Around two weeks ago, I finally got sick and tired of being in pain and exhausted all the time, and decided to do something about it.

Granted, I strongly suspected that my probable diagnosis, fibromyalgia, wouldn’t be particularly tractable to solve, but I didn’t want to let fatalistic thinking stop me from doing all I could to fix the issue in the first place. Once I’d exhausted all avenues, only then could I complain about modern medicine’s inability to resolve this problem.

I got a referral to the university’s Pain Management Clinic, which I hadn’t even known existed until the referral happened. It’s located in a complex I jokingly call the “hotelspital,” since if you hadn’t noticed the high number of folks who come in limping, straggling, or in various other states of medical distress, you’d imagine you’d wandered into a Hyatt or something similar. (The New York Times amusingly noted the trend with a quiz – “Hotel or Hospital?”)

Anyway, the first visit to the hotelspital went well – I showed up early, finished the paperwork and pre-admission surveys, and had enough time to get a coffee and relax outside on some surprisingly comfortable Dedon lounge furniture, including the specific chair depicted below, which is angled just right for you to lean back and relax without feeling like a complete slouch. Continue reading →

I spent the past week bowled over by a cold that had taken my poor boyfriend M by surprise a week or two before.

We had basically the same symptoms in the same progression, and I was in extended contact with him because I chose to go help him while he was sick, so I’m fairly certain it was his bug. It all started with an uneasy feeling in the sinuses, followed by an intensely painful sore throat (so bad that M’s doc incorrectly diagnosed it as strep!), high fevers (>100 F for me), nonstop upper respiratory mucus production, and a general feeling of having been run over twice by a dump truck.

The recovery process involved some limited coughing, a sharp drop in the throat soreness after the second day, lingering fevers and chills the next day, and really prolonged weakness for two or three days afterwards. I remember how he was struggling to just get up and walk around the house even though his last fever was two days ago – now I fully understand why! Today I was at that same stage of recovery, and I was sweating and winded after doing some simple chores like taking the laundry out to the local laundromat’s, which is only 500 ft from my place.

Anyway, I know I’m back, because here I am, blogging stuff at an ungodly hour (:P ), after spending a day doing things like cleaning up around the house and setting up some absolutely awesome outdoor furniture that finally (!) arrived today. My nose seems to have finally decided it will not be a full-time mucus factory after all. Whew.

.     .     .

I wish the cold was the only thing that was bothering me, but it’s not.

My finances are an ever-lurking worry in the back of my mind – I’m vaguely aware of it at all hours of the day, and it colors my actions and decisions. You know you’re worried about money when the March of Dimes fundraising letter arrives in the mail and you want to rip into the envelope and SAVE THAT DIME DAMMIT.

The other thing that has been bugging me recently (roommate woes) is somewhat to do with the finances – if I hadn’t been stressing about getting someone to take over the room that a previous roommate had abruptly vacated without proper 30 day notice, I don’t think I would have been so willing to settle for the first taker. As it was, I’d interviewed a lot of people and had good impressions of them, but the first person to commit was someone who literally signed on a few hours after he’d visited. I should have realized then that that was a bad sign.

A lot of times, I dismiss my intuitive sense because I think, “Come on, let’s not be prejudicial. Give them a chance.” Unfortunately it often turns out that my gut sense was spot-on, and the unease I was picking up was not merely me being judgmental, but just a mere hint of worse trouble to come. One prospective roommate, whom I pushed back on when he said he wanted in ASAP, turned out to be incredibly intrusive – he wanted to know who else was interested and how much they made! I told him flat out that that was inappropriate and violating others’ privacy, and he backed down. But just imagine if he’d moved in – our bedrooms don’t lock except from the inside! He’d totally be the dude snooping in your room while you’re out. Eww.

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This is probably a record for me, not blogging about anything in over three months!

