This is a rather personal post, but I think it will help me to put some of my thoughts here.
For the last few years, I have been plagued with bouts of anxiety. This, I’m assuming, is linked to being perimenopausal and having ADHD that has only now been diagnosed despite the fact that I am 50-fricking-5! I’ve always been an anxious person, but anxiety has always been an occasional visitor, and easily managed. But in recent weeks, anxiety has sort of moved in without me knowing, and it’s starting to really impact on my life. Being in constant fight or flight mode, with that electrical, fizzy, butterflies-in-my-stomach feeling being impossible to ignore is exhausting both cognitively and physically, and now it’s making it hard to leave the house.
Worryingly, it's also starting to affect my studies – and studying was the one thing I could rely on to take my mind off the anxiety and calm me down- using my ‘hyper-focus ADHD powers’ was a good way to focus on something else, and it really did help.
At my last supervision meeting, I mentioned that my copy of NVivo kept refusing to boot up and was really slow, which was worrying because I had only coded 6 transcriptions, and I’d already generated almost 500 codes with a further 30+ transcripts to code. My supervisor looked puzzled. I explained that I had been going through each transcript and meticulously applying very specific and very detailed codes for every unit of meaning I found. He asked why I wasn’t applying any of these codes across transcripts (when appropriate to do so). I realised, like a fool, that I had forgotten to do this, and that I need to start again generating brief, generic codes that can be used multiple times and across participants. And I think this may have been the ‘anxiety straw’ that broke the camel’s back.
I look at earlier blog posts from this year and see that some form of cognitive/mental health issue has been brewing for a while, but I have ignored the warnings and powered on, because that’s what I do. And now I’ve sort of fallen over. That is also what I do, and it seems that despite my advanced age, I haven’t learned to take action BEFORE the falling down bit.
This morning I've emailed my first supervisor to tell him I'm just too anxious to attend the BIOSI Education Summit at Leeds University next week. I'm down to do a 5 minute presentation about incidental learning in OWRPGs, and I'm scheduled for the end of the first day, so it won't be a loss to the conference if I don't present. In fact, they get to finish 5 minutes early! As a non-scientific person, I still feel like an imposter too. I'm a biosciences student, but I have no scientific qualifications. The conference programme looks very scary to my unscientific mind, and right now the thought of travelling up to Leeds in a minibus full of academics I've never met terrifies me.
I've not taken any time off from my studies since I enrolled, so maybe I need a break to clear my head? But I also need to see my GP to sort this out - it may be that I need medication, or counselling, or neither, or both.
SEPTEMBER EDIT: My first supervisor has been incredibly supportive, has offered to do my presentation on my behalf, and has recommended that I take a few weeks off. I'm very lucky to have such supportive supervisors. He also reminded me that my research his genuinely of interest to others and that I am a good BIOSI student. I needed to hear this, and it has helped a huge amount. I also contacted my GP, and have been prescribed HRT patches. A week in, and these have already started to work miracles.