Summer Developments

I know, I know, it;s been a long time since the last post.  I seem to have spent the Spring (and most of the Summer) in the grip of depression and anxiety.  On the plus side, I now have a therapist who was able to actually point out to me that I do actually fit diagnostic criteria for pretty severe anxiety.

(Me: But I don't really feel anxious unless I do something like try to work or talk to someone, and I don't get panic attacks.
Him: So, do you avoid doing any of this long list of things?
Me: Oh yeah, pretty much all of them. The thought of them is terrifying.
Him: Yeah. That's anxiety.
Me: *Lightbulb* Ooooooh, so I'm actually just so awesome at avoidance that I don't even notice I'm doing it any more? Wow, my brain fucks me over in some interesting ways...)


This has been...interesting and kind of awesome in that now I'm learning how to recognise feelings of anxiety instead of just...oh, I have an overwhelming desire not to do that thing that I was planning to. Unfortunately, the internet has provided no magic ways to get over this, except CBT and graduated exposure - which kind of condenses down to 'get the fuck up and get over it (but, you know, over time)  and you might just have to accept living in a degree of discomfort for ever. But hey, you'll notice it less as you go on to do even MORE uncomfortable things'. 

So, I've been trying to do more things, and notice what my brain is veering away from and seeing if I can redirect it.  Which is useful but also exhausting because it adds an extra level of fighting myself.

(Apparently one thing I need to get used to the discomfort of is letting myself exist in social situations. So I'll start with the internet, post a few things and then maybe actually tell more than one person that this blog exists.)

The other thing I need to get into is the habit of writing.  Expressing myself is one of the things that I've slowly let dwindle away - honestly, it's much easier to say nothing or focus on being utterly unremarkable than risk venturing an opinion or being creative...and that's a line of thought that I've been following for years.  And of course, because I rarely risk it, I never learn to get over that fear of exposure - putting myself out there (where ever that somewhere is) where another actual person could have an opinion about me or my words. 

Why yes, I do need to write a 100,000 word thesis in the next two years.  And publish papers in journals. And speak at conferences in front of people I would like to be able to consider as peers. 

These things cannot exist together.  So, either I suck it up, retrain my brain and fear reflexes and learn to live with discomfort, or the PhD I've been working towards for 5 years will turn out to be a pipedream.

February Review

Winter still had a sting in the tail for me. Was it that I said I was so glad to be rid of January?  It's now just one week away from the end of the second University term, and I'm not really sure what I've achieved so far.  February had... Nights out with friends and obscene jokes, a Valentine's card, adventures squeezed into the back of a tiny car, mashed avocado on toast, a film festival and guests visiting, velvet jackets, a ride in the boot of a car and talking with ghosts in a cathedral.

On the other hand it also had antibiotics which triggered depression, two colds which left my head thick and fuzzy, frustrated attempts to find a house for next year, avoiding people and my office, too many days of missed seminars or talks and nights both wishing and unable to go out. 

It is largely because of those that this update is so late. I looked at the targets I set myself and they seem like a joke, however moderate they were.

February targets:

• 2 long bits of writing  - I haven't even achieved 1, though I have managed quite a few pages of notes
• 5 blog posts (this one doesn't count) - I posted 2
• Attend 3 large social gatherings - I'm trying to remember...I definitely made it to two, possibly three
• Read 1 theoretical text and 1 biography - I think I did read 1 theoretical text, but not a biography

 Books bought: 2
Significant things:

• Three cheers for CBT?  I have my doubts about it and I think it is a far from universally good therapeutic technique, but I think I am at a stage where it can be helpful.  That is, I am aware that I am mildly depressed and want techniques to help me stop my brain spiralling onwards into more serious depression, because it's been there before and has bad habits.  I'm taking a course which seems to be helping spur me into helpful actions at least.
• I have started to organise my notebooks and type up notes from last term.
•  I had another meeting with supervisor. She still seems happy with what I am doing, so...
• I volunteered to write a survey for the department.  This should be exciting :)
• I have started 'timesheeting' my work so that I can keep track of where time is going and note down when I've worked on what

March targets:  (In March I am having minor surgery and it is also includes some Easter holidaying)

• 1 piece of longer writing for second supervisor
• 2 short first draft pieces of writing for first supervisor
• Finish organising notebooks
• 4 blog posts
• Complete survey successfully and prepare to send out

On the plus side, the sun is coming back, the days are getting longer and warmer, and I think it's almost time to hang up my winter coat.

