Broken

I’ve reached a crisis point in recent weeks. Just in the most ground down, exhausted, nothing left kind of way.

There are lots of factors which got me to this point. Like so many people, the impact of the pandemic and the isolation this has created can’t be underestimated – especially as someone who lives alone and relied on travelling out of my home city in order to have overnight visits to friends. There’s also been a year and a half of disruption to my key routines – like travelling into my workplace, chats with colleagues, regular swimming, and social events. The protective routines and habits I have tried to have, have been stripped away. For months I have felt the blackness creeping in around the edges. I just kept moving forwards in the hope I could outrun it.

What has always been a stressful and demanding job in academia has also been more intense and more draining in the last year and a half as all my work shifted online and I worked on huge curriculum and delivery redesign. The knock-on impact has been having no real break between teaching blocks, while still being expected to deliver on projects that require enormous creative and cognitive energy. I was telling (and not being heard by) my mentor that I was on the verge of burn-out before I hit the wall which resulted in me being signed off sick 3 weeks ago.

In the last 6 months, I’ve bought my first home. In key ways, this has relieved a major stress which came with living in a rental flat I was continually threatened with eviction from, as for 14 of the 18 months I lived there, my landlord had it on the market. But few things are ever straightforwardly positive: the move has meant I’ve traded insecurity for a huge amount of financial responsibility and the technical stresses of arranging building and maintenance works. While I’m fortunate in having space and independence the flip side of this is I am doing it all alone and that adds a lot of pressure.

Finally, I had a romantic relationship which ended unexpectedly and suddenly. In many ways, it feels like it was the final nail in the coffin of my mental health. Initially, I went through the usual ‘break up’ routine and had support from friends in all the standard self-doubt, loss, regret, confusion and questioning which follows. But I felt the shift as that ‘normal’ mourning ended and I found myself somewhere much darker, more confusing and perhaps more dangerous.

I am very much still ‘in’ the bad place in all of this. Still slogging through plummeting mood, isolation, fear, shame, and the gnawing sense of loss that comes with looking back on weeks that passed in a blur of deep depression where no memories got recorded.

I am, by necessity, back on the merry-go-round of NHS mental health services. This has been painful and scary and disempowering.

I felt blamed by the psychiatrist who, upon discovering I had stopped taking quetiapine in March following discussion with my GP, became animated on the topic of my making that decision “without talking to anyone”. I felt terrified of the CPN who, when I was unable to answer questions because speaking had become excrutiatingly painful, simply stood up and walked out of the room while I struggled to find the words to answer the question she’d asked minutes before. I feel bruised by the impact of the medications I am now taking – quetiapine again and now also sertraline. And I feel afraid of the impossible choice I seem to have between intolerable side effects and intolerable emotional state.

I wish this entry was one of hope. Of a chink of light opening ahead of me. Of a shift in my outlook that means I can answer the risk assessment questions the Shared Care team ask me twice a week, differently.

I wish that the weeks ahead didn’t have to include more terrifying activities; like speaking to Occupational Health at work to ask for adjustments to my role and workload. Like telling my employer and a few strategically chosen friends that I have a chronic mental health issue and that I have been unwell. Like waiting for these medications to make some difference to my mood and not taking any irreversible actions before that happens. Like confronting, over and over again, the idea that this is what I am living with and I can’t get rid of it by pretending it doesn’t exist.

On tenancity. Or: I can’t fail

One of my earliest memories is learning to ride a bike. Like all children there’s really only one way to learn this; keep perservering until you do it. You fall off again and again and then one time…you don’t. If, like me, you have a patient teacher in a parent you get there eventually without too much trauma.

Funnily enough though, I don’t remember any of that. I’m sure in an abstract sort of way all of that happened but I don’t have any sort of clear or specific memory of it – there is no flash where I triumphantly ride off into the sunset unaided. What my memory is of, is refusing.

I have run indoors, abandoning my bike in the middle of the road with my father standing near it, and I am sitting on the floor in the kitchen, back against the living room door. My Dad comes in, eventually. As I reflect on this as an adult I realise he has obviously taken a few calming breaths and walked slowly indoors after me as he reflects on what he can say next. He challenges me to continue; asks if I want to spend the rest of my life cycling with stabilisers, promises to deny me any future access to a bike if I won’t learn, and reiterates his certainty I can do it if only I persist. But he also says something along the lines “if you won’t learn now I won’t teach you again”. He calls my bluff, of course. I want to learn and I want to succeed. But it is so hard I want to stop. I also want, somehow, for it just to be done – to be past the learning and into the enjoying. My protest and refusal is more about my frustration that to achieve anything you must first work really hard at it.

