Floating toward the dreamscape...

Should be falling asleep, but unfortunately my brain and heart aren't having it since they are racing with thoughts and feelings.  As a result, I thought I would post a few recent updates and thoughts on here in hopes of emptying/exhausting my brain...

One of the biggest developments is that I'm defending soon, and hopefully moving on in my career or at least beyond grad school.  This bring me to the main thing I hope to articulate here: Since I got the OK to defend back in the middle of April (just a month ago!), I feel like I'm slowly reawakening from some long dream/nightmare/limbo.  Because of this, I feel like I've been much more sensitive to the coming of the seasons - the coming of summer, end of spring, graduation(s), even show finales.

Between watching the finales for "Once Upon a Time" and "Revenge", I just felt the calling of multiple emotions. It's totally crazy since it's just tv, but also amazing that this medium of expression works well enough to catch that response from me.  It is also refreshing because I'm feeling something/anything.  I've been such a mess for so long, that I was numb to anything other than misery and worthlessness.  Maybe I still deserve to feel that way, but at least for the moment, the possibility of having a new start and at least a future outside of grad school, has woken me up.  The feeling is even starting to reflect on the other elements of my life as I want to wake up in the morning (as least for the time being, haha) and I'm sorting though my junk and cleaning up after myself.  Hell, I finally got my car washed since forever, and I'm actually grocery shopping and planning meals again instead of just grabbing onto whatever junk food I can stuff in my mouth so I can get back to "lab" or stressing out about "lab".  I put "lab" in quotes because, in retrospect, there was so much inefficiency and time wasted, and until recently I was almost completely paralyzed by this stress.  And I don't know whose fault the situation was and I don't care; I just hope I can have my fresh start in science/life to try and apply lessons learned from this period of time and hope I never go back to that place of fear/misery/depression.  This will probably come completely out of left field, but it's echoing in my brain so I'm just going to write it:

"I was never afraid of failing, but I can't act knowing that I'm walking toward failure."

That released from my mind, I guess this post is really just me trying to process everything that is happening as I get ready to transition to the next chapter of my life.  Thoughts of falling in love, or at least settling down and, maybe, eventually children don't feel like this unreachable dream. In addition, the things I like to do outside of playing video games or going out for drinks seem less forbidden in terms of time in the future... All of these topics are strong in my thoughts as I'm acutely aware that I gave up too much of myself for grad school, and I mean this in terms of not protecting or taking care of myself, so I not fully proud of the work I put out at times.  I have no regrets, but I will look back at this time always with the thought that I could have been more focused, efficient, and just better.  Lastly, I never want that fear of failure to paralyze me again, I owe myself that, otherwise I will truly get left behind... Waking up now, that's kind of how I feel, but it doesn't feel as bad as it could have been ultimately, but maybe that's because I'm still alive with a chance to get my Ph.D and move on.


I just need to write this gosh darn dissertation by the deadline, ha ha ha.