Gin Trap

I am depressed at the moment, which is not unsurprising with the end of term and the temporary cessation of the hive-ish activity that’s the juice on which this place seems to run. So this entry is dedicated to the rather bleakly Calvinist (or New Age–Calvinism’s anti-rational flipside) theme of what I’m learning about myself therein.

If I get depressed, it’s often in response to being really frustrated about something. What I seem to be frustrated about at the moment is the number of additional tasks that are being piled on me when [shout "hell-oh-oo" and strike an Oprah-esque sort of finger wagging pose] I’m on my non-teaching time. When I started this job, the custom was for those above and around us to leave us all the hell alone when we weren’t in the classroom, the better to let us recover our equilibrium.

But that’s not the case anymore. Screws are turning, budgets contracting and everyone needs a piece of everyone else. So the second rung of my depression is realising that there’s never not going to be a time at work when I’m excused the duty of being assertive. That’s a long-winded way of saying that the responsibility of saying “no” to all kinds of requests because I don’t have time or energy is now always with me. I’m not naturally good at this. I find it tiring in itself.

So the environment’s changed, and in a way that makes it hard for someone like me, but also reveals to me some of the ideas I hold about the kind of place in which I’d prefer to work. What strikes me about them is that they’re largely impracticable: people thinking before they ask you to do something whether it’s realistic or even convenient for you to fulfil that request; a curious, courtly sort of environment in which we all hang back from each other a little and then approach with caution or kindness. I think that, in retrospect, I’m lucky that this ever existed at all, especially amongst the universities, where scholarly isolation seems so effectively to breed misanthropy or a general atrophying of social concessions.

I get over-subscribed quite a lot at work, and that’s because I find it hard to say no to others; I like to please people and to feel like I’m helping. (Why that is the case is of course another story, likely written by Mr. Jung and Mr. Freud.) But at present I’m in a wider environment where the onus is on me to monitor, constantly, what I can and can’t commit to, and not on those many and varied who are doing the asking. So managing the day and the evil thereof becomes a case of fiercely defending my own boundaries and territory–which I’m too tired to really feel like doing.

It’s in this frame of mind that I get particularly hard on myself, but it also has a curious side-effect of increased productivity. I’ve been marking like a machine, freed by depression’s detachment from caring too much about the papers I’m commissioned to judge, and I’ve been tapping out my own prose too at a pace usually impeded by attacks of thoughtfulness. But I feel temporarily paid out, strung out and worn out. This aspect of my life is not one that I imagined for myself when I dreamed of the end of student life, a gin trap in amongst the flora and fauna.