Unpaid sabbaticals

I have a lot coming up in the next few months. I've applied for a leave of absence for April-June, no word yet but I am already planning as if it has been accepted. I'm calling it an unpaid sabbatical.

Before then I would like to get in another field trip and start on some new measurements and finish up some of the previous ones. I did some practice runs with two of my species that grow in the Blue Mountains and it looks like I will need to do all of the measurements immediately in the field, and that they will take a few hours! I'm hoping to create some stomatal closure curves, assuming my species don't fuse their stomata shut as soon as I harvest a branch. 

I got Chat GPT to summarise what I'm looking at in layman's terms because I am lazy and forget most people don't know what stomata are:

"A stomatal closure curve is a graph that shows how plant leaf openings, called stomata, respond to changes in water availability. It demonstrates how tightly the stomata close at different levels of water supply. Stomatal conductance, which measures how gases pass through the stomata, decreases as the stomata close in response to lower water availability, reflected in the curve. This curve helps researchers understand how plants regulate water loss through transpiration under varying environmental conditions."

Prior to my break I am also hoping to get to Adelaide to finally see The Dark Room live. I started following Robbotron on Twitch during covid. He and a few other people really helped me and kept me going during that time, and the communities were also great and oh-so wholesome, but not in a sickening way, in a totally awesome way that I could relate to. Here are a few other important communities I was a part of: RandomBritishDude, MitchBruzzese, RustyQuill (specifically Mike and Anil), and an honorable mention to Monkeeeyboi whom I found through RandomBritishDude. If you know these people or clicked on the hyperlinks you may have noticed they are all UK citizens, except for Mitch who is an Aussie. Robbotron is also Aussie, but resides in the UK.  As you might have guessed I was living my best life as a nocturnal during lockdown :)

Anyway, I will also be starting a 10-week DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy) program, that will conclude about halfway through my sabbatical. My uni counselor got me on to it and is part of organising it. She has been bringing it up for a little while now, and my psychologist has mentioned it and group therapies a couple of times too. So when she offered me a spot in the program, I pretty much jumped on it. I am a bit nervous of course, group therapy - "what the hell? I hate humans", but I am also excited and hoping it will help me to function better. 

I will not only be taking a sabbatical from my PhD though, but also my psychologist. We discussed it today, it came up naturally and we were both kind of on the same page (or close enough). Since I'm doing this course and will be receiving support from it I should focus on that, and then soon after that ends my psychologist is going overseas for a bit. So essentially we won't see each other for about 6 months. This saddens me as I enjoy talking with them, however, talking to them today it looks like we have been having similar thoughts about things and that a break could benefit us. When we do meet up again we will reassess the situation and see if I will even need their continued support or if the counsellors through uni will be enough. 

So overall these next few months could turn out to be quite interesting and potentially life-changing? It's scary but exciting. I'm just so confused about some things, and unhappy or apathetic about others. I'm really hoping for a bit more clarity on things and to be able to acknowledge and express myself better. Yes, I'm doing this all to better my life, but it could also lead to big challenging changes in my life. These changes are going to affect those around me, and that's what scares me most,  upsetting other people.  

To end on a different note (purposeful pun) recently Sheldon Riley's Eurovison song "Not the same" has really resonated with me and made me feel stronger. I could always somewhat relate, and of course, I love his voice, but only recently has it really gone deep for me. I just love Eurovision so much, I get to discover so many new styles of music and artists and get all the feels! Here is their performance at the Eurovision finals, enjoy!