Compartmentalization

I now compartmentalize. I realized it last week on the train and it took me by surprise. My husband has always been able to compartmentalize and I have never understood it. In fact, I used to find it incredibly annoying. How could anyone just shut one whole aspect of their life down in a moment? I couldn't understand how a person could live without all their messiness from one situation bleeding onto all their messiness of another.

Then, standing on the train, I realized that I had simply stopped worrying about my research residency (even though a project that I'm working on gave me fits all day while I was there and I certainly hadn't really fixed it by the time I left), that I was only focused on reading this one chapter of my stats text during my commute, and that when I stepped off the train I would no longer focus on the stats text and would instead focus on dinner. It was as if one concern simply vanished in the presence of another. NOTHING was moving into the mental space of anything else. It was shocking. And also a little like being reborn. I suddenly felt able to cope with the chaos that the PhD program forces upon a person.

So, I get it. It is a coping mechanism and perhaps even a survival mechanism: if one can't compartmentalize in a PhD program then one's brain surely explodes. Or, at least, that is my explanation for this newly acquired, and still slightly freakish, skill.

I am changing as a person, and that change is slow and incremental, but I notice it in sudden moments of insight that feel like discoveries.

The Heat is On

The holidays have officially passed. This break was a particularly strange one for me and not very restful. For some reason, it seems to have gone by too quickly and the things that I needed to accomplish during it have not all been finished. This isn't that surprising to me, but I do feel like I never really got to turn off my anxiety from the previous quarter. Since the start of this second year of the program, I have had this constant, low-level sense of anxiety that goes everywhere with me.

After I finished my master's degree, it took me almost a year to completely lose that non-stop, niggling sense of stress. I attributed it to the incredible pressure that I was under to complete a dual certification and work full-time to pay for it. Also, with school, unlike a regular nursing job, you bring so much of the work home with you. My primary study space is my living room. If I stop to read a non-assigned book or watch TV, my giant piles of work stare at me from my desk like enormous lurking guilt-creatures. Every minute that I spend not studying is a minute that I have lost.

At the end of last quarter (AKA the quarter where I took WAY too many classes), I had planned to start working very seriously on my new quest for funding. But, I just couldn't get started. So, here I am, with only a few days until the next quarter starts finally beginning the writing that I should have started three weeks ago. I honestly have no idea how this happened. Nonetheless, this quarter is the quarter where I will be doing the bulk of the applications and proposals for funding for next year. This will be in addition to my other classes. Today, I need to write part of a proposal, continue readings for the first week of classes next week, and build my spreadsheet of funding sources. It really isn't feeling like a break anymore.....

The new quarter starts in a few days!