💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~mieum › prose › 2020-10-12-failure_to_launch.gmi captured on 2022-06-03 at 22:52:10. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
It's been a hard year for everyone, and for me and my family, many of the factors that have made it so overwhelming seem to have come to a head in the past few weeks. A lot is in flux right now, and many more obstacles and opportunities have appeared on the horizon. I feel like I need to write about what is going on and where we are trying to go in order to make sense of it all, but I have been unable to write anything of substance. Everything turns into a wild rant about my frustrations with professional philosophy, or it simply breaks down trying to explore too many tangents. Everything I want to express is stuck on the launchpad.
So I'm trying to take small steps toward articulating what needs to be expressed.
I've been struggling with anxiety much more this year than I have at any other time in my life. There were a few occassions in my youth when I sufferred mild-to-severe panic attacks, but they were isolated incidents from which I quickly and successfully wound down. Over the past year, I haven't had any severe panic attacks, but I've been consistently anxious. There have been a few times when it got to be so bad that it was overwhelming and even crippling. What is difficult about this anxiety is it does not have an easily-located, definite cause. There are a few contributing factors that I am aware of, and to which I am responding with positive changes in habit and lifestyle.
About six years ago my wife and I were attacked by a dog, and I just barely saved her life. Ever since then, I've developed some triggers that wind me up almost instantly. These usually involve precarious situations where I feel overwhelmed by the potential dangers in a situation. It is related to the feeling of being utterly helpless in a potentially fatal circumstance---like only barely preventing a dog from ripping out your wife's throat out. Even if the situation is not even close to being comparable to such extreme danger, I feel nervous about the potential ways it could quickly spin out of control. For a few years I struggled with a bad habit of imagining frightening near-death situations, usually involving my family members, and how I would react to save them, or what would happen if I couldn't. I've more or less gotten over this, but the triggers are still there, even if they are not as sensitive as they used to be.
The more salient factor to my compounding anxiety as of late, however, has been just a looming, vague pressure weighing down on me at all times. A lot of that pressure is rooted in my ongoing effort (or obligation) to finish my dissertation. I have been researching on my own for about three years or so, and I began writing my paper full-time around the same time the coronavirus appeared on the scene. On top of this, our second child was born just months before, and our first child was starting at a new co-op preschool. Everything about our life changed, and without our realizing it, we internalized a weird sense of gloom-and-doom that seems to be common during the pandemic. We suddenly had a lot on our plate without anything to eat, so-to-speak---lots of responsibility and obligation without any recreation or even reprieve. We quickly felt spread thin and disoriented to the point of feeling like this is how it has always been and how it always will be. We unwittingly developed this weird attitude of just enduring life and looking forward to some vague relief in the remote future.
We acknowledged how unhealthy and undesirable our circumstances were, but it felt like we had no choice but to press on. At some point, however, it got to be too much, and the proverbial camel's back was broken. For me, this came in the form of a lengthy and absurd argument over the phone with my advisor. I had sent him an update on my progress in the form of 150-plus pages of updated chapters. He wanted me to tediously detail all the changes from previous drafts, so I did, even though it was Chuseok (which is a Korean holiday comparable to Thanksgiving in the US). I realized then that he had not even read my paper, or at least any of my latest drafts. When I finally talked with him on the phone, he scolded me like a child or pet who was "in trouble." And I am not exaggerating. Even though I still have over a month before I need to submit my final draft, he evidently felt like the most effective way to "advise" me at that juncture was to berrate me like a dog who shit on the carpet for not being finished with my paper already. What really pushed me over the edge, though, was that he accused me of being careless and undedicated---that is, if I was really committed and doing what I was supposed to, then I wouldn't allow all the obstacles in my life to impede my progress. Stellar advice, dude.
At that point I realized how absurd all of this is. I would love to get into all of the ridiculous "advice" I have received from my advisor, but this has already begun deteriorating into a rant as it is, and I don't know how constructive it would be to dwell on all that. The takeaway from this conversation was that somehow, at some point, I had been working on the clock---his clock, not mine. There is no real reason that I need to hurry up and finish other than the fact that if I don't, it will supposedly reflect poorly on my advisor's reputation or his efficacy as an advisor. I have spent the majority of my time and energy this year working on my dissertation, and it simply is not enough to meet the arbitrary deadlines for submission and defense. I simply cannot produce a lengthy academic research paper in a vacuum while the rest of my life is in pieces. By what stretch of the imagination would the make sense or even be desirable? I have given up trying to appease my advisor and his expectations, and I've decided to prioritize around the immediate problems in my life. I see no other way, really, and I no longer feel the need to justify that decision to anyone (although, the reality is that justification will continually be required of me).
We have decided to simplify our lives and live more deliberately. The only way to escape living on someone or somewhere else's time is to reclaim your own. This is a difficult thing to do. The idea itself is simple enough---it's easy to desire or value a slower pace of life, to idealize the aesthetic of a simpler way of life. But it is actually very political, and the reality is that we are embedded in the social-cultural worlds we inhabit---and vice versa. What I mean is, you have to be able to swim upstream, and you have to be content with the simple joy of doing that. That is why we have decided to prioritize around projects which immediately benefit the quality of our life here and now; projects which we are genuinely interested in and whose work we enjoy doing. Even just being together and living as a family~
There is so much I could say about all this. I want to talk about the actual projects we are working on, and the philosophical motivations and discoveries involved. It is too much to get at in a single go, I've found. I think I'm better off taking little bites. Even writing this was a challenge today. I like many others in the greater gemini/gopher/pubnix universe have had a lull in online activity, so I wanted to break my silence. I have a lot I want and need to say, and even though I can't get it all out yet, I want to start trying.
_________
CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 mieum(at)rawtext.club