Poetry Man

I hate to jinx myself, but I think I am just about out of the hole I had been in for quite a while. More importantly, I think I have set myself to stay most of the way out of it once school starts in the Spring.

My biggest problem was feeling completely overwhelmed with teaching and not having any time or energy to not make any progress on my dissertation. It seemed like all I was doing was grading or planning for classes and that I could never put even a dent in the mountain of stuff I had to do for my classes. Well, in the Spring I will only be teaching,at most, two classes and from the looks of things right now, only one. Best of all, neither of those classes will be at my main school. I love most of my students there, but the politics of dealing with the administration has simply become too much for right now. There have been days when I have simply wanted to scream “Who’s running this monkey farm?” as loudly as I could. Instead, they will be at the wonderful small Catholic college I started teaching at last semester. They seem to really love me there and value my style of teaaching. In fact, I have been told that as soon as I finish the diss, they would love to give me a faculty position there. All of this shifting in my schedule will leave me lots of dissertation time. I have a firm plan for what I need to get done when, and I intend to do what I can to make that happen. Thanks to the overwhelming generosity of a dear friend and a loan from the US government,I am in position to get some sanity back in this part of my life.

On the heath front, things are looking a bit better. My family doctor has a plan for me to get a formal diagnosis. Unfortunately, the neuro he sent me to threw a monkeywrench in it (entry coming soon on that), but I have faith in my doctor to get things on track again. I also have a prescription for PT and a referral to get another neuropsych exam for the cognitive issues I’ve been having. Things are not all roses obviously, but they are finally moving in a positive direction that I feel good about. Part of the plan is to get me in position dissertation and health wise to be able to go back to teaching full time in the Fall.

For the first time in quite a while, I have hope and I feel positive about things. Everything really may be OK.

There’s one final element to my parents’ reaction last weekend that I haven’t talked about. As I mentioned before, my parents’ first concern when I told them about my meeting with my director was that they had already told pretty much everyone we know that I would be graduating in May and they didn’t know what to tell them.

Well, my Mother’s decision about all of that was that I have to tell all of them that I won’t be graduating. I can’t stand the thought of this and I am now dreading pretty much every social/family encounter I’m going to have at home over the next 6 months or so. I don’t want to have to disappoint all these people and the rest of my family. Doing it to my parents was awful enough. I feel like a failure right now as it is and the last thing I want is to have those feelings reinforced by telling people about this over and over again.

I would like to be able to just tell them no and refuse to do this, but it’s really not that simple. Whenever I see these people, one of the first, if not the first, questions they are going to ask me is about graduating. How am I supposed to answer them? I don’t want to leave them feeling rotten for asking an itended friendly question, but I also don’t know how to keep from feeling rotten myself. I would appreciate any help or advice in how to deal with this.

That’s the sound I made as this depression that I have been battling in cycles over the past 6 months finally hit bottom last week.

I was at an appointment with my behavioral therapist last week when her asking me how I’ve been doing elictited the simple answer of “overwhelmed.” As we talked over the next hour, I talked about how I didn’t mean overwhelmed by my classes, my dissertation, my health, or my financial situation, all of which have been exacerbated in the last 2 or 3 months. I meant all of that and more. I have been feeling overwhelmed by life. Everything and I do mean everything feels like work and feels like more than I can handle. Even adjusting my fantasy football roster feels like pressure right now. Anyway, spilling my guts about how overwhelemed I’ve been feeling coupled with her talking about the physical changes my therapist has noticed in me as a result of the MS triggered a bit of a breakdown that really sent me plummeting emotionally.

I thought I had it reined in last weekend when I went home, but that I was before I told my parents the result of my meeting with my dissertation advisor. Essentially, he likes my argument in the chapter I gave him and he thinks it’s a good draft, but he had lots of things he still wanted me to do, which will be 2 or 3 months worth of work. In short, it makes graduation in the spring an impossibility. I explained all of this to my parents this weekend. They weren’t mad at me, but I almost wish they had been.

My Mom’s first response was “What are we supposed to do? We’ve told all these people you’re going to graduate” ( I didn’t tell them I was. It was all on their own) “What are we supposed to tell people?” This initial bit of self-centeredness on my Mom’s part gave way to her saying “I know one thing. I’m not telling anyone else anything about you anymore.” and ultimately led to “I guess I’m just going to have to accept that you’re going to be there forever and never graduate.” My Dad verbally agreed with everything she said. Losing my parents’ faith in me and belief in me hurts, as does the suggestion that they aren’t proud of me anymore. Losing their belief in me felt like another trapdoor had opened underneath me, which lead to me dropping to the bottom of the hole where I am now sitting.

The good news is that I do believe this is the bottom of the hole for this bout of depression and I’m ready to figure out what I can do to begin climbing out of it.