teacuphistorian

[teacuphistorian]

Having Executive Dysfunction Be Like...

Me: Hello, I would like to start a task please.

Brain: Okay, what sort of task were you looking to do?

Me: I need to wash my dishes.

Brain: Ooo, I’m sorry, but we’re not currently accepting applications for multi-step tasks. That would require you to empty the dish drainer AND wash SEVERAL dishes.

Me: But…it’ll take me thirty seconds to empty the dish drainer.

Brain: Unfortunately we cannot confirm that. Here is a list of single-step tasks you may do instead.

Me: …None of these are things I have to get done today.

Brain: You can try back in a few hours and perhaps we’ll have an opening.

Me: But I have free time NOW.

Brain: While you wait, would you like to watch five hours of Let’s Play videos?

Me: I’ve seen all these though.

Brain: Exactly! So you know you like them! Finding a new video to watch AND watching it counts as a multi-step task, and we’re not currently accepting applications for multi-step tasks. :)

Me: …

Brain: :)

Me: Can I watch videos while I wash my dishes?

Brain: Ooo, I’m sorry, but we’re not currently accepting applications for–

Me: *headdesk*

[teacuphistorian]

This PhD stuff is familiar. It’s nice.

I feel better prepared to deal with the challenges of a research degree. I’m especially better at choosing my own projects. Now I just have to try to do that within an external social framework.

[teacuphistorian]

I struggle a lot with the idea of defining a subject area, but I do think there are some repeated areas of interest for me which have stood the test of time.

I wish it wasn’t so important to me for my ideas to be valid to other people.

I’m really fascinated by individual political minds. Political biographies are always cool, but more than that are things like the political concepts defining an age and the mechanisms going on within political history. For some reason, the Conservative Party comes up a lot, just because it’s curious like no other. It’s got a lot of big, significant, influential names. I want to branch out from it, but it presents some of the most interesting psychological puzzles.

I need to try to remember that my interests outside of academic applications are still valid within them.

I’m most interested in why particular decisions were made.

[teacuphistorian]

Providing some definition for PhD applications is good.

I wish my mind didn’t go blank as soon as I actually have to talk to people or interact with them in any way. It’s as if my entire thought process suddenly becomes invalid.

[teacuphistorian]

My arms feel so collapsed and weak today. My head is foggy.

I do have a bit more clarity on my day now.

[teacuphistorian]

The world outside for me - especially of people’s minds with whom I’ll have to interact - is just one big, black hole.

I decided a long time ago that I should live life for myself. Yet I don’t seem to be doing that and it’s hard to achieve when life won’t let you into most things anyway.

The structure for applying to PhDs is useful, though.

[teacuphistorian]

I mean, what is it about me which makes me so incapable of helping myself? I know something like 2/3 of autistic people aren’t in employment even if they want to be. But I feel so accomplished that I should be achieving things, even if I’m not.

[teacuphistorian]

I think that when I was little, I recognised the pattern that things would be fine whatever I did, so I didn’t have to do anything. Any claims that I did rang false. Now I wish someone had explained why it would be useful down the road.

I need lots of explanatory depth.

I also do better with detail to be working on.

I’m so crap.

[teacuphistorian]

I’m also really concerned about the whole independent research thing. I just feel so invalid whenever I have to determine what I’m studying. That’s the main problem for me. I feel like I’m wasting other people’s time and my work doesn’t fit in with that of others. I don’t even know what my work is half the time. I don’t really have a specific area. It all feels so horribly false, whenever I make a choice. No one’s ever talked through with me what it means to make a choice like that. They’ve said I have to, but not why or how to come to terms with it. I feel so spoilt but it’s a genuine problem for me which I spergily don’t have an answer to.

Sometimes I feel like if I think about it more I’ll have more of an answer, but I never do. It just feels like a mask.

[teacuphistorian]

I need to introspect way more than I do. I just haven’t had an outlet for it. Or time, I suppose. But blogging is my way of getting thoughts out of my head and I need to do it. I feel very lost these days without it.

I just have this fog in my head all the time. I don’t know where I’m trying to get to with it. I don’t even have much to say here. There’s just nothing.

Yet within those nothings, there is something. Every now and again, I see something which pulls a reaction from the depths of my mind and for that one moment I have something to contribute again. But I don’t feel as sharp as I need to be. I need to be able to research and learn new things and put them to good use. I just can’t seem to find anyone who’ll let me do that. In the sense that I can’t pass an interview and I can’t decide on a way to achieve that by myself. Whether it should be writing a book, or just writing articles for no real career aim, or... journalism, I guess? 

It’s been the same question for months.

Journalism was almost an answer but I wasn’t really able to have the conversation about funding. I couldn’t solve that myself and I gave a couple of very light hints to my parents but they didn’t respond to them. I’m not sure they even noticed. I just wasn’t able to have that conversation.

I think my blogging really went downhill after the Institute for Government rejection and the rejection from DCMS. I’ve just completely lost faith in anyone hiring me for a job I actually want to do.

I’m taking another angle of attack at the moment in applying to Ministerial Contact Units. But those aren’t research-based. They aren’t policy roles. What they are is an opportunity to observe minister / politician / constituent interactions first-hand.

