Dark spot

[Trigger warning: depression]

I’m in a very dark spot again. 

This is probably another bout of post-op depression and I’m really struggling. 

Physically struggling with exhaustion and these stress headaches I tend to get in my left temple with a searing pain (migraines?). 

But especially struggling mentally and emotionally, which is also causing most of the physical symptoms such as my left-temple stress headaches. 

I’m going through an existential crisis. It’s not the first of my life, which is partly why I recognize it so well. 

My work feels totally pointless to me. And this is not only the depression speaking: I’ve struggled with finding a deeper motivation, a longer-term goal to the types of scientific/technical work that I’ve done for years. It comes in waves.

Sometimes it’s the novelty of the topic, the excitement of a new project and/or of a new team; sometimes it’s simply the fun aspects of learning something new (I love to learn new stuff); sometimes it’s just the practical aspect that a particular job will allow me to achieve other goals that in a specific moment of my life are important to me: all three of these aspects or combinations of them often buoy me for months, even years, in a job. In fact, all three of these aspects led me to choose and also sincerely enjoy my current work for several months. But now I have no enthusiasm left. I don’t believe in the topics on which I’m doing research, i.e. I don’t believe either in their being useful/helpful/beneficial to the world or in their leading to anything “good” nor do I enjoy most of the daily tasks connected to my work. Moreover, I’m feeling frustrated with my supervisor and almost guilty for feeling this way because on the personal level he’s such a nice human; but professionally I feel, in turns, either micromanaged by him in ways that feel limiting (& almost insulting) to me or abandoned to my own devices when I would actually need support (like some scientific brainstorming or advice). And finally, in these days specifically, I’m feeling terribly stressed out about a huge conference I have to attend next week, leaving in two days and staying away a full week and presenting scientific results that aren’t ready.

This conference doesn’t just feel like some temporary “extra stress” that is part of my work, but actually feels like an odious huge effort and terrible threat to me. Because I don’t care about the work I’m doing. But especially because it will expose me to hundreds of people flying in from all over the country (& even the world), most of them probably not wearing masks and thus threatening my physical health: if I get sick now, after five weeks of total inactivity and being stuck at home most of the time, if I’m forced to several more weeks of physical inactivity because of getting sick at a conference in which I have no interest, I don’t know what will happen to my mental health. The temporary meltdowns I’ve been having in the past few days might blow up into one huge, uncontrollable, irreversible breakdown.