[frontierkodiak]

My friend, shoot me an email and I’d love to chat.

My present situation is not all that dissimilar to what you describe.

I have been in a MSc program for the past 2 years which has continually threatened to drain all the life-force out of me. I’d always been a happy-go-lucky, jubilant, highly social person, but I moved 1000mi away from my friends and family to accept what appeared to be a funded position which perfectly aligned with my interests. It took me maybe 6 months to realize that I’d fucked up. You might be able to relate to some of the reasons.

For the first time in my life, I was alone, all day, every day. I had zero energy. It took all the effort in the world to get out of bed before 5pm.. I was getting up at 6am to climb mountains every day only a few months before!! I would go weeks at a time without talking to another person, because they simply were nowhere to be found. ‘My’ department had, of course, moved almost entirely online, and they didn’t know I existed. I developed a horrible mental dialogue of constantly shaming myself for my lethargy. I didn’t let myself do my hobbies, since to my mind I hadn’t ‘earned’ them, since I wasn’t getting any work done. I waited it out for a bit, I thought that surely the department would come back to life, and I would finally be able to make human connections, and I would just revert to the old me. Of course, this didn’t work, because nobody wanted to come back: all the decision-makers were happier than ever sitting at home with their families all day. By the end of my first semester, the terrible dullness which has overtaken my person wasn’t going to just go away.

And yeah, I think having difficulty with executive function leads to really harmful positive feedback loops when you’re not doing well. As I continued to fail to get work done, and my mind became less and less healthy, my excitement and joy for the world and for my work was replaced by anxiety and despair. I stopped sleeping well, I stopped eating well, I stopped giving a shit. I spent damn near two years sitting in front of a computer, haranguing myself for not being better, my internal voice screaming at me that if I could just be a professional for this day, and get my fucking work done, then I’ll feel better. It doesn’t really work that way. I’ve also got ADHD, but I’d always done quite well in school etc. because I had good strategies for managing my mind—- I knew that if I surrounded myself with other people, then I’d always been energized enough to get my stuff done, even if it wasn’t at 100% efficiency. I didn’t mind, it worked very well for me— I’d occasionally hand something in late, but I earnestly didn’t give a shit because I loved the way my mind worked: I was always overflowing with energy and creativity etc., more so than my peers, so I figured I was doing something right, and embraced that part of my cognition. All that goes out the window when I moved across the country to start my MSc: all of a sudden, the joy of befriending new folks, of working in a high-energy environment with other folks who are passionate about their work, that stuff all disappeared. The people at my new department didn’t know me and they actively did not want to know me. I was just a threat to them: the casual interactions which had made me love life were eliminated. The only connection that I had to people at my new school were over email and over Zoom. I felt helpless, I knew exactly what was wrong in my life, but there was nothing I could do to fix it. I despaired. I felt like I was dying.

I wasted 1.5 yrs before I finally decided to reclaim some agency in my life. I earnestly weighed quitting. I didn’t need the degree, I went to grad school for ‘everything else’ and all those other things had been denied to me. I would make far more $ if I just went and got a software job. And most importantly, I realized that I owed my advisor nothing: I had wracked myself with guilt that I hadn’t been producing for him, even though he was paying me a stipend.. but I finally valued myself and realized that I needed to place value on what I get out of my early 20s. I plotted realistic escape routes: I could just quit, go home, recharge with my family, furnish up my GitHub etc. and go get a good job. Whoa! I realized I was excited! Excited about a possibility in my life for the first time in ages, rather than just passing time, waiting for someone to give me permission to be happy. This was insanely liberating. I finally had another option; I knew I would be okay if I quit. And so before this spring semester, I basically told my advisor that I’d quit if I couldn’t work remotely for this semester. I told him I had waited too long. I needed more from my life. I understand that they do not want to get COVID, I don’t either, but I need to value my health, too, and my mental health is a huge part of that. He acquiesced, and I worked up some extra scratch so that I could go spend time with friends, family, my girlfriend for the past 6 months. I’ve gotten 10x more done in this span than I did over that stupid year and a half where I was just in a room alone all day, every day. And most importantly, I’ve just got life in me again. I have thoughts and feelings and ideas and feel excitement about the future. I’ve got so many passion projects lined up for when I finish in about a month. My executive dysfunction is still pretty crappy, but it’s worlds better than it was, and I’m going to finish. Just barely— but I will. I’ve also got an ‘F’ incomplete class from a breakdown in a previous semester, which I am completing now while also finishing my thesis. It’s crazy and I am working like a madman, but my person is back and I take pride in my work again.

I’m not really who I want to be yet, and I am still just so ready to move on to the next stage of my life— preferably one with a little more support, and a whole lot more community— but my gears are spinning again. I’m sleeping 6hrs a night again, half of what I was at my worst, but I am so much less tired. My person is not as tired: I feel pretty free, I feel like I have agency, I feel like I’m driving my the car of my life. That was a really, really important place for me to get back to.

I’m not sure how well this all maps onto your experience, but I can see myself pretty clearly in how you describe your state: you feel like you’ve got nothing left. You need a perspective shift. You need to remind yourself what exists outside of this shitty local minima you’re lodged into.

I think my 2 takeaways are that 1) never trick yourself into thinking that any ‘opportunity’ is worth allowing yourself to get to where you’ve got nothing left, and that 2) you can get your person back. I’m not sure what it will take for you, but you should be confident that you can. There’s a lot of stuff that I did over this time that really helped me take control of my life and rebuild my mental state— I got really into playing basketball, making art, etc.— that I didn’t mention, but really, I think the point is to look to your past, identify the parts of your life that have energized you, and start doing those things again. You need some time away from work to get your person back. Remember that a week repairing your relationship with yourself followed by a week of living a more well-adjusted life, where you get a reasonable amount of things done, is much more efficient that two weeks of despair, deriding yourself for not being enough, draining yourself even further.

But anyway— shoot me an email, if you want. I’d be happy to chat and share a little bit more about my experience. I’m still not out of this yet— I’ve got a lot of shit to do before submitting my thesis in 3 weeks— but I did figure out how to recharge those batteries!