Well, that’s not exactly true. I’ve been posting more stuff to social media lately, part of a conscious effort to reach out to people to combat my social isolation due to being on leave. Although I did recently tell another recluse to go sit in cafes and just enjoy being around other people, and even strike up conversations if she’s brave, the truth is that I’m trying to save money right now while I’m not earning any, and it’s hard to justify a $1.20 cup of coffee if I’ve got all the tools and ingredients needed to make an equally good cup at home for mere cents.

I posted something about my reasons for being on leave a few weeks back. It had been rolling around in the back of my mind that I should use the opportunity of my leave to reach out to other people who might be experiencing the same things I did. Having been sort of a role model for people in my department, my own statement of “Stress bites. Health first. It’s not wimpy to stop out” hopefully makes a dent in the corrosive “work above all else” culture I came from.

This corrosive workaholic culture is something that I can trace all the way back to, well, elementary school. I recall being forced to stay up way past my usual bedtime once in first grade because I put off a lot of work due to being sick and had to make it up. (I think I was also doing the perfectionist-procrastination thing too, but nobody caught me then …) My first all-nighter was in 6th grade in the gifted program. By freshman year of high school, I’d pulled my first 36-hour allnighter, and came home to collapse into a deep sleep on the living room carpet fairly regularly. That was also when I first experienced the agony of my body wanting to go to sleep badly but being forceably kept awake by the caffeine that I’d drunk earlier to make it through the day.

Whether it’s a cultural thing, a familial thing, a social thing, even a departmental thing doesn’t matter, though. Ultimately, stress is harmful, not just merely uncomfortable. Sleep deprivation in the teenage years can do a serious number on brain development, which increases the likelihood of coming down with depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses. Sleep deprivation also increases the risk of Alzheimer’s and other degenerative neural diseases later in life, since (as recently discovered) sleep is when the brain cleans out its metabolic wastes. Not sleeping means letting dangerous amyloid proteins build up, which leads to plaque, which leads to forgetting the way home when you’re 65 ….

Anyway. Being on leave, while nerve-wracking due to the lack of income part, at least has given my poor tension-strained body a chance to soften and relax. I’ve noticed that I’m having fewer and fewer headaches and neckaches, and my mood is in general much sunnier than before. I’ve been able to pay attention to things that were neglected for a long time, like making my current apartment more of a home than just a house, and cleaning out the junk I’ve accumulated over the years. I’ve even noticed that I waste less fresh food because I have the time to a) remember it’s there, and b) cook and eat it.

These are all incremental improvements, though. Since life hasn’t exactly laid off on me completely (a landlord/roommate/lease kerfuffle happened earlier this month, for example, partly documented on Facebook), I still experience relapses of intense stress and pain. My body is still learning how to come down more quickly from such a tense worked-up state, so I know I’m not quite yet resilient enough to handle a full-time job or a return to school. My friends who have been through similar experiences (and there were more of them than I’d thought!) have said it takes about 2 years to get back to full health, and I believe them, though I think I’ve also made tremendous progress since just the start of this calendar year alone (about 2.5 months at this point).

Life will never be easy, so it’s up to me to harden up so I can handle it better. Being abused as a kid means that your system is completely predisposed to blow even the slightest disagreement or trouble out of proportion, since any hint of danger could suddenly and unpredictably lead to pain and abandonment by the bigger angry people that you are fully dependent on. Thus, I have a lot of unlearning to do. I have to teach my body to calm down, realize that I am no longer helplessly at the mercy of capricious tyrants but am a full able adult myself. I’m not going to unlearn the lessons of an entire childhood overnight, which is why I know I’ll need time. As for strength and willpower, well, that’s what’s gotten me this far already, and that’s what will get me out of this.

I’ve been suffering from very bad stress-related pain recently – not only my TMJ issues, but also my back and neck and shoulders are acting up. The stress also seems to have triggered allergic skin reactions, in the form of itchy hives. Luckily two days of Claritin put a stop to that, although so far I haven’t found a solution to the pain yet. Hopefully tonight’s massage will help.

