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.