Self-esteem: por los suelos.
Pressure, of every kind: high.
Fatigue: extreme.
Immediate Reason: the language program.
I am so tired from it, and so traumatized from the language teaching wars. The trauma would end if we had a program with goals and policies, and if it were coherent and feasible and we all actually followed it, if we actually supported each other and if we had administrative backup.
I keep thinking that if I were a better person I would be able to do a good, and also efficient job of this without any of the above. Saying things like “be brave” and “it will be over soon” (I particularly hate “be brave” because it is so condescending) are not solutions, because this is not a passing problem.
I do not know what the students are really responsible for knowing how to do in these multi-section, multi-term courses, so I do not know what it might be reasonable to expect. I feel uninformed and incompetent, and I do not understand what is happening. I feel impaired. We know we cannot ask each other what is happening since any question may be taken as criticism and thus cause the next war.
*
The hopelessness I feel around this situation exacerbates the issue, but it really does seem to me that my hands are tied. In the absence of information about the program the only real solution would be to have the situation of the instructors, which is that this is all they do. Then one could give the language teaching the time it needs. One would also be teaching more sections, so one would be a de facto program creator; the lack of a general program would be less important to one’s daily life.
That would not be a good solution and once again, the hopelessness I feel is not helpful, nor is the shame of even being in this situation.
*
My own reaction to the whole thing is also really deep. It is a reaction I have in discourses and groups that are structured in a certain way and as such it has nothing to do with the situation at hand. I have become entirely too deferential and this awakens the rage I have. Rage at which ur-event I wish I knew; it seems to be a reaction to mediating and listening and quelling one’s own views and placating and donating, and realizing too late that one has opened one’s last vein.
*
Rage because I know I am here to be trampled upon, but have been promised I will not be trampled to death. Now I find I am about to be trampled to death anyway, and I am incensed. Rage in self-defense, but also because an agreement has been broken. I would like to know what story this is.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
All right, let us see: in our family self-assertion and rage are associated with one another. It is as though one had to feel rage in order to be allowed to express or even be aware of one’s own (dissenting) views.
So I seem to have to go through these exhausting feelings of rage (which I experience as practically joyful moments of clarity) in order to allow the self to come through, or something along those lines.
That, by the way, is also the reason I quit publishing research: could not take the adrenalin rush stating my own ideas in public required.
THIS is today’s realization!!!
So it is true, the conclusion I have come to before, everything is about individuation, and my primordial fear is that individuation means death.
I have to remember this, and remember that it is the opposite really, individuation means life. So I can relax.
All the exhaustion I have, all of the feelings about trying to climb out of a barrel or out of a coffin in which I am buried alive by mistake, are always about individuation, I need it to live but I fear it means a death sentence, and I am caught in this eternal frustration of ambivalence.
It is why … everything, and it is why those ideas from Bateson will help. It is why I like to be anonymous or in very functional environments, so I can be under cover as I work through these things. (And I do think, by the way, that these settings do help reveal, and not help hide, pace whatever pseudo- therapeutic things could be said about how this stressful environment is what I need. It’s not, it’s just what I have, so anyway.)