Because the best way to introduce yourself to the internet is with an intense overshare. This year I had the joy of completing honours as a part of my bachelor of science degree, and it appears I have been gifted with this continuing, but maybe fading (we’ll see), anxiety as a result. For those not versed in academic lingo, honours is like a testing ground to see if you should go onto further research. In my case it consisted of a year long project with a thesis produced by the end of it. I’ve heard it compared to something like doing a PhD, but worse. Honours is roundly acknowledged as being difficult, tiring and stressful.
However, all of this assumes that, at the very least, your supervisors will be there to support you. Allow me to tell you that when the best thing you can say about your primary supervisor is that they happened to find you a fantastic secondary supervisor that it was an incredibly tough year. There were changes to my project, caused by my main supervisor, that made no sense, dodgy scientific and ethical practice and an unwillingness to actually give a damn. A particular highlight was my main supervisor’s attempt to bail on my entire project about a month before my thesis was due through a two line email sent only to my second and third supervisors.
Still, I managed to drag myself over the line, encouraged by my other two supervisors, with the expectation that the fear and anxiety would go away. That afterwards I would be able to forget about all the rotten things that had happened and move on to doing better things. Gaming, cooking, bludging in general. But the relief never really came. The lasting waves of anxiety that have dogged me since I gave in my thesis were totally unexpected. It’s been over a month since I submitted my thesis and I still find myself spontaneously bursting into tears for no known reason. Literally yesterday I felt panic shoot through me at the thought of doing the dishes, the fucking dishes. I need to do a last bit of Christmas shopping and the thought of all the things I need to do to get to the city and back has thus far been overwhelming me.
A large part of me is so fucking angry that my main supervisor managed to get at me so severely. Given that we’re not even on speaking terms and I could probably never talk to them ever again for fear that I would say something that I would regret later (though I’m beginning to think that there are no words strong enough), they can’t actually know that they’ve screwed me over this badly. Ultimately, after all the additional anguish, my mark was fine, and I could do a PhD if I wanted to, so this isn’t some attempt at a strike back for a bad mark.
All of this adds together to make me realise how much of a prick I’ve probably been in the past. Having had no experience with anything remotely bordering on mental illness I’ve typically shut down when exposed to it. Why exactly? I don’t know, most likely out of fear, why is a jerk a jerk to anyone? But even now as I sit here and type this, I can feel tension rolling through me for no reason. I’m safe, I’m loved, nothing that I need to do in the near future is what I would previously have described as stressful or difficult, and yet everything feels slightly shifted. It’s as if someone moved the furniture in my absence but I can’t quite figure out how or as soon as I pin down what the difference is, I lose it again. About the only time I don’t ever feel it is when I’m sucked into playing Skyrim or the like.
I’m not claiming to have any great knowledge of mental illnesses or what they’re genuinely like. But I do know that after a month of completely unexpected anxiety that I really wish would just go away, that they are clearly more complex than I imagined. I’m trying to suck it up and move on, but it’s just not working.
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