Last night I had a bunch of dreams (or mini-dreams?) in quick succession, all with the same themes. Come to think of it, they all had pretty much the same plot, too, just different settings, situations, and characters. The dreams are pretty reflective of how I feel my life is going right now, so I'll share one of them:
In the dream, I'm in my office on campus. I've just gotten in, it's late(r) in the morning, about an hour later than I normally get in, and I have office hours starting in five minutes. I've been away from campus for the last few days due to some unexplained family crisis, and there are assignments due that day in all of my classes, so I expect that I will have a steady line of students waiting to see me. I walk into my office and the dean and one of his assistants is sitting there, waiting for me to arrive. "We need to talk to you right now; it's vitally important," says the dean. I tell him that I can only talk for five minutes. He ignores me, closes my door, and then launches into this long-winded explanation of this crisis that somehow involves me. Meanwhile, I'm not listening because I can see, through the window in my office door (?), a bunch of students waiting outside, craning their necks and trying to see if I'm in. I feel bad because I feel that I should be helping them, especially since office hours have now officially begun and they're starting to knock, but the dean is oblivious to all this. I say to the dean, "Can we please continue this another time? I could meet with you after office hours." Instead, he and his assistant say that they will just sit in my office and wait for me to finish.
At this point, one of my colleagues comes barreling into my office. "I need to talk to you now!" he says. I ask him if it's quick, and he says "of course". And then of course he launches into a long-winded, convoluted explanation of who-knows-what, because once again I'm distracted by the fast-growing line of increasingly panicked students AND the dean sitting in my office, impatiently tapping his foot. I ask him politely if we can talk later and he starts yelling at me for not helping him.
The whole time I just feel completely overwhelmed. I don't know where to focus my attention or spend my energy, because everyone in the dream needs my time and attention *now*, and all of their needs seem equally important and urgent. I start to panic, thinking that my tenure case is surely toast at this point, since I've now pissed off the dean, my colleague, and my students, and who knows who else.
Mercifully, at this point I woke up.
It's so hard to function effectively when you feel like you're operating in crisis mode. Yet that's largely how things have been around here for the past few weeks. Every time I think I see things starting to slow down and clear up, something else happens to throw everything out of whack again. I just fear that something is going to give soon, and that something might just very well be my sanity or my physical health.
It's gotta get better soon. Right? Right??
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"Every time I think I see things starting to slow down and clear up, something else happens to throw everything out of whack again. I just fear that something is going to give soon, and that something might just very well be my sanity or my physical health.
It's gotta get better soon. Right? Right??"
I'm not sure that it necessarily will. The crisis mode will end at some point, but it won't necessarily end soon, and it's quite possible that your health (mental and/or physical) will suffer in the meantime.
I went through a similar period. A mentor of mine told me to hang in there, because things would get better. But they didn't. After 4 years where more than 50% of the time was mega-stressed pressured time, I couldn't cope any more. My mental health suffered and my physical health deteriorated. I only started to recover when concrete steps were taken to reduce my workload and deal with the mental pressure (counselling helped). I'm now a lot better than I was, but I can't cope with the strain I was under before and I had to go part-time to ease the pressure. And I'm childless. I have no idea how mothers cope (or indeed conscientious fathers).
From what you say, I'm worried that you are under dangerous amounts of pressure, and you imploding isn't going to do anything for your tenure case (and thus your long-term career). Is there anything concrete you can do to try and reduce your load? Maybe a swap to redistribute the load? Maybe you're doing extra that you shouldn't be doing? Are there other working moms in your department? Anyone sympathetic to the demands of motherhood who could make some concrete suggestions as to what could be done? Can your husband do some extra of the childcare/domestic chores temporarily to ease the load on you in the meantime?
As a professional of any sort--scientist, physician, attorney, businessperson, artist, musician, whatever--you will never "catch up" with all the crap you have to do. Get used to never crossing off that last thing on your list and sighing, "Ahh. Done!" That will never ever happen for the rest of your life. I promise.
The key is to learn to accept that some things will get done late and some things will never get done, and to pick and choose what to move up and what to move down on your to-do list.