Who doesn’t feel that way?

Of course, I succeeded. I couldn’t tell you if it took another 5 minutes or another 5 hours. But I did it and I suspect my Dad delivered a gentle “told you so” to my triumphant little face.

Teaching children about the value of tenancity is vital. Supporting them until they achieve the thing they set out to do and therefore showing them what they can do if they stick at it, is part of what good parenting looks like. But I think it’s also necessary to teach children that sometimes you can give up, you can settle for less, and you can let go of some goals. This is where we step away from the riding a bike analogy.

I can’t give up. I will not fail. I would struggle to give you an example of a time I set out to do something and failed to accomplish it. This has become a rod for my own back.

Quitting a job feels like failure to me. I have only quit a job simply because I disliked it/found it impossible to continue once. Quitting my current job would mean I could never return to this type of job (academia is weird). But my job makes me feel under siege. Every day something else crops up I didn’t know, couldn’t have known, but needed to know 3 weeks ago. I live in constant terror of failure. I have a bone-deep dread of being regarded as incompetent, disorganised, or lazy. I suffer sometimes crippling imposter syndrome. If I stick it out a couple of years more, it’s likely a number of the things which are making my job especially difficult will resolve themselves; familiarity with systems, policies, module content and the personalities of colleagues and management all come with time.

In the midst of a global pandemic, quitting my job is unthinkable. The stability and security my employment gives me is exceptional in a landscape of furloughing, redundancy and unemployment. ‘Failing’ seems to mean something different now. Walking away from something so forgiving in a unforgiving time for the uncertain hope of ‘less stress’ or ‘space’ is absurd.

So I can’t quit, but I also can’t manage the stress of needing to succeed – according to my idosyncratic definition of success.

What I perhaps need is to embrace the possibility of small failures, of missing deadlines, of delivering less than my best, and consciously putting both achievement and failure in perspective. Whose life am I making better – or worse – by my obsession with success? I tell my students to let themselves off the hook, forgive themselves, allow themselves space. I need to tell myself that – even if my managers won’t give me that explicit permission to fail, I have to try and create space for it myself.

The drop in productivity I – like so many people now working remotely – am now experiencing might be the first test for this.

Ups and downs, it’s ups and downs

I’ve had blog guilt. I wanted to write but I’ve also struggled to know how to frame my thoughts.

In a biographical summary; I’ve moved house from the tiny studio flat where I’ve lived for 6.5 years to a large one bed in a new city. I have lived here for a month. Whilst I’m still on the South Coast it feels, at times, impossibly far away from ‘home’, aka the city I chose for 10 years. I’ve moved in order to start a new job, and been actively at that new job for 2 weeks.  The job itself is technically the same as what I have been doing for the last 2 years but a new institution means a new set of politics, norms, rhythms. Term doesn’t start for another 2 weeks which also means the rhythm of the place is currently off tempo and as a result I’ve had a rather disjointed and uneven induction – par for the course in academia.

Where does this leave me?

I tried to plan for – give myself space for – a bit of a meltdown when I moved. But it didn’t quite arrive as I expected. I flew through the first two weeks in the city, before I began my job, and started to wonder if I had been excessively cautious about my own resilience and emotional resources. Week one of new job therefore took me by surprise with painful loneliness and a sense of loss. Week two was initially much, much better but the tiniest of half-criticism on Friday punctured all my self confidence and brought me back to earth with a bump.

I am looking ahead to the beginning of term now. I know that the next two weeks will represent an intesification of my duties and this will increase, week on week, until at least the middle of November. The anticipation of overwork, stress, anxiety, and exhausation is itself, exhausting. Coupled with the usual dose of imposter syndrome, crushed ego from peer review, and anxiety associated with trying to integrate into a new workplace? I’m filled with dread and feel constantly on the verge of tears.

And it’s nearly my birthday – a source of great existential angst for the last few years.

Accompanying these feelings is always an unbidden mental-tour through the worst and most distressing moments of my life so far. A raking over of my own past so frequently reviewed as to be boring – but no less distressing for its familiarity. Being forced to consider a ‘greatest hits’ reel of my worst experiences every time my mind is not actively occupied is exhausting and infuriating . It leads me to a kind of frantic activity where I seek, not to do anything of merit in the present, but just to stay out of the past.

There’s no magic pill. And there’s no easy route through or out of this.

In some ways I’ve made my own bed here; I chose this career and I’ve worked really hard to get it, along with all the highs and lows it brings. But it’s also true that no job I’ve had to date has magically resolved the high levels of anxiety, dread, and emotional instability that mark my day to day life. I am who I am in that respect and I take that to jobs with me.

