Resubmitting new forms about old forms and not being able to fly

So... no more panic attacks, yes crying at admin emails because they are so stressful, but no more panic attacks.

Last Friday my Spain trip finally got approved to go on to the next stage of approvals. I really don't get it, it's the same information being approved by the same people, this time it's just on their web-froms rather than their word-doc forms. Why do I need to waste my time doing the exact same paperwork twice? Shouldn't it be the job of the admin people to put it into the computer system? Or just get us to put it directly into the system to begin with? Obviously not, because PhD students don't have anything else to do with their less than a minimum wage and more than a full time job work hours expectations.

Anyway, I also have neck pain and a headache, oh and I am feeling very tired today. But hey, what's new? This is everyday life for me so I should just get over it and push through?

Someone one told me that I have been in a constant "Fight or flight" mode for many years now, I think I finally understand them now, sure I accepted it to a degree, but now I really get what they mean. In a way I believe they were referring to a particular thing in my life, but my life in general is fight or flight. I have to fight constantly against my physical body, my mind, and then I'm not even going to mention all of the external factors impacting my life. 

I don't really have the option of "flight" because if I do so many things will disintegrate. The closes I come to flight is standing in one spot, exerting all of my energy flapping my wings, whilst still being in the middle of a battle.

Anyway, that's enough for now, I need to try and do some work, its 14:41 on a Monday..

Oh, and one last thing.. a couple of weeks ago I had a suspected herniated disc, I had different constant pain than normal and my remedial massues thought that might be the case. Of course by the time I got to my physio and GP after the weekend, there were no obvious signs of it, so once again I have no definitive answer about why I was in so much pain...

Questioning my path

So I recently just took myself on a solo trip interstate. I very much enjoyed it. This was the first time visiting this city, and the first time travelling somewhere alone and not meeting up with anyone at the other end. I really need to do this more often. I'm not responsible for anyone but myself, I can do what I want for however long I want to. Which for me meant visiting lots of museums and galleries, and spending several hours in the Botanic Gardens! 

It was also great to not have as many loud and intrusive thoughts for a few days. I'm sure they'll pop back up again, but I'm really hoping that they will be a bit quieter, if only for the rest of this month.

Anyway, I've been back for a couple of days now. I had a day of rest yesterday, and a day working from home today because I was too tired to drive anywhere, especially an hour to uni. 

However, now I'm starting to question if I'm even up to a career in academia. I've barely scraped through the past 1.5 years with all of my physical and mental health issues. I haven't even started writing papers or my thesis yet (I don't count methods). 

Perhaps like previous times in my life, after a while of not doing research I will miss it again. Don't get me wrong I really enjoy what I do, it's just the constraints upon me and the battles I fight every single day just to get out of bed or to take a shower are exhausting. I don't know if I can keep doing this long term, something in my life has to change simply so I can function more efficiently. 

What would I do instead? Do more animal work for a while, but I know from experiance that won't be enough to intellectually stimulate me forever. It also won't be able to get me out of the financial situation my family is in. I could also do more casual work at universities, but there's not too much job security in that, there is also a preference to hire internally. I could also go back to making content, but that never really made me much money, and I hate the technological side. 

I have no urge to quit my PhD, I 100% want to finish this. However, I am doubting if I can continue in this line of work afterwards with how I am now. Will I ever be able to swim? :P

Unplanned time off

After a great weekend out herping (searching for amphibians and reptiles) I was absolutely exhausted on Monday. I did not end up driving into campus as it would probably not be the safest for me to be driving for an hour or so. I did some image analysis at home, but the access to the remote system wasn't working very well so I couldn't do much from home. I also kept falling asleep at the computer.

Accepting that I need a day of rest after a weekend with humans, driving for several hours by myself, and just doing any activity is still not easy for me. I want to be able to do more still. A weekend doing something for myself (in this case a herping trip with a society) was great for my mental health, but I am still left completely physically broken afterwards. It is so frustrating. I wish doing things for myself actually recharged my batteries rather than also ran them down. But I guess I'm not in the best place as of late and even these things drain me more than I would like. 

My mental health must really be in a state when even the things that make me mentally feel better are wearing me this thin. My physical health is certainly not blameless though. This increased migraine severity in my mid thirties is certainly a real douze. 

Oh but don't worry my dear readers, the struggles of my life do not end there. My mother tested positive for covid last night, and as someone of high risk we were advised to go to the emergency department at hospital. So we ended up at hospital around 1 am. We saw the nurse and the doctor, all looked good so far, but bloods were taken just to check, that would be an hour before we got the results for that. Almost 2 hours later I asked what was happening, and whilst the bloods were normal, they could not dispense the anti-viral medication until 7-7.30 am. We were finally able to leave the hospital around 8 am. Now as messed up as my sleep and body already were this was the final straw. Around 3.30 am at the hospital I emailed my supervisor requesting sick leave. Even if Mum's covid is manageable and I don't contract it from her, there was no way I could see myself being able to work this week.

Anyway we got home had something to eat and I went to bed somewhere between 9 and 10 am. I may have been in bed for about 10 hours but I only got about 7 - 8 hours sleep, I woke up several times and I also had a massive headache (the chairs at hospital probably aided with this). I eventually give up on sleeping and trying to rest in bed and get up, the massive headache continues. I take something for it but only generic painkillers not migraine meds. It's decreased the pain a little bit but I can feel it's all still there, its just been pushed back a little bit for now. 