The more things don’t work out, the more I get scrambled and the less I’m able to make any sense of things or coordinate myself to achieve anything. I should be one of those people who picks something and works to achieve it but I just have no idea what that realistically is. Everything seems out of reach. I truly don’t believe anything will come through that I actually want to do. I also feel that it really should. That those places are where I belong. So I feel this dissonance that I’ll never get to where I’m supposed to be and my life will be a waste. So I should go for some second-rate option. But then what? So then I just end up back at nothing, in my own world, doing things within my control.

It’s such a fucked up state to be in. I mean, I really don’t know what to do with it.

I should probably be in a think tank. I just feel like I’m eroding, slowly but surely. A useless blot in the eye of society.

I just feel at the bottom of a pit. A useless, horrible pit. A pit from which there’s no escape. I’m just speaking to the void for eternity. It’s so horrible.

I feel like taking a couple of years out will have ruined my PhD chances. But maybe if I contact people I know they’ll be able to help me out?

I’m just so useless. Without a structure to follow, I have no idea what to do to make life work for me. I never have. I just fundamentally don’t understand how to make sense of it all.

As always, Durham makes more sense for me than others.

If I ask, people might be able to help.

I think I do have a lot of the traits these things ask for, but them stating them makes me feel like I won’t have them in their eyes, and therefore effectively I don’t have them at all. Things like drive or determination; ambition... It’s hard to be anything in this vacuum I’m in.

[teacuphistorian]

I think the issue is that the certainty lies with myself. I can't relax because what if I forget what my plan is?

[teacuphistorian]

Struggling without structure at the moment. Veering from knowing things are mostly okay to feeling very uncertain because of the lack of any definite response or structure.

I know what I need to do next. It just seems to take so long for the time to arrive to do it. I've been sick since I got those rejections and it's been most of a week. It's hard to hold faith and be proactive about things when you have to wait so long to do them. I couldn't really work on work stuff. I didn't even have appetite.

[teacuphistorian]

I just don't know what my place in the world is now. I don't feel like anything has a good enough chance of success or actual money. I don't know how people like me succeed these days.

I guess it just tends to be by keeping going and hoping you have someone to support you.

I really don't want to go back into temping. I don't think I have any useful skills to learn from that and I don't want to waste my time.

It's not even that I'm an arts graduate. Even the science graduates I know have had it hard. The only ones I know to have been successful did business or economics and went into accountancy. I couldn't do something like that. I also feel like graduate schemes would take way too long and be completely the wrong fit.

The answer is we need better employment legislation for the modern age. The UK's current laws are pre-internet.

I've been working on journalism so far this year, so I reckon that's my best bet. I love academia but a PhD is as difficult to get into as anything else if you aren't willing to pay your own way. I think I'm actually ready to start submitting to papers and publications, etc. Kind of excited about it. Hoping I actually get paid for it.

Then there's always that book I'm definitely writing someday. Looking forward to that, too.

[teacuphistorian]

Ordered some stuff to have another go at miniature painting. Feel like an outsider in the community and like it's all too expensive. Hoping it's manageable and fun this time, though.

[teacuphistorian]

Well, that's another rejection today. Like the last, I really thought I had a chance with this one. It was a massive intake. I also interviewed in something like January.

At least I got actual results and feedback from this one. I failed on social skills. Quelle surprise.

It was a really weird interview. They didn't use the normal structure. I've realised that maybe one of the reasons I keep getting extra socialising questions is to try to get me to give a better answer.

We'll see if I can actually manage to deal with this in time for the next one.

[teacuphistorian]

All these years later, I'm still struck by the utter artistry of Guns N' Roses.

There are lots of other musicians putting quiet emotions beautifully, but I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone so completely capture raw, difficult, tumultuous emotions quite as powerfully as Guns N' Roses.

A couple of songs really stand out to me as examples of this. One is Coma, which uses the entire band but especially Axl to get across the inside experience of impulsive suicide. Another is Estranged, which really gets across the difficult process of isolation from what you found meaningful and finding the strength to carry on. Then there's Civil War, Welcome to the Jungle... even Right Next Door to Hell.

Guns N' Roses, like no other band, get across the raw, visceral, lived experience of difficult times and deep emotion. In all of their songs, they get across that feeling clearly, whether it's dealing with a rowdy neighbour, an irritating partner, a long-held friend or life in the backstreets of Los Angeles. Guns N' Roses recognises when life isn't pretty but you have to get through it anyway.

The reason I picked Coma and Estranged as some of their very best is because they truly take you through the entire experience, from beginning to end. The songs are long enough that you live that experience with the band. Whether it's going through a suicide attempt, the short and long-term factors driving it and what it's like on the front lines of being pulled back from the brink in Coma, or losing meaningful human connection and going into isolation whilst knowing you have to keep living through it, both of these songs take you through the entire emotional trajectory from beginning to end. They're truly masterpieces.

This isn't always the case with Guns songs. Sometimes they're just about something really silly or selfish. But selfishness is in some ways what makes Guns so great, because they have a really deeply-rooted understanding of what it means to be trapped inside yourself and having to stick it out, through all the pretty highs and ugly lows.

Axl Rose being bipolar may make him the source of much drama, but it's also an essential part of his unique ability to communicate those emotions like few else can. The rest of the band perfectly flesh out those visions. Sometimes it leads to childish songs. Sometimes it leads to masterpieces. Always it leads to authenticity.

[teacuphistorian]

What happened to the old internet? It used to be so easy to find your tribe. Now it feels like everyone's in their own personalised, isolated bubbles.

I always knew regulation, algorithms and business would kill the internet... It's kind of a necessary development but the freedom which lets bad things thrive also enables good things to flourish.