What A F-ing Wonderful Break

[fersakyn]

So... got a phone call from the human resources guy who hired me for my parttime gig teaching at an after-school center. I've been laid off. Wonderful. And he's been laid off too.

I have a bit of migraine right now. I imagine it's mostly stress-induced. I have to work on my dissertation, I have to find a new job, I feel like life's been handing me lemon after lemon, and I'm very sick of lemonade.

I recently completed paperwork to ask for a leave of absence so that I don't have to pay tuition. I used medical/health as my reason with a letter from a therapist I saw briefly. I hope it goes through, 'cuz right now I'm not seeing the point of finishing. I'm not seeing the point of anything. I am very stressed out and depressed.

The chair of my diss committee and even my mother were concerned over using medical/health reasons for my petition for leave. They worry that it could hurt me later down the road somehow. Right now, I can't seem to care. I'm not lying about my mental and physical states. I'm not sleeping well, my sleeping and eating patterns defy being termed "patterns" at all, I even feel queasy after eating sometimes, I'm getting headaches when before I could count the number of headaches I got in a year on one hand, blah, blah, blah. I have a list of ailments, nothing life-threatening, all stress-related.

Life's really not going well, and I have lost hope that it will go well.

Comments

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't see how it's going to hurt you down the road to take a leave when it sounds appropriate to take one. Certainly it won't hurt as much as paying tuition for the semester if you aren't up to finishing. No one is going to ask "how long did it take you to do your doctorate? Oh really? That's too long!" because everyone takes a million years to finish.

Life is going to go well. If you aren't trying to finish a dissertation, finding a job will be somewhat easier. You won't be restricted to part-time work or work that seems somehow related to your field. It's true that this is an awful time to look for work, but when is a really good time?

Are you going to your family for the end of the semester/various holidays? How about some sleep and some TLC?

[fersakyn.livejournal.com]

I guess my chair and my mom both worry that "mental health" reasons will hurt future employment, but I don't think my file is open to scrutiny by future employers anyway. And yeah, most people take longer than the "normative" timeframe set by the department.

Actually, I'm still working on the diss. I still want to finish by June '09. It's not a great time to finish and get a job, but taking longer just means paying more tuition.

So I must find a compatible parttime job that will help me pay for food and stuff (living at home right now because financial woes since September), and keep me sufficiently occupied so I don't feel like crap. Having too much unstructured time for me means that nothing gets done. I'm weird like that.

Thanks for your comments. Nice to hear someone's voice echoing through the void of the internet.

[schemingreader.livejournal.com]

Well, I did a dissertation and it was very lonely, and the professors were all assholes. So I'm going to try to respond to these posts, because I want to pay forward all the positive energy I got during that period.