I wonder if it's due to going off the pill. Hormones are such a tricky thing. I don't think I've made note of that here. This whole fertility/pill/egg freezing thing. My mother wants me to see if it's possible to freeze any eggs. I feel... ambivalent about this. But I agreed to see the doctor and get more facts. Of course just to see the stupid doctor you have to be off the pill for four months. So I stopped my pills, and it's been four months. I need to make an appointment. I don't have particularly high hopes for this endeavor given that I only have one ovary left and am 38. But facts and knowledge are better than ignorance. I suppose I'll have more to say about this, when I know more.
But in ways it's related to the malaise and in ways it's not. It is because I see that all of my friends of age have children or are having children and that I am not in any position to even be considering having children in any way shape or form at the moment. I have that sense of running out of time. Although I look at babies and small children (especially) and I find I have no interest in them. But I did always think I would have a family. It just hasn't worked out that way. My life is great in almost every other way, but not this one. And there's not much I can do about it, and certainly not much else that I'm not already trying to do about it. So there's that.
Then I'm coming in to the last year of the PhD. It's unsettling and I feel overwhelmed and like I'm not capable of pulling this off. Like I've just been fucking about for three years and I'm about to exposed as the fraud and lazy sod I sometimes feel like I am. This one worries me less. I know I'm just overwhelmed with the amount of work I need to do in the next year, and right now it all seems a big ungainly mess. But once I settle in and start actually doing some work I think I'll feel better about it.
More worryingly is the sense of isolation I've been feeling. Which isn't necessarily sensible, as I spend a lot of my time socializing with people. But there is something missing. I feel removed from my friends in some way. Separate or outside. Not when I'm with them- not when I'm out doing things. But when I have time to myself which, despite the fact that I am busy all the time, I seem to also have plenty of. Sort of. I guess I count work time as 'alone time' which maybe is because the PhD is such a solitary thing to be doing. Even when you're with other people, for example, in my of office in Cambridge where all the PhD students sit together, you're still just working on your own thing that no one else is working on.
Of course there's also the cold and the weather and the dark.
It's sort of depression, although not, I don't think, the crippling clinical depression that people are afflicted by. I don't think drugs or therapy will help me. Just need to muddle through. Acknowledge how I'm feeling right now. Keep an eye on it. Keep doing everything I'm supposed to be doing. After all, what else can I do?
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