I need to get up and get myself home so I can take my anxiety pills, but it’s hard to do anything but sit in place when I feel this anxious.  [laugh track plays]

I’m at that point in my research where I’ve been thinking about the same question for many hours and I don’t have an answer or even any good leads, and it’s not even the kind of “math problem” that has a definite (if inaccessible) answer

It’s more like “how can I incorporate [thing] into my general approach to [phenomenon]”

And it’s possible that there just is no good way to incorporate [thing] – in fact I have no assurances that my general approach to [phenomenon] is a good idea at all.  I’m just hoping it is because I’ve been working on it for the last year and a half.

Ah, research.

To do:

1. Relax.  Everything’s going to be fine.
2. At some point between now and Wedesnday, finish problem set for [Class 1].  
3. At some point between now and Wednesday, finish implementing and testing [research idea].
4. At some point over the weekend, try doing problem set for [Class 2].  If it’s too hard or time-consuming, decide to withdraw from [Class 2].  If so, don’t feel bad about this.  Research is first work priority.
5. On Wednesday morning, do first half of ADHD testing.
6. There is plenty of time to do all these things.  Nothing is ruined because you got sick.  If you can’t get yourself to do something, stop trying to work and relax.  You have time to do this, even though you think you don’t.
7. Asymptotics are what matters.  No one cares if you’re not working now.  No one will be looking at your work until Wednesday.  This feels strange, but it’s true.  (The problem set for [Class 1] was extended not because of you and your illness, but because of other people who did worse on the earlier sets, as the professor explicitly stated.  You are still clearly doing well in [Class 1].)  In the longer-term, see what the ADHD test says.  Things may change.  Research productivity is a matter of months, not weeks.
8. The above seems “too easy.”  This is a sign that it’s on the right track.  Correct for your “bias to interpret ambiguous information in a threat-related manner.”  Everything is fine.

Well I have signed up to get tested for ADHD two weeks from now, so I’m moving forward on the “figuring out why I am so bad at life” front

(Also it’ll be nice to have another neuropsych test just to sate my curiosity about whether the one I took when I was 13 still has implications for my life today)

Okay, I have just given up and sent out emails saying I’m too sick to do the stuff I was supposed to do this weekend.  I did some of it, but not nearly enough of it.  And technically I am sick, though I still feel like I’m using that as an excuse.

But, like, that work clearly isn’t going to get done tonight, and what’s best is to destress and get to bed and maybe stay home tomorrow so I can become well again and then do more work later.  This is the way actual adults deal with illnesses, I have heard!

(I should have learned this lesson that one fall semester in college where I tried to push my way through every illness and as a result basically spent the entire semester sick.)

Ah, the “I’m clearly not going to get any more work done today but I still have to convince myself of it” phase

This one’s lasted about an hour so far

Sometimes I think that, if for some reason I wanted to, I could make a great* doom-and-gloom “God probably hates all of us” type preacher.

Because, you know, I already tend to feel that way a lot due to anxiety (despite being an atheist, so imagine how I’d feel if I actually believed in God!), and I’m pretty good with words and pretty good at explaining things to an audience (in my TA work) … 

*in the sense of “doing the job well by its own standards,” leaving aside the issue of whether the job is a thing that should be done

Sometimes there’s this frustration with the world that feels similar to the frustration associated with a Tourette’s tic I can’t perform

There is a way things should be and they are not that way

It feels like C. S. Lewis’ “made for another world” thing.  This world is just not “correct.”  On some basic level the things people tend to do can’t be squared with anything that feels natural to me, and there is nothing I can do about it.  This is not the product I ordered.  Bad command or file name

wanderingwhore reblogged your post I keep saying I need to spend less tim… and added:

Hair trigger unfollowing, and use tumblr savior liberally to ban things that are problems?

I’ve tried to do things like this, and they help, but ultimately if the “things that are problems” are just “the overall social norms of tumblr / the internet,” then the only way to reliably avoid them is to stay off tumblr / the internet.

(What I’m worried about isn’t stuff that is triggering or anything as direct as that – more like insidious stuff that reinforces bad thought patterns over the course of repeated exposure.)