coldhearted scientist وداد

This project brings up so much pain and I do not manage it well, do not handle it well, don’t treat myself well, perhaps. I can stop if I don’t think about deadlines, only about doing something now, and don’t require myself to think destructively.

This is how I used to be — before I learned to think destructively, and before I learned that choosing reasonable deadlines was not a good thing to do.

I’ve got fearful avoidant attachment, says the newspaper. Not about everything, but I have it. I have had it since … the first time I said yes to something big that I wanted to say no to, but thought I had no choice on. I made it worse after that.

In it you are afraid to touch the project, and your dread grows. You feel overwhelmed, get lost in things like social media or cleaning your desk, and try to figure out how to explain not getting the frightening project done.

Do I simply not want to do this project? I wonder if that is something I should face. I love intellectual work but I don’t think of it as something I do with friends, but for disapproving and violent authorities. This, I think, is key.

I keep trying to find a technique for battling this. And techniques like self-care are undeniably important. The newspaper says you should reduce your fear response: use  positive self-talk and support from colleagues or friends. Then take gentle action like opening one scary e-mail or working 15 minutes on a scary progress. The idea is that these small successes build on each other.

I keep finding that mere techniques are not enough. The association of certain projects with those violent authorities as opposed to with an idea of colleagues and friends, seems very important. Somehow managing to still be proud of self while working on certain things, instead of immediately going into a kind of worm mode, seems key, central to me.

Perhaps Reeducation was an entry into the world of people who do not meditate. It meant losing those perceptions and learning to think in a hierarchical way, and to think in terms of conflict, battle against others and self. I will meditate.

Axé.

And she was executed, after torture, one hundred years ago tomorrow. She hated Prussian men.

In this rentrée, how many of your departments were threatened with loss of program? It happens to us every third year or so and it is very unsettling. I am sure it is a tactic designed to throw us off our game and distract us into self-defense mode, such that we then give them reason to say our evaluations and publications and grantraising fell. I am very tired of it. It amounts to harassment, not because the threat isn’t real but because we are asked to make efforts at program expansion while the administration makes efforts to sabotage these, and when we reach a stalemate, we are then left alone for a year or more.
In the first year, we recover, in the second, we plan on our own terms, in the third, we really start to stream ahead with our work, and then the war is started again.

Also, I spent over an hour making career and graduate school plans with one of our minors, who graduated in December, and was glad to do it, BUT: in the past I could have claimed this as a teaching activity, which is how I think of it, but now it would be a service activity, and would only count if the student were a major and were assigned to me. So I guess it is public service. But my point is that it was meaningful, something a professor should do with this student, and in this case I was the right one to do it, but because this one does not fall within our statistics it is exactly the kind of thing the university considers meaningless now, and because the university had not specifically assigned me to do this for and with this student, they can accuse me of having wasted time today by doing it. D–n them, really.

Axé.