Self Care

I'm not a fan of solicitors or salesmen, people who want me to sign petitions, or really anyone who wants to get me to do something I didn't first seek out myself. (Sidetrack- did you know in Ireland, solicitors are like lawyers or something? Imagine when they come to the US and signs are everywhere saying No Solicitors.)

When people try to hand me a flier out on the street, I just keep my hands in my pockets so that they actually cannot hand it to me. I realize this is viewed as rude. But 99.9% of the time, I don't want what they're handing me. So they're just handing me trash to throw away for them. To me, that's rude.

Where am I going with this? Well I'm going to take the long way around this one. A couple weeks ago, a lady at work (we'll call her Lucy to protect her identity) asked us if Katie and I could come talk to a group of high school girls for a science workshop. Just an hour, then someone else would talk, then they'd do a tour, etc. So we agreed. Then a week later, she emailed and asked if we could each talk for an hour, totaling 2 hours. We agreed to try to stretch it to an hour and a half, but now we're pushing it. We were agreeing to come in for free on a Saturday, when we've been stretched pretty thin as it is. Then, a few days later, she threw us under the bus to come up with hands-on activities, and cc'd the person in charge of the science workshop. So that it was all on us to come up with something when that was never part of the agreement.

Combine that will all the pressure from my advisor to add more analysis and plots to my thesis. And what keeps coming back to me, is how he told me Sunday night that for the next few months, I'll be working on papers for him to publish.... for free. I was cut off from the funding when I came down here, but apparently I can still do the work.

After a near catastrophe with my email shutting down Thursday night and me being up late with help desk trying to get it fixed, I woke up Friday morning exhausted. I rolled out of bed and tried to make sense of weather data for the briefing. We've got a potential storm coming, which meant I had to get it right. I barely got it out on time at 6 am. I looked at the clock and figured I probably should get ready for work and skip my run. But then I thought about the meetings I had scheduled for that day, and having to come in on my Saturday to do more than I agreed to, and being pressured to do more writing and data analysis with my thesis and research papers than I feel is reasonable. I decided I should probably be good to myself and actually go for a run, make breakfast, and roll in late for work.

I'm glad I did. It was the first step in making myself a priority. After the workshop today (another near catastrophe), I came home, ate a bag of donut holes, drank a cup of coffee, and passed out on the couch. When I woke up an hour later, I drank another cup of coffee. I thought about my thesis and how I've got so much to add to it. I thought about the vegetables going bad in the fridge and how lately, I haven't had the energy or motivation to cook meals. I had carne asada nachos two nights in a row. Before that, I had bread and cheese for dinner a couple nights in a row. I looked out at my balcony that needed to be swept and straightened up. I thought about my bathroom that needed to be cleaned and laundry that needed to be done. And the routine is to push all of those things aside (again) and finish my thesis plots. My mind shifted back to the second night of carne asada nachos. What about me? What about my needs? What about my limits? Multiple therapists now have recommended that I be nicer to myself. After several months of struggling with that, today I finally realized what it means.

I got up from the couch and made dinner out of the farm fresh vegetables that are delivered to my door every two weeks, and the pork I bought at the farmer's market that came from the ranch about an hour or so north of here. While it cooked, I cleaned my bathroom and balcony, and swept, vacuumed, and mopped all the floors. I decided I was going to put aside my thesis to care for myself and my needs and wants.

Back to the people handing out fliers. If I don't put out my hands- they can't hand me one. My advisor has already said that my thesis is good enough for it to pass through graduate studies, but that he thinks I should add more analysis and more plots. And he thinks I need to spend the next several months writing papers for free (after graduating). And there's a fine line between obligation and my own personal limits, and sometimes it's really hard to know where that line is. But outside of getting my thesis approved and submitted to grad studies, he can't put more work on top of me than I'm willing to accept. I don't have to take my hands out of my pockets.

I'm slowly working out what it means to be nice to myself.

Stand up eight

I think back to 2013, as I made my plans to head back to school and decided getting my master's wouldn't be too difficult. Closing up my computer for the night, I have to chuckle. For the past 10 or 11 months, I've been slowly deteriorating. There's a great Japanese proverb:

Fall down seven times, stand up eight.

And I try. I've been getting knocked down my entire life, and eventually you just get used to getting back up. It becomes habit. 

