6 March 2025 - I have never been so stressed out in my life
I kind of had a mental breakdown at work today. I have had a breakdown another time, then it was just insane amounts of cherry tomatoes from foodsharing, half really good, half rotten. There were just to many of them. I was tired and I couldn’t handle it. My roomies are blessed, they went through and sorted all of it. But this time it was at work. I was showing a couple of slides I had prepared for a workshop, very simple slides, a few words and a graph of our model results. I like to keep it simple. My point was that one line was below another line. The question then came ”okay but why does the line go up and down?”. Very simple question. Problem is I have no clue whatsoever. And I don’t know how to find out. And it wasn’t the point anyway. But I mean its an obvious question, if I have the graph I must be able to answer it. This broke something. I got a few other questions and all I could answer was one word. My face was turning red out of frustration, I was almost shaking. I quickly said sorry I gotta go, jumped out of the call and just broke down in the grey office room for about 10 min or something. See, you can do that because you can’t see into the office rooms, and also basically no one is at the office anyway because it is so grey and awful.
Obviously this was a straw that broke the camels back kind of situation. I have one big and super interesting project that is taking up all my time, only the deadline was end of february. Then there is a workshop mid march (the one we were preparing for) that is taking up the rest of my time. Then there is a huge deadline end of march that I have barely started. And then I should also write a fucking research article that I have barely started (which belongs to the project that should have ended in february). And another thing for later. It’s basically impossible but so is moving the march deadlines, appearently. One has got to give, and if it isn’t the deadline I suppose it will have to be my mental health, huh. Oh, and US politics is not really helping...
And the workshop is so… We have so many meetings for this workshop, because noone is in charge and can divide the tasks. Things keep changing all the time because it is never defined, the emails that we want to send out, what presentations we are supposed to prepare, who is supposed to prepare it, how long the presentation is going to be. We keep trying to define things in a group of like 6 before anyone has had the time to think about it. Whenever you actually try to draft something, someone else comes in and changes it to something you don’t know what to do with anymore. Like shortening a sentence so much that its looses its meaning. And the incredible thing is, basically no one has even signed up for the workshop (although some have said yes verbally). Because even though we prepared a save-the-date email in december (in big stress), we didn’t send it out until second half of february, because oh maybe we should ask so and so first, so that they can ask the other person, but oh so and so is not responding, and maybe we should have a more defined agenda first and maybe we need to review that agenda like five thousand times before we do anything, maybe we should add meaning to it and then shorten it to devoid it of meaning and then ask ourselves what we meant and then redefine the whole thing and then shorten it again and then ask ourselves what we meant…
So I was going to go to bed but the thoughs kept spinning around until I scratched my leg out of frustration, and appearently my nails are kind of sharp because now my leg looks like I have a very excited dog. Then I took a shower, made a tea and listened to pink pony club and ruby don’t cry, and wrote this. I feel a little better, maybe I can get some hours of sleep.