I’ve been behaving like I’m sick recently, which is confusing, since I don’t think I am. I do have a nagging cough that hits sporadically, and I’ve been very sluggish, sleepy, and remiss on answering emails, but I’m not experiencing any other symptoms. It could just be depression kicking me in the face again, or it could be something else that I haven’t quite identified.

.     .     .

This week is the last week of the quarter, and possibly my last week of higher education ever, so going around campus doing my usual duties is taking on a cast of nostalgia.

I like my job – I like mentoring, I really enjoy teaching, and I feel like I’m in my element when I’m going around my home department. I’m not sure if it’s inflating my ego to unhealthy sizes yet, but I at least feel that I’ve been able to do good for the department and make positive changes. Having to give that all up isn’t just uncertainty-inducing, it’s also a loss, in a way. It helps me access a part of me that I often forget is there or don’t give myself enough credit for.

Today I found myself blabbing on for almost an hour about various teaching-related subjects at the last departmental workshop of the quarter, talking about various teaching awards, active learning methods, and the challenges of TAing my old radio frequency lab. I think I’m retreating into these “old war stories” as a way of clinging on to what pride I have left in my competence. Resting on my laurels is not something I aspire to do, but  when you’re too tired to do much else, you kind of want to milk that for all it’s worth.

In a way, I think this Leave of Absence is both good and also long-overdue. I’ve finally recognized that I’m too exhausted, too in pain, and too impaired to be useful for anything. I’m owning up to defeat and surrendering to a higher power, in a way. I’m letting go of outcomes and choosing to leap into uncertainty. I will have no job or active degree program for the first time in my life, no responsibilities beyond taking care of myself (which is time-consuming if you’re always limping around in a state of semi-illness). I will be living on my savings, something else that I’ve never done before either.

It’s overdue in the sense that I could have used this about three years ago, when I was underperforming heavily, ticking off group project mates and faculty with my constant excuses for homework/project extensions and unreliable email availability. I was so impaired then that I didn’t even recognize I needed to take a break and step down. Ideally I could have been forced to take a Dean’s Leave, for students who are struggling beyond the capacity of the university to help them, but I didn’t attract enough attention with my quiet meltdown. On the surface, it all looked okay. It was only underneath that you could see the roiling painful stressful life I was struggling to keep up with.

While reading about recovery, I learned that AA likes to say “You are only as sick as your secrets.” Well, the cat’s out of the bag, regarding all of the folks I worked with in the department – I’m struggling, I’m not doing okay, and I’m going to need time off to recuperate and figure out what my next step is.

No more secrets. No more hiding.

It has become more and more likely that I will have to give up my goal of getting a PhD, at least for now.

This was supposed to be my last quarter to go locate a new advisor; if I don’t find someone willing to sponsor me as a researcher before next January, I’m out of here. Even if I do get a tentative “yes” now, I would still have the additional hurdle of needing to ask for more time to work on my thesis, since my candidacy expires this coming February.

This is not how I pictured it all ending, of course, but this is the hard reality of the matter. You can’t get away with minimal productivity forever. And while I admit that I am not as motivated about doing research as I could be, the other part of it was that I had enough going on with my health and in my personal life to be a major distraction from getting anything else done.

Whenever I see other people who are on track to finish their degrees, it helps to remind myself that most of them are “normal” people, in the sense that they didn’t grow up in a family that looks more and more insane the farther away I get from it. Home was North Korea in miniature, with an autocratic dictator who didn’t care about what you wanted, would question you if you tried to leave (even for a simple jog around the block) or show any independence, and actively stifled any opportunities you had to branch out into the world and grow as a person.

It was an odd way to grow up, being “spoiled” with the privileges of an upper-middle-class income and education-focused parents on one hand, while also chafing at confinement and living in fear of punishment on the other. It taught me horribly wrong things about myself that I’m still working on untangling now.

Most importantly, it set me up for a lifetime of mental illness myself, a wretched sinking depression due to being inculcated with a twisted definition of love, and overly negative interpretations of the world and my own abilities to live in it. Without the help of antidepressant medication, I don’t think I would have ever been able to truly break free of the paranoia, anxiety, fear, helplessness, and gloom of my parents’ mindset.

