Today has been a rather challenging day. I woke up at 1am and found it hard to drift back off again.. Awake till 2am I then finally went to sleep and woke up around 7.30. But this time I stayed in bed. And I thought... it's that familiar feeling. Anxiety tying you to the bed and not letting you get up. At 8.15 I decided to get up and still do a run, still do a kettlebell workout and still go to work for 10.30. I'm still trying to go slowly at my pace and at what is important for me.
Except I forgot I had a call with my colleague Martin Heaney at 10 and I missed it. I rang him on my mobile on the way over the bridge to work and told him that I took extra time for self care. Yeah, I'm cracking up and I don't care who knows it at the moment. I discussed how difficult recruitment had been in light of the strategic portfolio development, as we'd both been charged with upping student recruitment recently and he told me to take care.
My focus was supposedly the cluster validation document but I had so much admin to do in just communicating things to students such as being in Kazakhstan for a week at the end of March and also students who aren't attending (!) and therefore can't present (!) at the assessment.
I tried to focus on doing the validation stuff but I was going into meltdown. The residual anxiety was just taking over me and it felt like the greyness of the day was just overtaking me. I sat and wrote and précis of what 'projects' means as defined in the corrections, but I kept on reading and reading the corrections and thinking... OMG. It's too much. I can't do it.
Andrew Branch, one of the 'anti-media cluster' who signed the letter came into my office to smooth out things. Out of everyone who signed the letter I thought he would have signed it the most out of peer pressure, and so I didn't have any qualms but he tried to push things – he asked me how I thought teaching would be distributed, how I saw economies of scale panned out. Instead I ended up popping off at him and saying did he think sending such a letter was a good thing? Did he think the conversation with management was going to be a 'friendly discussion'? By the look on his face he had not considered this. I also said Kathy Walker and Jonathan Hardy were playing a dangerous game by wilfully refusing a reasonable request, which I thought was dangerous territory.
Part of me wanted him tos hit his pants a little bit and realise what a duff move he had made. And part of me wanted him to tell his little gang that was the case. So while I should have been restrained, he caught me on the wrong day and maybe it's good for him to see me a little bit angry.
Today I really, really would have advocated for meds if I had them. In fact I wrote an online message to my GP saying I had had an anxiety relapse and wanted to hear the options from my GP. It felt like my body was pumping a constant source of low-level adrenaline that was just enough to keep me on edge. I felt terrible because I knew soon after is a low mood or depression. I thought to myself will there ever be a time in my life I'm not dealing with emotional crisis – where things are just 'okay' and I can ride out the wave, or focus on enriching my life in other ways.
The day felt really oppressive. I was supposed to go for dinner with my colleague Julia and I went to find her in her classroom in WB2.06 but it all felt oppressive and claustrophobic with the lighting. I sat in Costa and waited for her, then I burst out crying and told her I was cracking up. Told her about all the death anxiety. I don't think Julia is the most consoling person but she did at least care. She seemed to think my death anxiety was tied to a very specific thing around achievement and doing well.
We went to a bar called the Moxy and while she drank a red wine, she went through the requests from Suzanne Simon and Andy (management) and got angry. She made me realise they are , essentially, 'busy work' requests and they are putting all of this on me.She said to stop trying to be perfect and pay those requests lip service, submit it and let QA deal with the document. Essentially it means management's stupid requests would be bypassed to the people that really matter.
She bought me some wine and actually I relaxed. I spoke enthusiastically about Derrida and Auslander, and it really calmed me down. We talked about vibrations and frequencies and the universe and – while it is more mystical – it comforted me. And because of the comfort I allowed myself to just be there.
I told Julia about my entrepreneurial plans for Creative Wave and the Atelier and i tried to remember my own purpose. She seemed pleased.
She told me she hadn't been this excited about being back at UEL for ages – that I was powerful, that I had saved UEL and no one had risen to the occasion – and I could yet rise even further.
I escorted Julia, drunk, back to the station and I left feeling slightly more relaxed, wondering if I would be able to have a full night's sleep. And, if so, that I wasn't going to totally crack up tomorrow.
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