do more on-the-fly processing of stress: to allow myself to freak out about things that merit freak-outs, to get anxious and need reassurance, to ask for help when I need it, to not put so much pressure on myself to be consistently stable. (Of course, most of the time I really am pretty stable, and not *only* because of the contrast with the people around me, many of whom are irritatingly unstable a truly astonishing amount of the time. Ah, academia.) It's not a new attempt - I've been working on this off and on for at least six years - but it's something I've been thinking about a lot recently.
Today, thinking about application materials, I caught myself slipping back into the old mode of "oh, well, whatever, I'll get done what I get done and survey the damage later, tra la, we're all fine here, how are you?" I had to consciously stop myself and say "Self, don't be a moron about this. If you're worrying about whether your job letter will work for these jobs, just ask somebody."
So I e-mailed one of my profs to set up an appointment to talk about it. Took, what, two minutes to write and send that e-mail? And yet I was thiiiiiiiis close to not doing it.
I don't know why this is so difficult for me, but it is. And I hate it. I want making this change to be easy, and it's not easy. It has never been easy, and it is not, I report with annoyance, getting any easier. I am going to have to think about it every day, at a time and under conditions when I would really rather forego the time commitment of living the examined life, thankyouverymuch.
I guess posting this is my way of committing to doing it, of reminding myself that I do have spaces in which to freak out if I need to without feeling like I'm endangering my standing in the department or whatever.
I'm not sure whether this is a confession or a warning. Heh.
I realized a number of years ago now that in some ways I am too good at coping with stress on a day-to-day basis. I use "good" with fairly heavy irony, because my coping mechanism has traditionally been to ignore the stress, as if it will go away by itself. I don't actually deal with it in the sense of processing its causes; I just suppress the symptoms and continue to function as if I'm not under stress.
This strategy works very well for a while - sometimes quite a long while - until one day it fails to work and I have a complete meltdown.
Meltdowns are unpleasant. They're messy and time-consuming. I don't have time for one this year.
So: I've been trying, with mixed success, to do more on-the-fly processing of stress: to allow myself to freak out about things that merit freak-outs, to get anxious and need reassurance, to ask for help when I need it, to not put so much pressure on myself to be consistently stable. (Of course, most of the time I really am pretty stable, and not *only* because of the contrast with the people around me, many of whom are irritatingly unstable a truly astonishing amount of the time. Ah, academia.) It's not a new attempt - I've been working on this off and on for at least six years - but it's something I've been thinking about a lot recently.
Today, thinking about application materials, I caught myself slipping back into the old mode of "oh, well, whatever, I'll get done what I get done and survey the damage later, tra la, we're all fine here, how are you?" I had to consciously stop myself and say "Self, don't be a moron about this. If you're worrying about whether your job letter will work for these jobs, just ask somebody."
So I e-mailed one of my profs to set up an appointment to talk about it. Took, what, two minutes to write and send that e-mail? And yet I was thiiiiiiiis close to not doing it.
I don't know why this is so difficult for me, but it is. And I hate it. I want making this change to be easy, and it's not easy. It has never been easy, and it is not, I report with annoyance, getting any easier. I am going to have to think about it every day, at a time and under conditions when I would really rather forego the time commitment of living the examined life, thankyouverymuch.
I guess posting this is my way of committing to doing it, of reminding myself that I do have spaces in which to freak out if I need to without feeling like I'm endangering my standing in the department or whatever.
I'm not sure whether this is a confession or a warning. Heh.