Occam’s Razor on an Anxious Sunday
After finishing the extended version of The Return of the King last night, I started to feel a growing anxiety. The first thought was ‘hello darkness my old friend’, as in the last few months she’s been a faithful companion. So, I began my usual Sherlock Holmes-que procedure: where does it come from/what could have possibly triggered it/and how do I make it go away. I had a very good day yesterday, Matthias and I walked a section of the Jubilee Green Way, a several miles long walkway that crosses parts of London. He had picked a very interesting section, which passes next to the decadent beauty of the London City Airport, then moves north-eastwards to Olympia Park and ends at Victoria Park. After a warm shower and some Tequila-cuddles, we met with our covid-19 bubble for part III of The Lord of the Rings, which we had started yesterday.
Considering how the day had unfolded, I ruled out laziness and idleness-triggered anxiety, a classic. I had walked more than 15k and I was pleasantly tired. It wasn’t also the ‘no one loves me’ anxiety because even during a pandemic, I felt surrounded by friends and love. I was left with my ‘I ate too much and I’m ugly and fat’ anxiety, but my food consumption had been slightly over the usual, and still totally acceptable during a holiday. The sense of being a failure, of being unworthy of love and other familiar feelings didn’t go away after a night of good sleep. This morning I woke up in a even worse mood than yesterday. It is then that it dawned on me: I’m absolutely terrified about going back to work tomorrow. Or better: the thought of going back to the same hours, pressure, workload that had characterised the months leading up to Christmas scares me a great deal. Let me unpack this, as it is a multiform kind of dread. One of the things that terrifies me the most is going back to the mad number of hours that I churned out before the Christmas holidays. For the first time in a very long time, I couldn’t fit everything into a working week. I tried reducing the number of hours dedicated to one of the usual suspects: research. I cut my research hours down to a ridiculously low number, but that didn’t solve my problem. I was still struggling to get everything I was asked to do done. I realised that there were simply not as many hours in a week as I needed to be able to keep up.
One of the things that I hate the most both in personal and professional life is letting people down. Instead of reducing my involvement in activities with colleagues and students, I extended the working day and simply worked more. I was also worried about my students’ mental health considering that many of them were stuck in their campus accommodation, not able to meet friends (or make some) and rather isolated. I managed to achieve something that I didn’t think it could be possible: everything that needed to be done by Christmas got done and I didn’t let anyone down … except myself (and my partner). I worked through one of the biggest mental health crises I’ve ever had; I was in meetings where I turned off the video because I was crying and I couldn’t hide it; and I worked, like everyone else and as if nothing was happening, through a global pandemic. Giving up on research (not forever, but for too many weeks) and focusing on all these other tasks and duties that I had to fulfil made me ever more miserable. I knew that academia wasn’t just about teaching and research, but I also didn’t expect (ignorance is bliss?) to have signed up to become a project manager, a PA, a psychiatric emergency contact, a copy-editor and all the other roles that I have had to take up in the last months. Maybe more experienced colleagues will think: this is (neo-liberal) academia for you, babe. Welcome to the club, thanks for finally swallowing the red pill.
My thought during these terrible weeks leading up to Christmas was often: hold on until the holidays. You’ll be able to go for long walks, drink mulled wine, play with Tequila (the kitten in the photo, not the liquor) and spend time with Matthias. But also: you’ll finally be able to do research and finish that paper you wanted to write during term 1. Foolish thinking. I was (and, sadly, since today is the last day off I have, I am) so deeply exhausted that I was only able to squeeze in two mornings of writing and one of reading. I literally couldn’t bring myself to do one of my favourite things in the world: sit down and write. This is exhaustion for you: without children or dependent relatives to care for, without literally anything to do in locked-down London, I still couldn’t write. I couldn’t work.
The anxiety, depression and other symptoms that I have experienced in the last few months are not caused by my workload, or my work more generally. They have deeper and farther roots. But these months, and this workload, have made me sicker, weaker and more hopeless. My very wise partner put it rightly. He said that we (me, and our other left-leaning academics friends) go around talking about alienation, neo-liberalism, systems of production, exploitation and other concepts that we profess to understand, dissect and fight against. But at the same time, we work like machines. We work ourselves sick. There are systemic contradictions, it’s not that we simply don’t get it. We’re asked to make students experience as good as possible, but we’re not given the time or space to be able to do so. Students numbers have increased, but that hasn’t corresponded to an increase in the academic and support staff, due to the hiring freeze that was in place in many UK HE institutions this past year. We’re evaluated on the quality of our research outputs, but we have to resort to evenings, weekends and holidays to produce high quality, world changing research. We seek help from employers, but their hands are tied and some of them are as stretched and exhausted as we are. We seek help from GPs, but their hands are tied too. As an aside, I discovered something about mental health services here in the London borough of Southwark. Hardly pub quiz material, but do you know what criteria one needs to fit to be referred to a psychiatric? One needs either to be pregnant and not able to take anti-depressants; to have tried three to four drugs prescribed by their GP with no positive effects; or have tried to kill oneself. Let that sink in for a moment. Now, add a global pandemic, impossible demands and working hours, lonely and anxious students, extremely tired colleagues, no support from a broken medical system… Ok, maybe I managed to solve the mystery about my anxiety today and the dread I feel thinking about tomorrow.
No shit, Sherlock.