Unfortunately, I had to do all of the work of realizing how sick my parents were and how much they had harmed me while my PhD candidacy clock was running. I had no choice – I wasn’t in any shape to be holding down a full time job, but I couldn’t afford to stop working entirely either. Ever since I found out the hard way that my dad wielded his financial support as a blunt weapon, I vowed to become financially independent of him as soon as possible.

I’m proud to say I’ve been (mostly?) taking care of myself since 2007 – finding my own housing, buying my own groceries, earning my own keep. While it has put a healthy distance between me and my often-abusive parents, it has come at a price – all of the time and energy spent keeping myself just barely afloat meant I couldn’t focus on research as much as I’d have liked. And going through all of these difficulties while also trying my best to hide them from my family for fear of a yelling-at, not to mention the absence of any kind of emotional support from them, only makes it harder.

I know now (without the pessimistic blinders of depression) that I am incredibly lucky and privileged, that I will have no trouble finding a job and keeping myself alive even if I don’t finish the PhD. So while I am sad to go, and really don’t want to, at the same time, I understand the hard requirements for the degree, and I also understand that life doesn’t end just because I haven’t reached this academic goal of mine so far. Emphasis on so far, since I always have the option to come back too, although it gets harder the longer people are out and away from school.

I don’t have any solid plans for the next few months, but I’ve studied some job postings and am considering going to work after a few months of good sorely-needed rest. It will be nice to have no sense of lingering doom over my head, not being followed everywhere by the guilt that I owe someone some long-overdue work. In an ideal world, I’d have been able to take a Leave of Absence and get myself all sorted out before coming back to finish triumphantly. This is, alas, not such an ideal world.

This past weekend, I went to visit my cousin. She’d chosen me to be the godmother (geez, how adult!) of her baby daughter, so I was ostensibly there to attend my goddaughter’s baptism. But my stay with them turned out to be more healing and validating than I had ever expected.

Before this trip, I hadn’t really ever spent much time with extended family without my parents around, and probably never as an adult that I can recall. Not that I felt I was missing out on anything – they seemed to always side with my parents, and to not really care all that much about my well-being.

What I hadn’t realized back then, as a child, was that they were going along with what my parents said, simply because they couldn’t tell I was hurting. From the outside, I appeared to be the ideal kid – healthy, studious, obedient, well-behaved, restrained, and high-achieving. If I had been able to be truly in touch with my feelings back then, and to tell them how deeply unhappy I was and how abusive my parents were, I think they would’ve just dismissed it as teenage exaggeration and moodiness.

But I’m an adult now, and I have worked long and hard to be more in touch with my feelings, though they sometimes do sneak up and surprise me. (Annoying and unprofessional tendency to burst into tears at the slightest provocation, for one.) And now that I’ve finally accepted that I am a survivor of child abuse, and that I have depression and it’s putting a serious cramp on my style, I am able to tell the truth about my past and see my parents for what they were, objectively.

And to my amazement, now that I’m an adult, and a sensible, intelligent one too, people are finally ready to hear what I have to say.

.     .     .

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I am a bit more angry at my depression now for how it’s affected my grad school career.

I went in to talk to a faculty member whom I was doing independent study with. He was very understanding of my health issues and limitations, and did his best to advise me from not just a technical-knowledge standpoint, but also a mentoring standpoint, as someone who has once been there and done that. That was super useful, because I’m not used to “managing upwards” like that – I hadn’t realized that I could send my advisor out to forge new connections with industry partners for access to things I needed for my research, for instance. It had never occurred to me to boss HIM around that way. XD

Anyway. This faculty member made a good point – I had done a lot of work for the old topic I’d had, and for someone with limited bandwidth and energy, it would make sense to leverage my existing strengths instead of trying to brute-force create something new.

Except that I kept shooting his ideas down, wet-blanket style. He’d suggest something, and I’d explain why it was bound not to work, or why I didn’t want to go there with it. But the whole time, he kept saying, “I think you see it far more negatively than I do; I think there’s a lot of good stuff in this project.”