People have advised me in recent years to decide what is important to me, and prioritise that in the choices I make about work, where I live, and so on. What I have found, in trying to do that, is I have no sense of how to get to things I am certain I want (an enduring and supportive and flourishing romantic relationship) and instead grab at things I hope will make my life easier (financial certainty, housing stability) even whilst those come at the expense of things I really value (like proximity to close friends). I keep longing for a set of circumstances I had this time last year as though it was a straight choice between that and what I have now; it isn’t.

The job I had no longer exists and I did not walk away from it in favour of this. I am here as a choice against unemployment and instability. Despite knowing this, I don’t feel it. This is both curious and a familiar dissonance; like a number of irrational and unproveable convictions I have about myself and how others see me, knowing something is not true does not change my emotional response and feeling that it is.

Where Are We Now?

I think the time since the last update might be the longest I’ve gone between posts. There both are and are not reasons for this.

One big factor has been work. Work has been both rewarding and exhausting. I’ve had no time to post, and no mental energy left – which is sometimes good, it can be nice to feel spent and have no time or inclination for unproductive introspection.

In terms of work, most recently, my union called 14 days of strike action spread over 4 weeks. Due to my participation in the strike, work has transformed from a good balance of exhausting and rewarding, to a source of anxiety, frustrated productivity, and stress.

This post isn’t about the reasons for the strike action, it’s about the personal, emotional experience of taking part in prolonged and ongoing strike action. And, I think, it might be about being in my mid-30s and not feeling I have much direction.

I’ve written before about my slightly complicated relationship to work, it’s where my sense of self worth and fulfilment comes from. It’s the only place I get that from. Not being able to work -deliberately withdrawing my labour – means denying myself a regulating, rewarding element from my life. And it takes it’s toll on my mental wellbeing.

When I’m working sometimes I can’t get out of bed in the morning, I can’t sleep, I feel frustrated and I feel overloaded and I need to be able to work flexibly because sometimes I have very poor concentration and anxiety. It’s important to note that all those things are present whether I’m in work or not. However, what I lose during the strike (and during holidays where I don’t have an actual trip-away of some sort planned) is the focus, the impetus to keep moving, and the sense of connection to some sort of purpose.

If I don’t have the next deadline to drive me forward, if I don’t have a place to go to structure my day and move me from one headspace (home – neurosis) to another (work – purpose) I don’t get that sense of worth.

And right now, as more friends settle down, as more friends move forward with home purchases or children or deepening and developing relationships, it’s harder to find reasons to celebrate or be happy with who I am by reference to who I am as in individual – who I am on a personal level. Nobody wants me on an inter-personal level, so I need to prove my value professionally.

And now I can’t do that. Worse; I have to stop working in order to try and protect my retirement income. So not only am I refusing to work, I’m doing it as an investment in a future life I literally cannot imagine. And not just in a millenial, I’m-never-going-to-retire, way. I mean in terms of not being able to imagine my life in retirement as anything other than cripplingly lonely, with no value as a person, with no purpose. And still mad.

Being mad, as you get older, is harder. I have less tolerance for it in myself and others. I see the frequency of mental health problems and neuroses in my peers. I hear people talking about it. And I don’t – can’t – won’t?- accept it.

This is not what I imagined or expected or hoped my life would be like ‘in the future’ [forever deferred, non-specified future that is]. I don’t want us to have to spend all this energy on looking after each other. I’m fed up of seeing people drop off the edge without warning. I hate realising we won’t just ‘grow out’ of the pain and trauma which shaped us at different points in our past. I am exhausted by all of our struggles.

I feel hopeless, drained, to come to the realisation that this is life. This isn’t the stuff we sort out before we get on with life. This is it. It’s woven into the fabric of our everyday. There are so many memes about adulthood being defined by feeling constantly exhausted. I think it’s possible to read that simply as physical exhaustion – but it’s also a psychic exhaustion.

And I want to bury my head in work and avoid all of this. ‘This’ being pain and messy emotions and crap coping strategies and uncertain future. But, of course, I can’t.

Well being and wank

I have an ambivalent relationship to the concept of ‘wellbeing’ and the connected advice and recommendations that go along. On the one hand, I recognise there are some compelling results from scientific studies that support the suggestion that taking time to engage in mindfulness exercises, or sport, or creative hobbies can have a significant impact on the maintenance of good mental health. On the other hand, I hear ‘mindfulness’ and I shut down, the working class chip on my shoulder grows so heavy it topples me over, and I snort at the suggestion I stop working and do that ‘pile of wank’.

