Grad School PTSD is Real, Folks

It has been 3 glorious months since I defended my thesis and earned myself a masters degree. Masters of science in nursing, to be specific.

While in grad school, the following things happened to me:

• My aunt sold our family cottage and my grandmother's home without telling any other members of my family.
• I was involved in a law dispute re: said sales, which my father undermined by firing the lawyer I'd hired because he was too afraid to go head to head with his bitch sister.
• I started therapy.
• My dad smashed up my car in a hit-and-run and came within a whisper of death
• I had to buy a new car long before I was financially able.
• I had to move because our landlady wanted to move back into her house.
• My bipolar mother:
• Divorced my stepfather (yes it was ugly)
• Picked fight after fight with me over my inability to help her pick up the pieces after said divorce
• Came THIS CLOSE to bankruptcy
• Is generally cuckoobananas
• My partner Nate:
• Was (and still is) in a constant battle with OCD
• Got diagnosed with diverticular disease, causing him months and months of pain
• Had to get surgery for his disease
• During which he nearly DIED.
• My grandmother died.

You might think "well at least her schooling was going well"... alas, you are dead wrong. While I was enjoying the coursework and everything I was learning, my thesis was a disaster. My primary supervisor - the head of the nursing department at my university AND an expert in my chosen field of study - shit the bed big time, moving back and forth between micromanagement and negligence. My secondary supervisor, a warm, thoughtful, beautiful, brilliant, and calm woman whom I admire greatly, shit the bed even harder in ways I won't describe here because I simply don't want to re-live them. Long story short, my thesis was completed a semester late because of the way I was managed by my supervisors, who not only told me that this was normal for grad students (I was the only one of my peers who was managed this way), and actually spent more time planning on raking me through the coals for an email I wrote calling them out on their mismanagement than they did actually prioritizing my work. As it turns out, academics do not appreciate being called out on their bullshit (or basically criticized in any way). In the end, I couldn't even bring myself to be proud of my work. I couldn't tell where my own writing ended and my micromanaging supervisor's writing began, as she has revised it to within an inch of its life.

Suffice to say, when that ordeal was done, I got very drunk, ate a ton of oysters, cried, and tried to put it all behind me.

I needed a break. Big time.

But do you know what happens to type-A people who are able to finally close the doors on a complex and high pressure situation from which they barely made it out alive? They seamlessly pop right into a new one. But more on my new job later.

My therapist, whom I started to see within my first term in grad school (and thank fuck I had the wherewithal to recognize the need for this early on) told me once, "grad school PTSD is real". At the time I didn't take much stock in that because nobody thinks about post-trauma when they are preoccupied by that current trauma. But holy shit, that was a fucking prophecy. While in grad school, I sacrificed so much: the health of my relationships with my partner, family, and colleagues. My intrinsic commitment to my bedside nursing job, which I had loved so dearly. My financial stability (definitely more on that later). My mental-well-being. The only thing on which I had a firm grasp was my physical health, which, I realize now in my grad-school-PTSD haze, was the only thing over which I had any control. But again - more on that later. 

TL;DR

Grad school sucked the life out of me. But I'm trying to pick up the pieces, and Deedle 2.0 is underway. This blog is basically a forum in which I can systematically (thank you, Type-A!) keep track of the things I am learning about how to be a functional human being and keep my shit under control. You see, I like to smoke the pot, and as a result, my big beautiful brain sometimes forgets the creative ways in which I approach things and the perspectives I have on what I'm doing/thinking/learning/changing/developing. 

In addition, I like to think of my self as a influencer (but not in the douchey Instragram way - I want to be very clear about that), because when I'm passionate about something, I can get pretty much anyone on board. It would be great if I could just send someone a link to my brilliance, so that I can spend the time that I would ordinarily spend explaining something to someone doing other things. 

You see, I'm all about leading horses to water, and then fucking off to be more efficient elsewhere.