He surprised me with one little tidbit – it turned out that a former employer of mine had been struggling with the exact same type of problem that my research goal had been to solve. If I did do a project on that for my PhD, they would be very interested in hiring me back, I think. And since I’m interested in going back, that would be in my interest too. So this project is not only more alive than I’d expected, but also more immediately relevant to my own goals.

I had tried my best to stay professional during the talk, but I burst out crying when he said I had more positives going for me than I’d thought – out of frustration and sorrow at everything my stupid bout with depression had cost me in my life. I’d wasted three extra years floundering in the desert when I could have started off on this topic and run with it back in ’10? The main reason I hadn’t moved on it was because I felt it was hopeless, and that I was hopeless – and now I was realizing that those were just distortions of my disease, not facts on the ground.

I pointed to my tear-stained self. “There you have it. This is the definition of clinical depression. Seeing only the dark side of everything.”

After I left his office (he ran overtime, and generously let me stay later without kicking me out), I poked my head into the office of the faculty member next door. That guy is famously hard to get ahold of, but here he was, holding court in his office. He’s always had a soft spot for me, for some unknown reason – I think he sees a lot of similarities between the two of us.

Anyway, he invited me into his office, and handed me two Kleenexes (a straight man! who keeps Kleenex in his office! in his super-messy office!) when I burst out sobbing in front of him. “It’s been … so hard … much harder than I thought it would be.” “I’m sorry.”

He gave me a hint of a research tip, based on something he’d read and done some back-of-the-envelope calculations about in the past. “That might be worth investigating.”

More importantly, though, he restored my confidence in myself – talking with him reminded me that he respected me for not just my wit and humor, but also for the interest and competence in his field of expertise that I’d shown. I’d once corrected helped him when he was having trouble plotting a graph and doing some calculations for a final exam solution. I remember when I had him for quals – how I was terrified of letting him down, and how I quickly solved the problem that he’d put silently before me after only a bit of a bobble. “Just as I’d expected of you,” he said with a broad smile. I’d finished before time was up, and was perfect.

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Things are looking up for me.

I can’t believe I hadn’t thought about this until now, but the student disability office can provide a letter recommending that I get more time to complete my PhD, based on the fact that I’ve had clinical depression while in graduate school. This removes the impending deadline of my PhD candidacy expiring on me, and also takes a huge load of stress and pressure off of my back. Ironically, that might actually free me up to make more forward progress on the actual degree itself….

I feel like a bit of a dork for not thinking about this earlier – it was a staffer who reminded me of this, and bless his heart for it! I talk about the disability office every quarter to the new TAs at TA orientation, so I of all people should have known about the things they’re capable of doing on behalf of students. I even attended a TA mini-conference on how to better accommodate students with disabilities two years ago.

Part of my reluctance to utilize their services, I think, is due to my own denial of my problems. I tend to avoid things more than face them head-on, despite my avowed preference for the latter, and try to maintain the appearance of normality even when I’m struggling. I’m fairly sure I learned this from my parents, who do their best to project an image of upper-middle-class respectability while hiding enormous ugly secrets in their personal lives (untreated depression, anxiety, OCD, and hoarding; marital trouble and family discord).

Anyway. I’m too deep into the hole to pretend nothing is wrong anymore. It is not normal for someone to get so exhausted that s/he can only handle 2-3 major tasks a day. It is not normal to be so negative about oneself as to fail to appreciate one’s true capabilities. It is not normal to consistently underestimate the strength and quality of one’s social ties, and to be dismissive of all of the goodwill that people have shown one as mere flukes. These are the signs of a person who needs help and is still in the throes of depression.

The fact that I can admit that now, and can budget my energy so that I don’t wear myself out completely every day, is already a sign of improvement and higher-order thinking. Having the energy to be self-aware was beyond me a few years ago; now I can regulate my schedule and decide what should be a priority and what shouldn’t. M thinks I’m on an upswing as well – he’s seen my progress over the last year, and I think he’s been a big part of it too.