It's 11 pm now. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm sick of being in bed and asleep, I want to do stuff, anything, but I also need to have some sort of diurnal schedule as I start my group DBT on Thursday and assuming I don't get covid, I need to get to that in person, it starts at 10 am.

So there we have it, between my own mental and physical health problems with the addition of my a family members health and my carer responsibilities, I have decided to take another week off. Although doing an official request is still confusing to me since my candidature time is still being eaten up when I'm on sick leave - I guess it's for record keeping purposes. 

I can't really concentrate on writing anymore.

Here's a little reminder..

Absence of negative emotions ≠ happiness

The absence of negative feelings does not equal happiness.

That statement is something I need to remember. It's completely logical, but often forgotten. remember, when you are bored or indifferent you are neither experiencing a negative nor positive emotion. 

I've been listening to The Psychology of Depression and Anxiety - Dr Scott Eilers. That's where this reminder came from, but also some other things I picked up on whilst listening to an episode on happiness. 

He talks about how our life experience is all internal, and everything outside is just stimuli. I absolutely love this. He further goes into how it's all about how we translate or interpret said stimuli that give us our life experience. An example he uses is if you're in another country and everyone speaks a language you don't understand. That stimulus means nothing to you unless you can translate it. Sometimes when we have health problems (mental or physical) our translator doesn't work - it just doesn't get the message through to us or it distorts the message so we are not receiving what the message is in reality. 

Anyway, I started listening to this episode for a second time to reinforce some of this stuff. I've listened to quite a bit of his stuff these past few months, and I highly recommend it. It compliments any other therapy you might be receiving too. He also posts it as YouTube videos if you prefer a visual (see below).

Still alive, barely

Well, it's certainly been, what's the current saying "a hot minute"? since I last wrote here.

Things mentally and physically have been going downhill since June last year. 

I took a week or two off from uni in October, which was nice and kept me going for the rest of the year. However, it lasted only a short time and by the beginning of December, I was pretty burnt out again. 

Christmas was pretty awful. It was nice to have time off uni, but I've been looking forward to Christmas less and less every year for a while now. This year just reinforced that. I was very much exhausted, had no social battery left, and got pretty bad migraine symptoms on Christmas day itself. 

Migraine for me has been getting more frequent and more intense this past 7-12 months. I rarely ever got nausea, but now it's a regular symptom. I have found if I allow myself to vomit it does relieve some of the pain for a while though. 

I'm still seeing my physiotherapist or remedial masseuse almost weekly, however, that no longer seems to be enough to manage my pain anymore. I have read online that migraines do get more severe in your thirties, so I'm guessing my age might have something to do with it, and of course the increasing physical and mental exertion of doing a PhD.

A bit more on the emotional/mental health side of things, I've been going through a lot of 'self-discovery' for lack of a better term since June last year. I've been seeing a psychologist on top of the counselor at uni. The counselor at uni is great for the surface problems, but the psychologist makes me think and feel deeper about things, that I have ignored and disregarded about myself. 

There's certainly been some unexpected insights from seeing this particular psychologist, it's been a weird and at times challenging ride so far - as I'm sure I've touched upon in previous posts. I think we're getting to a place where I'm willing to address some things that I wasn't before. I know I'm running the risk of getting hurt by doing this (for several reasons), however, I'm almost ready to take that step of 'faith' so to speak. There are still a few things I am unsure about, that I feel I should address with the psychologist during our next meeting, but whether I do or do not at the time is another challenge in itself. 

I am looking into taking 4-8 weeks off from my PhD around this April. I just can't keep doing this. My sleep is ineffective, I have pains in my body almost constantly, and on top of my usual mental health battles and these new challenges arising, I'm constantly running on empty. I'm hoping to book in to see a neurologist, let's hope the waiting lists are not too long!

Work-wise I think my PhD is going okay, I spoke with my main supervisor yesterday and mentioned I might need a break and they were fine with that. I do have a field trip starting this Saturday. This field trip is to the same place I went to last June when everything started to unravel for me, so I am a bit fearful of how I will cope, especially given my decreasing overall health. 

I did have almost 48 hours of reprieve recently. A combination of finally doing Body Combat again (one of the best therapies out there for me), taking myself on a short solo walk, and having some deep conversations with my pairbond, resulted in me feeling good, capable, and less broken. So this time 3 days of work on myself led to almost 2 days of good health. I knew I was on borrowed time though, and I could sense when it was coming to an end. 

This field trip is very important though, and as usual, I will power through to benefit my research, even if it comes at a cost to myself. Like I did after doing Body Combat last week where I knew that my migraine symptoms would be triggered, I could even feel it starting during the class but kept going. I wasn't completely idiotic about it, after the class, I took a long bath with magnesium salts, I did not drink any alcohol, and I took my rizatriptan before I went to sleep. I didn't expect these actions to work so well, I still experienced excessive tiredness and pain, but nowhere to the extent I have in the past. I could actually get out of bed and go for a walk later that day. I am hoping I can manage this field trip's physical pains similarly, but I'm still uncertain about how I will go emotionally.