Difficulty Settings

October 2024

I’m painfully aware that I’ve not added anything to these pages for a while, and this is just one of the many things that has been making me feel anxious and overwhelmed of late.

I had a bloody awesome first year and was surprised that overwhelm and / or imposter syndrome hadn’t kicked in before. I know that there are walls I’m going to hit throughout this project, and I know that it is normal – indeed, expected – that PhD students will feel overwhelmed or just want to give it all up at least once in their journey. I haven’t hit the ‘I can’t do this’ wall (yet), but I have slammed into the wall of ‘I have generalised anxiety because my full time job is mentally exhausting, my PhD that is taking up every spare hour I have, I have a house to keep in some sort of order and a back yard I need to keep from turning into the Lost Gardens of Splott, and I feel completely overwhelmed.’

In September, it all just became too much. I couldn’t shake a growing sense of unease that slammed me in the belly every morning when I woke up and gnawed at me all day. I tried to ignore it, but the feeling just got heavier every day, leaving me physically and mentally unable to do anything…and so making the panic worse. I was certain that I wasn’t doing enough PhD ‘stuff’, that I had wasted my first-year dicking about, and that I was going to fall so far behind that I’d be forced to give up. I was frightened, angry at myself, and had days where my brain refused to switch on, making even the simplest of tasks impossible to engage with.

And then I got COVID. And this (third) time knocked me for 6. I spent 2 days in bed unable to even keep water down, genuinely wondering whether I’d need to go to hospital before I died of dehydration. I slept on and off for 2 days, then, as if a switch had been flipped, I woke up and realised that not only did I feel physically better – the anxiety had gone too. It was as if my body had forced its own collapse, so I had to rest and recover. (That sounds rather dramatic.)

Anyway, I’m up and about, and no longer feeling overwhelmed. And I’m mindful of something I read a few weeks ago in an article about neurodivergence: if going through life is like a video game, we play it on ‘nightmare’ difficulty, and neurotypicals play on normal.  And when it’s put like that, it does sound rather ridiculous and gives some perspective. So, whenever I feel overwhelmed again – and it will happen - I’m going to remind myself to turn down the difficulty settings on this game of life.