In an ideal world, I’d take time off for a Leave of Absence and completely kick back until I get well, but this is a real world, where I need to stay in my position at school to maintain my (minimal) income and health insurance access even if I’m not really capable of doing academic research at the moment. My psychiatrist understood this, which is why she was perfectly fine with filing a disability letter on my behalf. She hadn’t suggested it to me ever, though – the onus was on me to ask.

Having people acknowledge that I am NOT a slacker, a time-waster, a procrastinator, but someone with a recognized and understandable disability out of my control is also a load off of me psychologically. I’m doing my best to fight the depression with medication, supplements, and psychotherapy, but since I’ve been depressed for a very, very long time (first diagnosed in 2005, but probably walking around with it even earlier), it makes sense that depression won’t release me from its clutches quite so easily. The official letter from the campus disability office recognizes that I’ve been fighting this uneven battle for a while, even if it won’t take effect retroactively. It’s not an “excuse,” it’s a valid reason.

I felt so relieved when that staffer told me that no, depression was a very understandable reason as to why I couldn’t finish my degree on time. Life is not a crystal stair – but at least in this case, I have hands pulling me up.

Everything hurts.

This has been the default state of my body for the last few days. My neck, lower back, shoulders, and calves are killing me, all for a variety of reasons. Stress is aggravating my tension/TMJ-related problems, and the persistent cough I’ve got from the flu two weeks ago isn’t helping with my back pains either.

The last few times I’ve come to campus, I’ve driven myself, in spite of my enviro-guilt and the expense in gasoline. Today I took the bus in, and now I know why I haven’t been doing that – having to dash across the street to catch it on my still-weak sprained ankle and then dealing with being out of breath and dogged by a ragged cough afterwards was no fun.

Basically, my rule of thumb for public transit is that you had better be prepared to run/walk every distance between the transit stop and your intended destination. If you can’t do it, don’t do it via transit, or else you may find yourself praying desperately for a taxi to bail you out. Even if you have a bike with you, you could always end up with a flat tire in an inconvenient location, like I did once, and have to walk the last mile yourself. So basically, if you’re a quarter lame and panting with exhaustion after crossing the street, maybe transit might be pushing your limits today.

I’ve booked a massage for later today. I am certain I will enjoy every moment of it. Given that massages are fairly expensive for my budget, I don’t indulge in them more than once or twice a year, and only when I reach the breaking point. Last night I finally realized that I was so exhausted and in so much discomfort that I wasn’t able to function and do my job, and when I woke up this morning in pretty much the same state, I knew a massage was overdue.

Woah. This Xanga 2.0 is so different.

I’m mildly disappointed that I currently can’t access any themes in WordPress other than the default Xanga one, and even then, I can’t go in and customize the colors or anything. Hence this blue stuff all around, when I’d much rather go back to my standard purple/gray combination. Oh well. It’s a pity they couldn’t save any of the old Xanga skins, since some of them were quite impressive.

Anyway. No decisions yet whether I’ll migrate to another WordPress blog or not – I’ve already paid for this and next (I think?) year’s access on this platform, so it would be kind of silly not to use it.

There have been other changes in my life right now – namely, the department is attempting to replace me with someone new, and one of my roommates is planning to move out. The first is something I have more control over, while the latter is something he’ll have to figure out for himself.

One thing I’ve realized, after spending the summer doing zero work in my departmental position, is that I really do love my current work, which is mostly teaching and mentoring, and I’m only getting better at it as I go along. I haven’t plateaued yet, and I don’t think I ever will, at this rate. It’s a pity that academia is so focused on research that there isn’t a degree out there for people like me who love to teach but would rather not do research, or even worse, that people somehow think “good at teaching == good at research” and vice-versa.

Anyway. If anything, the realization that I love my job and am nowhere near ready to give it up should be motivation to get me started on research, despite all of my misgivings and fears about it. I’m not ready to leave yet! You’ll have to drag me out of my office kicking and screaming!!! XD