Ac-anaemia

There have been mornings, lying in bed, unable to fully wake up, with a slow but panicked voice in my head:

“Wake up!” “Wake up! – you’re not breathing!” “Are you breathing?” “You have to move, I don’t think your heart is beating” “Wake-up, you’re dying!”

Then my hair started to fall out. And the headaches, and chest pains. I thought it was stress. I’m sure the nosebleeds didn’t help.

So, I’m on iron pills. Getting ready to go home for a month. Major decisions have already been made, but will take time to play out. More jobs are being posted each day, but nothing I want to do, nor in places I want to live. But in my new realisations comes a weight lifted from my shoulders. I’m no longer going to worry about getting the academic job. I no longer care. I’ll apply for a few things that come up; but not sure I’d take them if they were offered. I’ll plan my experiments for the fall – the plan is to stock-pile a tonne of data, and then if nothing interesting comes along next May when my funding runs out, I’ll just go home.

I’ll write. I’ll run. I’ll take care of myself. Get healthy. Recover from the last 12 years of stress and hard work. Yes, I’m taking a sabbatical.

If I live cheaply, I figure I can survive for at least a year on my savings. In the mean time, I might pick up some contract or consulting work. I’ll live with my partner (I’ll tell him about this plan later), I’ll grow tomatoes, I’ll write my novel. I’ll write some grants with people around my home town, I’ll see my friends, I’ll do something. I don’t know what, but I’m not worried anymore. This feeling I’ve had for the past two years is slowly fading – and I wonder how much of it has been my career stress and how much has been anaemia. What if it was all just anaemia?

Too depressed to blog – it must be bad

I’ve been taking a break from all things post-doc because I’ve found the whole situation too depressing to think about. I’ve been here two years. I’ve published a few papers, watched the job market tank, funding dry up, and gotten new wrinkles on my face. I look old, I feel old, and I still don’t have a job. I live thousands of kilometres away from my whole life; and the whole time I feel that I am on the cusp of a break though.

In fact, I know I am. But I just don’t know if I can do it. And the straw wasn’t my entire lack of personal life (and sex for that matter), but a realisation that I was leaving behind research I wanted to continue with just to be employable. Yes kids, it stopped being fun. And that was the whole reason I did it.

I used to love my job. Now I’m writing review papers about plant-pollination system for botany journals (note: this is NOT what I do).

The only solace I have is a PhD student in my lab who wants to be a film maker. I’m trying to get him to drop out.

Part of what I need to reconcile with are my expectations of success. If I’m not happy personally, am I successful? Not really. Especially since the catalyst for my academic career was fear of being trapped in a job I hated. I can’t call myself a failure, so why do I feel like one? maybe because this is a weird, weird profession where the bar is always higher than you will ever jump because it’s attached to the top of your head.

Funding runs out in May. Something will happen then.