A Late Realisation

Today I realised that wanting to stay in bed all day and not leave to eat or fetch entertainment is actually a sign that I am ill, and even if I COULD force myself out of bed, I probably wouldn't be able to achieve anything.  The issue when your job mostly involves thinking very hard about complicated things is that when your head feels like it is made of cotton wool then there probably isn't much point in even trying to force yourself to engage.

Now, you'd think that I might have realised this way before now, but apparently I really hadn't. I think its the after effect of years of borderline mental health issues, where I assumed that if I could just get over myself and actually leave the bed / room / building or pick up an article and concentrate properly then I'd get over my general malaise and be able to work properly.  Well, today I picked myself up out of bed by the early evening, and took myself out to a couple of lectures that I've been looking forward to for a few weeks... And while it wasn't a total waste of time, I was aware that I just wasn't capable of engaging with it as I would like to.  It was taking all my energy just to follow the arguments, I didn't have a hope in hell of evaluating them.

When I realised this, it was a light-dawning, choirs singing revelatory moment where suddenly I could accept that I'd actually been ill today, rather than just kind of crap.  Accepting that I couldn't realistically have done any work suddenly took away a whole burden of background guilt about 'taking the day off'. 

I'm not sure if, now that I've finally come to this point, it will stick.  So, this post is partly here to remind myself in the future that it's actually not the usual state of affairs for me to want to do nothing and not move for the day - and when it happens it means that I'm probably ill.

January Review

A month I am very glad indeed to see the back of.  Going from the end of sumbel season (and, admittedly, a very good New Years' party) and travelling back to the north east, trying to get back into the working mindset.  Still just as cold and dark as December, though, with no real sign of days getting longer.  Walking home in the dark gets old, and the snow was lovely but the ice is perilous.

I did have another PhD student look askance at the fact that I could enjoy the prettiness of the snow though. I pointed out that it wasn't going to settle, and it was practically CGI quality snow falling in front of a cathedral lit up for the night - glorious. His response?  "Well, when you get to my age you don't really find it that exciting."  He is twenty-three.  I responded with the hope that once he reached my grand old age of twenty-six he would once again take delight in the world...

So, achievements this month:

Long bits of writing done: 1 (should have been 2, that is now trailing over into February)
Blog posts written: 3
Books read: 0 completely (Theory is, if I start tracking it, it will improve)
Books bought: 3 (not too bad, a little high. On the plus side, did discover a couple of ebook repositories, and am arranging a loan of another text I want to read.)
Significant things:

• Sat down for a morning with some bibliographic software, put together a system that works and organised most of the PDFs from last term.
• Had an excellent supervision and set some targets for next month.
• Found login details for most of my blogs and actually started using them.
• Managed to arrange social things to happen twice.
• Had a really crap month, but have not dropped anything really important, and have made plans to help with next month.

February targets:

• 2 long bits of writing
• 5 blog posts (this one doesn't count)
• Attend 3 large social gatherings
• Read 1 theoretical text and 1 biography

A handful of things

• Three weeks into term and I'm only just feeling like I'm picking up what I'm supposed to be doing again. People keep talking about this writing thing and I always mean to do, but never seem to be quite ready.  Challenge for this term is to be less easily distracted from trains of thought by seeing a shiny book or going to a fun talk. 
• On the other hand, I need to be pretty positive about what I've been doing, because since coming back here I've been feeling like I've been dragging myself around all day.  Which I had no way to clearly explain, until Robot Hugs drew it.
• My new love is this site which produces lovely background noise.  Turns out my favourite combination is thunder and rain, which kind of feels like warm stroking for my brain. Or a blanket, to use a slightly clearer simile.
• Today I have accomplished extreme cleverness (by my standards). I now have all of my references on a browser that lives on a flash drive!  This should hopefully be both an intuitive system for me to use and also get around the issue of Uni computers, which reset all preferences to defaults every time you log off, thus making them buggers to work on.  