The idea of taking time for yourself in order to ‘nurture’ yourself (I can’t even write that without scare quotes, this is how deep it goes!) and place your emotional, intangible needs above, say, doing some hard work, is one I am ill at ease with.  I’ve blamed this reluctance to acknowledge there may be something useful in all this “new age, wishy washy, hippy nonsense” on my working class upbringing. But perhaps that’s not all there is too it.

On the one hand, I come from a family who – rightly – value hard work. I was brought up to believe that you will find pride in yourself and your life if you work hard, and believe in what you’re doing. It’s an idea that’s guided me well, these 32 years.  I’ve pushed on and always sought out something to work on, and work for, in my life. It has rewarded me with pride in my accomplishments, and a sense of purpose in a range of different jobs – regardless of how they are regarded by others.

The trouble is, this isn’t enough.  You also need a sense of yourself which expands beyond your work, and which can’t be utterly destroyed if you fail, or lose your job, or can’t pull off the task you set yourself this time. It’s also not enough if working is the thing that’s made you exhausted and low.

Perhaps this is why it’s so hard for me to talk about my mental health, and my ‘wellbeing’.

Right now I’m on fixed term contracts, working two jobs, and staring down the barrel of unemployment/uncertain employment in September. I’m also riding out a low.  After a farcically bad Friday where I tried to socialise with friends and colleagues, and only succeeded in making a lot of people worry about me, I found I needed to confront ‘wellbeing’.

Friday night’s disaster was predictable. I’ve worked flat out for 10 weeks without a break – yes, I’ve even been working weekends. I was exhausted. What I needed on Friday was not socialising, it was time. I needed time before I put on my ‘nice’ clothes (somewhere in the classification of clothes above ‘clean’ but below ‘wedding guest’) and headed out the door.  I needed time before I had a rushed dinner and sent a message to say I was on my way to the pub. I needed time before I confirmed the time and place and invited more people to join us.  And yet I still did all those things. Still pushed forward and pushed myself to do the thing I knew I didn’t want to, and perhaps couldn’t. Because I most often view socialising as another job. Something you do almost mechanically, by numbers. And when I ‘tick off’ whatever it is, I trust I’ll get the reward of pride, or personal value, or wellbeing.

But cyclothymia doesn’t work like that.

On Friday night I couldn’t speak. And everything everyone said hurt. Being there didn’t work. Working hard at going through the motions, didn’t work.

Saturday, I slept. Then I walked. For three hours I walked. And on Sunday I slept. And then I swam. I need to do that more this week, I can feel that already. I need to not work – both ‘traditional’ work and my self-designated social-stuff work. This is wellbeing.  Getting head space, disconnecting from the internet, from friends, from work, from responsibilities and deadlines, and from pressures and insecurities of life. Taking time to feel my body do good things, taking time to notice spring exploding from the gardens and parks, taking time to feel something outside of my mind.

I need that space, the time, the not working. But I’m afraid to take it and admit I need it. Because if that works – if not working works – then where does my self-worth come from? Because if I can be emotionally ‘rewarded’ by not working, then will that make the value of work less? And if I lose that route to value, will I ever be able to find a way to gain a sense of worth again?

Wellbeing is, then, a terrifying spin of the wheel for me. A fear that gaining anything positive from not working will be cancelled out by undermining the positive things I gain from half-killing myself to work and socialise. I wish I could say that realising this has revolutionised my relationship to taking time for self-care activities like walking, exercising, and spending time in nature, but it hasn’t. Next week I’ll start working on articles and funding bids and job applications again. And I’ll likely reassure myself that this is the best place to get my sense of worth from, and Saturday’s long walk was just a blip, a one-off alternative.

Besides, I’m cured/never needed self-care/just got lazy.

Mental Health and Academia

I’ve been threatening to write this post for sometime, and, as I sit here with a ball of anxiety in my gut because I’ve not worked on anything relating to my thesis for a full 7 days, tonight seems as good a day as any.

Let me start with a disclaimer; I am currently working towards a PhD. This has been my dream since I was an undergraduate, or, to measure it in time, it has been my dream for just over a decade. I’m incredibly lucky that I was successful in both my application to study my desired topic, and won a three year scholarship to do so. Money is tight but it is, importantly, sufficient to live on. Nonetheless, PhD study is a demanding, challenging, and at times exhausting way to spend a few years.

