Loss and Reclamation: My Personal Path to Healing after Graduate School

Over the past few years, I feel like I have begun to slowly unravel. I feel like I lost part of myself that I might not be able to reclaim. I am far more tired than I feel I have the right to be. But I also have never learned how not to be hard on myself. A colleague told me recently that "you are always so hard on yourself. You have to learn your self worth." Nothing could be truer, but it is hard to rediscover my value because of my own negative thoughts and self-deprecation. All the stress from my PhD studies is finally catching up with me. When I was working on my dissertation, I never had that much time to worry because I was so busy trying to get it done. Now I feel even busier. I teach five classes and have five tutoring sessions on top of it. I am working on an article that does not seem to be gelling quite like I want it to, and I hope that I can eventually catch up on sleep.

My stress management seems to be failing me. I get home after a busy day at work and prepare to do at least four more hours of work. I usually get distracted and end up sitting in front of the television watching a show that I do not even like. Or I reread articles for my article and try to take ineffective notes. 

The new tactic is to write about my issues, hoping beyond hope that it will help me find some grounding and, perhaps, learn to focus my energies. Writing for the pure sake of writing is my way of reclaiming my self and my ideas after a particularly trying five years. Some days I wake from dreams of being lost in graduate school, not finishing a class that I never took, being scolded by my teachers for being a poor student, or reliving a bad test. There are even days when I wake up believing I still have to defend my dissertation or, even worse, retake comprehensive exams. I know that someday this type of mental malaise will disappear, probably to be replaced by more gray hair or nightmares about job interviews and publishing.

Here's hoping that I can avoid that by getting some of these concerns out on the written page. I feel like I lost something, so writing about my concerns will hopefully set me on the path of reclaiming the power and self-confidence that seemed to disappear when I started graduate school. Or, just maybe, it will help me gain confidence I never had. I'm just going to keep on working on personal writing until something changes or I get some rest.