momentary metacognition

So I've been realizing that a lot of the language I've been using for the past month or so when describing myself or my mental state or situation seems inevitably to involve some sort of feeling of being static, unmoving, stuck, or blocked somehow. This seems to all go back to my inability to deal with the current stressors in my life in anything even approaching a healthy way - rather than being productive when necessary and using any free time to destress, I've been having huge concentration issues, flipping into daydreams without actually realizing that I've done so for several minutes, have had my energy level spike in one of those weird, toxic ways that means that my muscles are constantly sore and I end up feeling more exhausted than usual, that sort of stuff. Meanwhile, my ability to get through all the reading I have for my class each week is suffering - I get through it all, but I'm not comprehending it on a level I'd be thrilled about with if I were taking the class, much less teaching it. I'm not really comprehending anything I'm reading right now on a very deep level. Because of this, I'm having a hard time critiquing arguments, synthesizing ideas, or working through any of the problems I've run into on the dissertation. My dissertation progress has slowed to nonexistent - I need to be putting together another draft of the proposal, but I've been finding it next to impossible to throw my brain into thinking about anything to do with the dissertation or the proposal for any length of time. During the first half of the semester I was balancing pretty well - I'd spend the mid-week section of time working on exclusively dissertation stuff and keep my brain pretty well focused on that, and then spend Friday-Monday working on stuff for my class. Lately, however, it's been taking all week to get through class stuff, my brain seems unable to flip into dissertation mode, and the stress of feeling like I'm forever falling further behind is leaving me unable to sleep - which is probably feeding the cycle more.

The upshot I suppose is that it feels like whatever is really ADD in my brain has gone on spin cycle, and I'm actually worse than usual. I'm to the point of idealizing any type of work that isn't graduate school, because I wonder a lot of the time if I'd be more productive if I were in a typical 8-5 office environment, and I feel like at this point my self-esteem seems tied to my productivity, as I've been getting more and more depressed and angry at myself over my lack of work or productivity or, um, product (seeing my dissertation proposal as a sort of end-phase commodity I suppose - I'm feeling pretty alienated from the process at the moment especially when I know that the whole proposal is pretty much there just to make the Dean here allow me to be on maintenance of candidacy).

Meanwhile, I'm comparing myself pretty relentlessly to Tony. I need to stop this. He just has this seemingly magical ability to stop all the things in his brain and really focus, and this ability is completely eluding me. And he just ran his first marathon last week, and I'm barely managing to work out more than once a week (though I'm down to magic weight - that 135 pound mark that means that I feel pretty good and thin, but not so thin that Sarah and Janet start yelling at me to gain weight - just healthy). I think I should be trying to work out a bit more because it seems like the cardio and whatnot should be helping me to focus some of the stress somewhere else. I can eat more if I worry about losing any more weight.

So I'm stuck at the moment and not doing a very good job of working though it right now. I'm frustrated with school because it feels like the current hoop I'm attempting to jump through is pretty pointless, and I'm also frustrated because for the most part I really haven't enjoyed teaching this semester as much as I was hoping to and it's making me call into question my ability as a teacher or even my desire to do this for the rest of my life. I think some of the stress of all of this professional doubt and self-doubt and not knowing how to overcome it quite yet is part of what's got my brain in overdrive, which is probably funneling into my concentration, which is in turn keeping me from getting through the proposal so that I can back up, do the background reading I need to be doing to really give some good analysis, and all of that.

And at the moment I need to be getting through the last three essays for tomorrow's class so that I can figure out how in the hell I think we'll be getting through five theoretical standpoints and their accompanying essays in two and a half hours. And it's all centered on Chaucer. I keep hoping they'll come up with a Chaucer action figure so I can hang him upside down by his ankle in my office...

On brighter notes, my comp two proposal for next semester got cleared, so I'll be teaching a course surrounding cultural attitudes towards death (Matthew!!! I need something short and accessible about AIDS please!!!). So we'll see how a comp two course goes when I'm doing everything I can to avoid talking politics with them...