arrgghh

I should be writing a paper right now, but instead I have once again spent the entire day sitting on the couch, staring into space, and taking procrastinatory detours into the internet and bad daytime tv.

This seems to be about all I can actually do with my working life at the moment. The paper I should be writing is something I have actively chosen to do and is a step on the way to realising those dreams I had of becoming an academic, but, I am stuck in a stupid rut and in fear not doing it.

I want to do it - I want to actively participate in the exchange of ideas at the conference and beyond. I am quite confident that in the abstract, meta paper sense I have something intelligent, useful, timely and interesting to say about the area. I just do not have the motivation to bring it all together at the moment. Writing is hard. Writing takes so much out of me. And to be perfectly honest I just want life to be easy for a while.

I am exhausted. After the year’s craziness (wonderful RU486 and summer school combination, full time semester one, winter school, the crazy suicidal housemate, moving house, first semester of honours, anxiety management and other general life stuff) I think I need a decent and proper break. I have been trying to do the things that usually make me feel better – eating well, cooking food I love, gardening, going to the beach, walking, cleaning, reading fiction and seeing live performance. But it isn’t working. Life is not getting easier. It seems to be getting harder.

I think part of the problem is that I am making things harder while thinking I am doing things that are easy. Thinking that now would be the right time to attempt to overcome my social isolation, recent chastity and my wholly vanilla experience till now possibly was not my brightest moment.

I keep pushing myself into social situations that I am not accustomed to and as such struggle in. I have been in Sydney for two years now and until recently have been bound within a small circle of people who I largely knew before I moved here. I kept using work and uni as my excuses for not moving outside this circle, but I got to a point where I couldn’t keep doing that. I just struggle with finding some balance and fitting it all in.

So I have been exploring relationships with people I already knew, meeting new people and pushing my own comfort zone. And I just keep getting more emotionally and mentally exhausted. But I am having fun, I’ve done things in the past month that I am glad I have done; things that are starting to draw me out of almost entirely phantasmic engagement with the world and into something close to the real.