And always remember, someone else's failure to plan ahead should never be allowed to become your emergency. As you become more adept, more experienced, more of an expert, you will find people seeking to get you to take responsibility for their inefficiencies and their poor planning. The extent to which you allow this to happen must be strictly controlled.
As far as your dream goes, just be glad you weren't also naked.
Thanks, C, for your helpful suggestions. It's hard for me to tell at this point if I'm just going through a really rough but temporary patch (which may very well be true---I've had some things thrown at me that I wasn't expecting but that I have to deal with, hence the dreams), or if this is systemic of more long-term dysfunction. I don't have a good support system in my department (one of the sources of stress), but I do have an excellent support system outside of my department, which I should utilize more. And Mr. Jane is doing as much as he can and keeps coming up with new suggestions to help make things easier for me until things calm down. So I'm hopeful.
(getting out for a nice walk today also helped bring some much-needed perspective to the various situations going on, too.)
PhysioProf, yes, the not being naked thing was fortunate, I suppose. :) Seriously though, reminding myself that everything is NOT going to get done is healthy, so thanks for the reminder! At this point, I don't feel like I have enough power to control what other people dump on me (tenure! I need tenure!!), but I am doing what I can, when I can. For instance, today I said no to a bunch of things that were not essential, and I've become very good at ignoring certain emails from certain people about non-essential things. So I'm learning. But I still have a ways to go.
PhysioProf, I think you're right about the prioritising, that is certainly necessary. But I'm wondering whether Jane is already prioritising and still having difficulties.
That suggestion used to drive me up the wall when I was in the midst of the stressful periods. Older academics would say in a patronising tone "It's just a matter of prioritising" and I'd think yes, I know that. I already threw all the non-important stuff off my to-do list, and I've been ignoring all the important non-urgent stuff for months/years now. I'm left looking at ONLY the important urgent stuff and that is still more than I can cope with!
The job was constantly forcing me to choose between leaving important tasks undone, or doing a very poor job of the tasks, or spending lots of extra time to do the tasks to an acceptable standard. And people would often give advice, often patronising or what came over as "blame the victim" - things like "Oh it's just a question of having the right attitude" or "You have to manage your time better" or "You have to lower your standards" or "You need to spend less time preparing" (what, you want me to give only half a lecture?), no-one would actually admit that the quantity of work itself was simply TOO MUCH. And worse, academics would use the "Ah but we're ALL BUSY" excuse in order to foist more work onto you. They ask you to do something, you explain you can't, so they say that everyone is busy and they manage it so you should too, thus effectively removing the one defense you had against their request. Grrr.
Anyway I'm wondering if it's the case that fundamentally, it's too heavy a workload, or whether there are things that can be done to manage the time better.
Here's a suggestion for responding to non-vitally-urgent requests: "Yes I could help you with that, but I have a lot on at the moment [list a few things that are more important than the request] and I'm only going to be free to help you around [pick a time several months into the future]". That will normally get the person to go away and they probably won't come back, but your response will have been of the "I'd love to help you" variety and they won't be offended, and will better appreciate that you're under pressure.
It's funny that you write what you did, C, because last night Mr. Jane and I had a long talk about my sky-high stress levels and how we could both manage things better---and I have to tell you, I was having a hard time coming up with things that I could cut or reduce. Because as you point out, a lot of the things I should be doing, like prioritizing and saying no and not insisting on perfection---well, I'm doing those already. But this is a recent thing---I was managing my workload pretty well up until a few weeks ago, with exceptions here and there, but for some reason everything went to hell a few weeks ago. I will say that today was a much better day: it was busy as hell, but I actually accomplished everything I needed to, and will get to go to bed at a halfway decent hour. So maybe things are looking up....
I hope things continue to look up for you and you continue to not be so stressed. I'll just finish with this: please don't spend a long extended period of time being over-stressed and thinking "Things must get better, mustn't they?" and as a consequence damaging your mental and physical health. Some things can have lasting consequences; for example my ability to cope with stress now is noticeably less than what it was. It seems to be all too easy to be optimistic rather than realistic and of course when you're stressed you don't have time to step back and think about it because you're so busy dealing with the workload.