Anxieties
Last night I dreamed that I lost my job, Mr. Pugh broke up with me, and someone left the door open and I wasn't sure if the cats had gotten out. In the dream I was at my grandmother's house (she's dead, and this is not the first time recently that I've dreamed about her). I tried to get a job at a coffee shop but didn't feel like I was really fitting in. in the dream I didn't know where I belonged anymore. This is likely (perhaps just obviously) related to my anxieties about moving into the research world as a professional. I've made a lot of mistakes in learnign as I go, and it often means I feel like a fake and a failure. But there are times when I almost feel competent, and that's a nice feeling I'd like to have more often. Buit it may also be related to the identity work I've been doing around my Indigeneity. I bought a bunch of Mi'kmaq books recently and have been reading them. I'm interacting more with other Indigenous people and I'm learning some Mi'kmaq. So I guess maybe it's making me feel kind of lost psychologically, if we can believe my subconscious.
This week I attended the OHTN's HIV conference Back To Basic, and I learned more about the human imune system than I'd ever known before. I like to think that I live in the real world and that I'm a pragmatic materialist. But this conference made me realize how little I actually know of the "real" world since my knowledge is limited to small areas of familiarity. So the "real" world includes fields of which I know nothing, and that means that decisions are inevitably made with only partial knowledge about what impact they might have in that "real" world. On Sunday I'm going to Kingston for a conference about HIV and prison populations. I've never been to Kingston and I'm looking forward to it. I just wish it didn't fall on the days I'm trying to finish my New Investigator Salary Award grant application to CIHR. Story of my life: shit is happening all at once.
This week I attended the OHTN's HIV conference Back To Basic, and I learned more about the human imune system than I'd ever known before. I like to think that I live in the real world and that I'm a pragmatic materialist. But this conference made me realize how little I actually know of the "real" world since my knowledge is limited to small areas of familiarity. So the "real" world includes fields of which I know nothing, and that means that decisions are inevitably made with only partial knowledge about what impact they might have in that "real" world. On Sunday I'm going to Kingston for a conference about HIV and prison populations. I've never been to Kingston and I'm looking forward to it. I just wish it didn't fall on the days I'm trying to finish my New Investigator Salary Award grant application to CIHR. Story of my life: shit is happening all at once.