Nights Drawing In

I am not good at winter.  It always takes me by surprise when I need to start wearing more layers, and I bristle with annoyance and spend a few weeks shivering before I relearn how to keep myself warm.  I can enjoy the autumn colours, the smell of a hazy morning and the start of the changing season, but then once we move into November the dark mornings and evenings start to take their toll.  Getting out of bed becomes ever more difficult (and so does leaving the house). I start wanting to take care of myself by doing nothing but eating and sleeping, and hibernation is just impossible when I've got the rest of my life still going on at the same pace.

I have a sunlight lamp - I call it my false sun god - and I spend time each day with it pointing obnoxiously brightly at my face to help me feel a bit more alive.  I try to get up and exercise each day - and in my new house I'm a mile away from my office and town, so I walk at least two miles a day.  I can still feel depression creeping towards me though, in an exhausting game of 'keep-away' where I tot up each small victory as proof that I am still functioning and fending off the seasonal blues (I often work off to-do lists. When I am doing well, the items I plan include reading whole books, reorganising my desk, planning papers and suchlike. On a bad day, I get to tick off eating meals and washing up).  This year is worse, I think, because I am in a new place with housemates I very rarely see (we are all busy students, in different fields) and just starting PhD study.

This stretch heading towards midwinter is better than afterwards though.  I know that very soon the christmas lights will come out, and I need to start planning and putting time into preparations for holiday events and gifts.  It might be dark at four in the afternoon, but lights in windows (and on roofs, and all over town, and frankly being really tacky in a lot of places) and the building anticipation help my mood enormously.  The really difficult bit is post-holiday, when new year jubilance fades but it is still dark and all you can do is wait for the light to slowly come back.  

In the meantime, I am going to go eat some soup and light candles.

Quick Hit: The Men Who Made Us Fat

This documentary can be found in 12 parts on Youtube, and it's an interesting romp through recent food history, from Nixon's agricultural policies to Sunny Delight turning a child orange.

In three episodes it looks at the rise of fast food chains and the impact of high fructose corn syrup, the economics and behavioural psychology of 'super-sized' portions plus the invention of snacking, and the impact of food packaging, legislation and 'health' foods. There's a lovely degree of paranoia around businesses lobbying MEPs and MPs (and a reminder that Andrew Lansley, when looking for a way to reduce child obesity, sat down with the people marketing, selling and profiting from unhealthy food to discuss if they could possibly maybe see a way forward to cut their profits voluntarily), but also a level of recognition that there is economic logic behind enticing people to buy more food that they like.  Some of the interviews with people who were in the industry thirty or forty years ago were fascinating - a discussion with a farmer in Indiana about the change to over-producing corn, and chatting with the man who introduced counter service in the UK.

Mostly, watching it made me very hungry.

In terms of fat-shaming, it skirted the edges a lot.  In its defence: there was a whole section on the neurological and biochemical responses to food - that sugar can stop people feeling full, that people don't notice if portion sizes are gradually increased, that our brains reward us more for eating sugar and fatty food, that we are duped by marketing etc.   (Consumers are portrayed to an extent as being entirely motivated by biological motivations for sugar and shiny packaging - but that is pretty much as they tend to be seen by sciences and economics anyway)

While 'being obese' is presented as a universal negative, the whole series is dedicated to unpicking structural causes and patterns in food production and marketing as the cause, and there is a lot of talk of people who are trying to eat healthily and lose weight, but are unable to do so due to the food industry itself.  A couple of interviewees do start to head off into individual-blame territory, and are redirected.  Despite that, there were a hell of a lot of stock shots of walking headless bodies

Conclusion: Nice enough basic documentary series, interesting interviews, some of the footage was overused enough to irritate when it was watched as a block rather than (as I suspect was intended) with a week between episodes.