The Machinations of Father Time

Blogging, as Shakespeare so rightly said (in one of the less read works no doubt), is a labour of such sweet sorrow. It brings you face to face with the necessity of filling an empty page with thoughts and opinions, most of which at the moment I don’t particulary want to face. However, in the spirit of sharing, and the interests of openness, but also with the selfish hope that a problem shared is a problem halved, here are the things that vex me.

• My PhD. I have a full draft effectively. I have 85k words on paper, in six chapters of varying quality and insightfulness. What remains is the re-writing of one chapter, the finishing of the argument section, the revisions to ensure coherence and clear argumentation, and the conclusion.  I worry massively that its not good enough. I worry that I am so tired of the topic that I will never reach the end of the process. I get irate that people don’t read it when they say they will. I feel resigned that its never going to finish. I feel angry that it has taken me this long to produce something so clearly “mediocre”, and I feel exhausted every time I look at it. I don’t have the words to explain to people who haven’t done this just how all consuming it has become to my life, to my sense of enjoyment and my ability to do anything other than sit here with it. This isn’t to say that it is in some way an experience that is “better” or “more severe” than others experience, I don’t have the baseline of assessment to state that. But it is, to me, the beginning of my day and the end of it. I wake up and think about it, I go to sleep and dream of it. It populates every one of the 24 hours, and it has done so for longer than I remember. I don’t have space for me in this, I may be able to carve out 24 hours outside of the office, or 2 hours to watch Big Brother, but I can’t carve out 1 second where the work isn’t with me as a voice in my head. It’s like having multiple personalities and they all say the same thing.  I resent that its eaten my life, even as I realise I can never live the life I want to without it. It is as if I have poured my hopes and fears and ability and weaknesses into 289 pages and that now my soul resides on the page, not in my body. It is apotheosis and nadir in uneasy cohabitation.

• I’m 29 next week and the progression of time is palpable. This leads to horrifically existential questions such as “where will I live”, “what work do I want to do”, “what work will I be able to get within the confines of previous two questions”, “how should I weigh up the varying competing pressures upon me”. Should I stay in Australia, where my heart says I should, even though it has limited job opportunities in the fields I am interested in. Should I go abroad, even back to the UK, where there is so much more ‘work” but so much less to make it a “home”. Do I prioritise the trajectory of my life since I entered school, or do I call a halt and say that now it is happiness that conditions the decisions I make. Is there a compromise, and will I really be happy? It is easy to come to a decision about these things with the arbitrary spite of decisiveness, but I am not the sort of person who can stick to a decision long without questioning it in endless detail and inevitable repetition. It is both my strength and my weakness.

• The question is then, how do I act over the coming months. How much and how often do I give into this questioning and angst, and when should I paper it over, laugh at the detritus and ephemera of life, watch Grey’s Anatomy and spend Sundays smiling. How honest should I be to my emotions, and which ones exactly are we talking about?

• Sometimes, just sometimes, the costs of this life become obvious and when I am feeling particularly low, especially weak and needy, that is when the pus of self doubt wells up. I miss (in the sense that I am absent from) family events and stages of life that to so many other people seem of definitive importance. Am I truly happy so doing so, or have I constructed myself in conscious opposition to that normality that so many seem to inhabit so happily? why, at my most philosophical (or self referential), do such binaries interest me so when clearly they are the chimera of my mind rather than an accurate depiction of what is? There are no answers to these questions, but the questions themselves become more manifest as time progresses and my life diverges in increasingly concrete ways from what it was and from the parameters of happiness that those I hold most dear seem to know exist with a surety that escapes me.

And so I blog, or not blog as the case may be. Some days I work very hard, other days I sit and glare at my work as one glares at a cancer on an MRI scan. I feel pressure from everywhere and I feel that fulfilling all those pressures is impossible, given the different pulls they exert on me. I worry that my self-reference has become a mania, and a rather static one at that, but I guess we all exist in confines of our own making and awareness of that is perhaps better than nothing.