Last weekend I worked 12 hours on Saturday and 8 on Sunday to get my thesis done and turned in to my advisor. Let me backtrack. Over the summer I had an emotional collapse. Too much pressure over too much time. I reached out and got help and am slowly trying to pull myself together, or at least keep from drowning. On Wednesday I graduated from anxiety coping skills school. At least I graduated from something. 

Back to last weekend. I was exhausted. I converted my thesis document to PDF and sent them both over to my advisor, 20 minutes before bedtime on Sunday night. As I scrolled through the PDF document, a feeling of calm passed over me like I hadn't felt in at least 6 months (medications excluded). I sent the email, got up from my desk, and began getting ready for bed. I started thinking about how on Monday after work, I could just come home and relax, instead of my usual routine of picking up my thesis and beginning work again. It was a soothing thought. My phone signaled a text message. It was my advisor. 

"Can you chat?"

I looked at the time. No. No I cannot chat. It's nearly 7:30 pm and I have to be up at 3:45 am to prepare the weather briefing. 

"Yep."

 I started to prepare the coffee pot while he skimmed my thesis and listed things that needed to be changed. Then he started adding more data analysis and more writing, and more papers, and more plots. An hour later I was barely able to mutter "Ok" to each of his demands. I felt myself slipping underwater. I didn't even struggle. (Turns out in the distraction I also neglected to put coffee grounds in the coffee maker.)

I hung up the phone and slowly sat down at my desk, and stared at the screen. Then promptly lost my shit. 

It's now been 5 days and it's been tough getting back up from that one. Maybe I'm halfway up. I feel like I'm dragging a 200 lb weight around. With no end in sight. I've learned something from all of those "light at the end of the tunnel" speeches. It's the same thing I learned when I was on a hotshot crew hiking to the top of the mountain. Every peak before the last one was a false peak. It looked like you were reaching the top because you could only see sky beyond the hill.... until you crested the hill and it was just a step leading to a steeper hill. And so on. The light is an illusion. Sometimes I say it's from an oncoming train. In any case, it's not really there. Throughout my career as a grad student, I have seen that light at the end of the tunnel at least a dozen times- then quickly everything goes black. At this point, an oncoming train would be a blessing. 

So. I'm getting back up. I think. I don't know exactly why, although self-preservation rings a bell. 

Fire

You eventually get tired of hearing about fires. At least I did anyway. My last season in fire, 19 firefighters burned alive. We had already submitted paperwork with our dentists' contact information, in case our bodies were ever burned so badly that dental records were our only means of identification.

I read through the article Mike's mom sent me about the fires in wine country, just in case she ever asked me about it. But I already knew enough, and didn't care to know anymore. We parked our research truck in the ashes of Fountain Grove and scanned the atmosphere through the night, and watched the Nun's Fire burn in the distance. Mansions reduced to ash and melted metal, whole neighborhoods burned to the ground. And the people. The people who couldn't get out in time. An officer showed me a picture of one he found- nothing but a few vertebrae to differentiate concrete from human. 

But you never do leave fire behind. For 14 years I have made a living off the tendency for California to burn. People from out of state will tell you they'd be terrified to live in a place where the ground shakes occasionally. Maybe because we all want to believe that the ground beneath our feet is solid, and won't one day fall out from underneath us. But I don't suspect my home will ever be lifted off the ground and deposited a few miles away in a pile of wooden shards by an unpredictable vortex of spinning air.

Yet everything burns. The article is from Alta- Journal of Alta California. I was going to read through it, then send it to the recycling bin so I didn't have to think about it anymore. Instead, it sits face up on my coffee table, flames illuminating the face of a male firefighter. I hate that my thesis involves this fire. I don't want to be part of the "everyone" who is talking about, researching, that fire. But I am. So I hold on to the journal, in case I need it.

During your emergency response training, they teach you that you will get called on the worst day of someone's life. You get called because something goes horribly wrong. You don't get called because someone is having a wonderful birthday party. You don't get called to the neighborhood where all is quiet and all is well. I thought I would become a meteorologist and learn to predict rainfall, and leave my fire days behind. But it's what I know. It's what I understand. And that understanding propelled me into years of research, and then into my new job.... still studying fire, and making a good living off of it. Fire is a parasite. It gets into your blood and becomes permanent. People want to talk to you about it, ask you about it, show you articles and ask if you've seen the movie.

I've lived it. I live it. I am not a moth drawn to the flames. I have walked through those fires and will never shake the embers from my shirt, or the smoke from my hair.