I Regret to Inform You That My Life Has Improved

I really do. 

I've long since abandoned this blog and that's mostly because I'm bad at time management. I have a lot of trouble setting goals and maintaining the discipline to accomplish those goals so I just don't get things done without someone else telling me what to do and when. I don't have blogging in my heart and I'm sure I'll make an abandon a few more in my time. 

However, there is another reason. 

This was a rage blog created in my general frustration towards grad school. I am still mad at grad school much of the time but I have also been taking better care of myself so the rage is felt much less keenly. I am getting things done without staying up all night and I can meet deadlines without crying. It's only September so I'm sure that all this rest and time management will fall apart by Reading Week, but for now I'm keeping my head higher above water than usual. 

And I hate how I got here because it was all rather obvious. 

I refuse to read self-help literature and I generally cringe at any kind of helpful advice about overcoming stress and difficulty focusing. I think that it's all a big distraction to keep us from improving our lives in more fundamental ways like demanding better working conditions or a safety net for the vulnerable and a lot of it descends into a kind of religious self-absorption - that salvation is obtained once I have abstained from the distractions of life and embrace the dignity of endless Instagramable toil. That if I work hard enough I will ascend to being a Productive Person. Part of me is suspicious of all this because I actually am religious and tend to know a bad sermon when I hear one. I do think that a lot of self-help is about empowering individuals to the exclusion of collective solutions to life's problems and telling people to work harder and self-improve all the time is a great way to sell stuff. 

And yet. 

At the start of this semester (which is only about 20 days old so get ready for a November post titled "I am pleased to inform you that I am once again in decline) I decided to take some of that insipid internet advice - that I would wake up early, exercise, drink water, and not take my computer to bed. I have followed through with this and now have a morning routine of getting up at 6:50am, using my bike for 15 minutes, doing yoga for 10-12 minutes, having a coffee, taking a shower, and writing in my dissertation diary. I am indeed less stressed, better able to manage my time, and generally better able to gain reasonable perspective about my life and its direction. And I hate it. 

Part of my hates this because it seems too easy. I mean it's not easy, it's taken months to work up to an early (and 6:50 isn't really all that early) wake-up time and over a year to get into a consistent and frequent cleaning routine. I have long fantasized about having ADHD or a serious vitamin deficiency in the hopes that one day a doctor would give me magical pills and I would become effortlessly productive and happy all the time. This is an unbelievably juvenile thing to day dream about but a mystical diagnosis always seemed like such an easy way to fix my life - and have an excuse for all my prior laziness. 

And the prior laziness is really the issue. I hate that I could have just done all this years ago. That I could have been considerably less depressed in that miserable first year of the PhD had I just committed to getting up and getting moving in the morning instead of after 11am. I feel like time was wasted but that's also a very capitalist way of thinking about things - that efficiency was lost to my own human frailty. In actuality, I just don't think that I was ready for that level of self-discipline and care before this point in my life. I just had not matured to the point where I could calm myself down and realize that I could just do the dishes and go back to work later rather than fret so much about my reading time that I ended up doing neither. Everything was so much more overwhelming even a couple years ago and I wasn't in a place where I could manage the maintenance cycle of balancing work and the self-care of eating well and cleaning my home. 

And the thing is, the discipline I have now required less control, not more. I used to become very angry at myself for not having enough willpower - that I couldn't just do things when I wanted to. That I couldn't just stay up all night reading or write for a full 8 hours straight. This past spring I failed once again to obtain a SSHRC grant and I had to admit that this was kind of the end of the road. I didn't need the money but I did need the prestige and now that I was officially a second- or third-rate scholar with no ability to prove that I'm an asset to an academic department. I had to let the dream of an academic career go. I will not get a professorship no matter how much harder I work and I'll... live. Letting that go didn't kill me and if anything I'm liberated by the knowledge that mediocrity doesn't end your life. I will find work and I will carry on because life keeps going and no amount of late night study will stop time from marching on. 

Now that I know that I don't have to be a Super Special Worker Bee to carry on and be happy I leave a lot of things up to habit. I don't will myself to wake up in the morning and be productive- I put my phone in the bathroom and once I go turn the alarm off the automated coffee machine has brewed so I might as well go down the stairs. And my bike is downstairs and it's cold so I might as well paddle around for a bit. Then my legs are sore so why not do a little yoga. Then I might as well shower because my clothes are already laid out from the night before and then once all that's done I'm not sleepy anymore so why not do some writing? And now that I've done all that I guess I'm not a complete failure so I can probably send some emails without people thinking that I'm too useless to talk to. 

I don't psych myself up for any of that, it just happens because they're habits, and they're habits because I did a little bit of work to make a routine everyday for months and months. I hate that my life has improved because the improvement required steady, banal work over time. I did not do anything special or interesting - I just plodded along in my quarantine while gradually deciding that I should probably just relax and embrace the fact that it's not that deep. That I'm just some rando like everyone else. Maybe I'll do something cool one day, but there's no rush to get there. 

This is still a very self-indulgent blog and I'm glad that I can write this out here where no one will ever see it. This is a space to be entirely selfish about my shallow little insights while remaining well out of sight. Since I'm on the (still fairly tenuous) path of self-improvement hopefully I'll get in the habit of thinking of others as much as I think of myself. Self-hatred is a very narcissistic place and now that I'm letting a lot of that go I hope I can progress from self-acceptance to something more outwardly useful.