There’s been quite a lot of discussion around the issue of the pressure on mental health which PhD study, and academic culture, place on individuals as a result of this great article in the Guardian; There is a culture of acceptance around mental health issues in academia. Recently, in my school, an event was scheduled for PhD students and faculty to discuss these issues and speak frankly about how the commodification of higher education was intensifying pressure on PhDs to produce published articles and other ‘impact’-ful research output. It was something of a damp squib; faculty were horrified to learn PhD students lost sleep over not getting enough published, not presenting at enough conferences, not ticking all the boxes needed to make themselves employable. Simultaneously, however, they spoke about their own acceptance of a culture where you work 16 hour+ days, reply to emails on weekends, between 7pm and 6am, and during holidays. They couldn’t see the connection between an absolute acceptance of a culture where you are never off-the-clock and the intense pressure we PhDs feel to complete, teach, publish, earn, all at a break neck pace.

I have a complex relationship with the never-off-duty nature of academia. On the one hand, being able to work in the wee small hours, set my own schedule, and send emails which get date stamped at 3 and 4am, knowing I won’t be thought of as ‘strange’ or even ‘excessive’ is helpful. There is also an enormous benefit that when a low hits and I simply can’t work, I can take that time off and catch up (however hard that is to do) later. Back in the days I worked a 9-5 in an office, and even when I worked shifts in retail, there is no flexibility whatsoever to go off grid, collapse into bed, sleep for 16 hours, have no social skills, and shake uncontrollably in the face of the smallest amount of stress. In this respect, academia is the perfect work environment for me.

In other ways, academia is a really, really difficult place to be when you’re cognitively ‘uncommon’.

“Inspired is when you think you can do anything. Manic is when you know it” – Takin’ Over the Asylum (1994)

Because PhD study is 99% self directed and also involves organising events, how much you have to do at any one time is dictated, largely, by what you volunteer for. When I’m hypomanic I not only want to offer up my services to plan and run any number of events, I also believe I have more than enough time to do it alongside my research. Hypomania can, of course, inspire. More often than not though, when I write when at my most manic, it tends to be repetitive drivel rather than incisive analysis. I don’t feel too bad about that though – some words on a page are better than none.

Almost counter-intuitively though, despite all the discussion that’s happening about mental ill health in academia, I find it one of the hardest places to talk about my own, intermittent, difficulties. Because even in acknowledgement of the mental ill-health that can be brought on by the pressure of academia, there’s still a framework of acceptable illness; depression, anxiety – these are things we can talk about. These are things we can help one another with by talking about, acknowledging, and working to alleviate the pressures which intensify them through mutual support. However, hypomania doesn’t look like a problem to those who don’t know you well, and depressive periods which you will continue to experience periodically no matter what happens in your life, seem like things both too big to ask for support with, and too fleeting for people to take seriously. Most people are happy to support a friend or colleague for a short period, but patience, and above all, energy, are finite resources for all of us. More than that – over committing yourself while hypomanic means letting people down when you come down – and who can blame colleagues and peers for getting frustrated at that?

Everyone is fighting their own battle with workload and stress – academia leaves no space for anyone to pick up the slack from someone who is struggling. That’s the fundamental issue; whilst everyone is under such huge pressure and falling onto the wrong side of the healthy/ill line, there will never be the space for a more holistic, community supportive model which will enable those with longer term, non-situational mental (ill) health issues to participate fully in academic work and study. And for those people like me, who are managing a long term mental health issue, always running at the limits of my stress tolerance leaves nothing left to tackle the rest of life, with it’s ups and downs, or – and this is the thing I often regret most – to offer to friends suffering similarly from stress, anxiety, and depression.

Academia is a treadmill. The pressure that comes from that unending cycle of league tables, publishing, conferences, 50 hour+ working weeks, and fixed-term-contract job applications is huge. Looking to my future, I am not sure how far I am willing to sacrifice my mental wellbeing for the career, and pursuit of knowledge which has motivated me up to now. That’s not right. Academia should not only be the preserve of those with enormous reserves of mental wellbeing.

Academics are frequently busy writing about the structural inequalities of society, and how they must be dismantled. There is considerable irony that they don’t turn their attention to the fundamentally ableist structures of their own profession which not only exclude or push to breaking point those with pre-existing mental health issues, but actively causes people in the field to become unwell. My ability to resist these pressures – the pressure to give everything I have and then the rest – is pretty low, and yet that is the only way things will change – if people in academia stand up and say ‘no! Enough is enough, we will not submit to this institution’s demands that we break ourselves on the wheel. We will slow down, we will ask the same from others, we will grant one another breathing space.’ The difficulty comes in being the first person to say this, the first person to do this. Because whilst the first person makes a stand, refuses to be broken, everyone else, exhausted though they are, will still be rushing ahead to the next publication, the next promotion, the next funding award. And therein lies the catch.