Happy Belated Thanksgiving!
I hope you have enjoyed a joyful holiday of delicious things and pleasant family time!
Very unfortunately, this has been kind of a tough month. I've scheduled my dissertation defense in February, which means kicking my statistical analyses into high gear and significantly cutting into my weekend free time. At the same time, the length of internship days continued to gradually increase.
The cumulative insult of these stressors has resulted in what very closely resembles a physical manifestation of CIB, meaning that instead of this:
...plus losing my voice and feeling generally miserable for over a week, resulting in two missed days of work with little impact on my overall recovery.
It has been immensely tiresome.
Luckily, it seems like this bullshit is finally remitting.
I'm choosing to interpret my brush with CIB as a somewhat over-kill-y reminder of the importance of self-care. Especially compared to my first month or two of internship and largely due to dissertation crunch time commencing, I have definitely been neglecting my responsibility to maintain a continual roster of fun outside-of-work things.
The tradeoff is that if I finish my dissertation as planned, I will have successfully secured my freedom from the clearly interminable bondage that is graduate school. This will ensure that in the relatively near future I will have oodles of time for self-care which will only be enhanced by the positive impact on my psyche of knowing this crap has an official expiration date.
So at least there's that.
Anyway, in the spirit of the recently-passed holiday, I thought I would share a sampling of the things for which I am thankful:
1. Fiancé, who often single-handedly supports me through the many hard days I've faced in this process.
2. Our beautiful city, which offers me stunning views of itself on my nightly drives home and reminds me of how grateful and lucky I am to live somewhere that still takes my breath away.
3. Speaking of which: my fabulous Little Car, which makes what would have been an impossible, awful, miserable 90-minutes-one-way commute an utterly painless ~27 minutes jam-packed with personal space, tailored climate control, and speediness.
4. My parents and family, who are crucial sources of support, love, and guidance.
5. My spectacular friends in and out of graduate school, who bolster me through hard times and who are brilliant and wonderful.
6. Wedding planning, which is a joyful reminder that there is a whole life waiting to happen outside of graduate school.
7. My perfect kittens, who make me feel loved and snuggled.
8. Podcasts and books, which help me stay connected to the gigantic world outside of my one little life (I especially love this one, because history is delicious).
9. Delicious food, holiday-related and otherwise, which is the icing on the cake of life.
10. Meditating, stretching, breathing, and all other practices that root me calmly and lovingly in each precious moment (also this site has an iPhone app is amazing for self-soothing).
And finally, obvi:
11. You, the dear and lovely people who read this ridiculous blog.
Happy Holidays!!
{Heart}
