Understand and accept the way I am

Let me quickly preempt everybody whose first reaction is, “Why are you wasting your time worrying about this?” The answer is that it’s irritating me, and there’s nothing I can do about the fact that it irritates me (which is why I’m posting it under this goal). The fact that it irritates me may not speak very well of me, but there it is. So I have to figure out what I’m going to do about it.

One of my students this semester calls me by a first name that is somewhat similar to mine but is not, in fact, correct. This is a surprisingly difficult situation, because:

The “right” form of address, according to this institution’s culture, is emphatically “Dr. Lastname.” I’m not a huge fan of undergraduates addressing me by my first name, but I think that correcting them would just answer rudeness with rudeness, so I always let it slide. If they ask what I prefer, I go with the Dr. thing, and I thank them for asking.

But in this situation? I’m stymied. If I tell him he’s got my first name wrong and give him the correct one, I’m implicitly saying that that’s how I’d like to be addressed. Which it isn’t. But if I correct him with “Dr. Lastname”...see aforementioned rudeness. This person irritates me in other ways, so I’m deathly afraid I’ll snap and snark at him one day. ARGH.

[UPDATE] Ok, he came into my office one day (not during office hours) and did it again, so I was pissed off enough to say, “[Student], I’m not sure why you’re calling me by my first name, but that’s not even it.” And then he peeked outside at the name on my door and corrected himself. And everything seems ok. I think this student is the type who doesn’t take hints and prefers explicit correction, so this was probably better than hinting/seething.

takes me a long time to complete my goals.

lost and immersed, time has no real meaning and I wander wherever my brush takes me.

that acceptance of myself at any one time in my life is in constant flux. What I may have thought on one day evolves into something else on the morrow. This is fascinating. The whole of it is within me, and instead of wondering and worrying about my lack of consistency, I relish that I practice doubt, change my mind and face obligations to question myself.

I like about myself is my quirky sense of humor. It is just plain, clean, healthy fun to laugh: http://dudemadness.com/default.aspx

This is connected with G2. There is much randomness at play and work here.

I’m having so much trouble moving on from my regrets about the past few years. For most of my life, even though I was crazy and sad, I was learning and achieving. And then I just…broke, for like 4 years of total stasis. I truly believe that I’m on the upswing, since I’ve been doing better for a while now, but I get so upset thinking about the missed opportunities and especially about how much better developed my habits, my skills, my maturity, etc. could be if I had been moving forward at all during that time. I keep trying to strengthen my weak-ass self-disciplinary muscles, and there’s just so much sadness, anger, and frustration at where I am right now and why.

I know that it does no good to think this way, and I just have to focus and plan the way out so meticulously that I can’t help but progress.

Dear Self,

You have this funny habit of subconsciously creating handicaps for yourself when you think a goal is too easy: “I’ll do it without telling anyone! With one hand behind my back! Only between the hours of 11:00 and 11:30 on Tuesdays!”

Maybe this was a fun game when you were growing up. But it needs to stop. Please replace it with the goal of over-preparing. OK, so you think (usually wrongly) that some task is easy. So ace the shit out of it rather than spicing things up by making it difficult.

~asterisk

Dear Self,

You are about to write a slightly defensive explanation of your ADD situation. You are correct that a lot of people question ADD and think it’s more of an excuse than an illness, but the main reason for your defensive paragraph is that you’ve internalized that perspective, and not that you anticipate hordes of critical comments from other 43t’ers.

But since you find it necessary, the basic facts are these: you’ve always had trouble paying attention, particularly to auditory stimuli. You covered for this fairly successfully through high school, and horrendously in college, where your retention from lectures hovered around 5%. These days, the main problem is that grad school has lots of lonely and unstimulating stretches, which is a horrible but necessary step toward the fun, varied, stimulating life of research and teaching and service that you’ve been aiming for and are now so close to.

You were off the charts on an ADD screening administered by your university’s learning-help office, but it’s never been clear how it interacts with the depression and the sleepiness. And you’ve only recently come around to accepting it as something real, to understanding that ADD is just a name for a cluster of symptoms that commonly occur together and that often respond to certain treatments, medical and otherwise. Giving that cluster of symptoms a name is descriptive and value-neutral and is a reasonable thing to do; if you feel that the word “disorder” pathologizes normal behavior, and/or medicalizes character flaws, you can call it something else. But it’s a Real Thing, and you have it.

You are not medicating for it, except indirectly. This is a reasonable choice, but it does require that you be very careful to create an environment that allows for productivity, and that you will work harder than others to do so.

This blog post by Female Science Professor about an ADD colleague is interesting and hopeful. Be a grown-up and figure out how to use your strengths and work around your weaknesses, k?

~asterisk

Dear Self,

You are quite right that getting up at 9 AM should mean getting to work two hours later than you would if you got up at 7. You are also quite right that the inevitable attack of afternoon sleepiness when you wake up at 7 AM should compensate for those lost hours. However, it seems to be a little more bimodal than that: either you get moving early like a normal person, or you never get moving. I know, I don’t understand it either.

Summary: These “flexible hours,” like everything “flexible” about graduate school, are a trap. Acting like a normal person with a normal job makes you more productive and happier.

Hugs,
~asterisk