I'm puzzled by my current circumstances. I thought finishing my degree and freeing up my time would give me a new lease on life. Instead, I feel like I'm floundering around because I don't have semesters and coursework and deadlines to ground me.
It's ridiculous! It took me a couple weeks to notice exactly what the problem was. I went back to work full-time mid-July, so I am still dealing with a good bit of fatigue from the long days, but I figured I'd be able to do things I enjoy. What happens is I come home from work, make some food (the time involved and degree of difficulty are wholly dependent on my level of fatigue on any given day), and find something to do.
The "find something to do" part is when I choke. For example: feeling like I ought to relax, I try to stay away from my computer. I'll take a book and sit on my porch, read a few pages, and then I get this creeping feeling that there's something "bigger" I should be doing. For the past two and a half years, yeah, there's been something bigger—grad school. Before that, it was college. Before that, it was high school.. and so on.
Perhaps this nagging feeling I have is a side-effect of having been in school for the last 18 years. The only other time in my life that I haven't been a student was the seven month stint immediately following my undergraduate career. (This excludes the time before kindergarten.) I hope to be a student again next fall, in a Ph.D. program to my liking. Right now I'm trying to decide where to apply. Next I'll fill out applications and try to secure a teaching assistantship. But until next fall, I have a problem... I'm not a student.
I have hobbies: writing, knitting, reading, biking, yoga, walking and training my dog. But how do "normal" people just do hobbies? Don't they feel like there's something more important they should be doing? (I mean that in the nicest way possible.) I don't think hobbies are a waste of time; I just wish I felt more comfortable doing them. That sounds horrible, but it's true. I think I'm wound too tight right now...
Currently I'm a cog in the workforce who comes home exhausted. (For now.) I have no scheduled activities or due dates (outside of bills to pay). I plan to stay at my job for the next year (unless, inconceivably, it gets more unbearable) so I seem to have found a sort of stasis. I'm making new friends (though I'd like more) and I'm trying to become more active (because I turned practically sedentary since my surgery... it still hurts sometimes). I feel less relaxed now, though, than I did when I was a full-time student and worked full-time. How is this possible?!
Maybe I just need to develop a schedule for myself. I don't know if that'll work, but I should at least give it a try. After all, it can't make me any crazier than I feel right now without one. I've even considered working through a reading list just so I feel like I have something academic on my plate. (Lord knows I'm terrified about mental attrition because I've worked so hard and paid so much to learn what I know!)
If anything, this experience has proven to me the old cliché about asking a busy person to do something because they'll find a way to fit it in. I am a little terrified, though, to know that I'm somehow happier when my activity level is maxed out.
I have this trouble every summer, so I line up projects for myself: a new paper to write, a conference, a summer course, _something_. My wife tells me that I have a harder time adjusting to this change than anyone she knows. I think you need a schedule, at least for a while, and then you can find the fun of breaking it every now and then (just like cutting class :) )
I sometimes feel guilty when I have unstructured time, because there should always be something productive to do, right?
In the past few years, I've started training myself to aspire to such accomplishments as getting nine hours of sleep, or watching a movie for pleasure. Those are in the rotation now, but I do have to plan for them, which means achieving them really does feel like an accomplishment.
I can certainly identify with the awareness that the next semester always comes with a new set of concrete deadlines and priorities, and even the week I sent reading AP English exams was a bit disorienting, since there was no way I could catch up or work ahead outside of regular office hours.
Thanks--both of you--for confirming that I'm not crazy. This lack of structure seems totally foreign to me but then I consider that what structure we have in our lives is either imposed (laws, whether of nature or humanity) or chosen (like my love for school). It's not foreign; I just haven't experienced it for a long, long time.
And yes, sometimes I'm haunted by the guilt of not being productive. What do I have to show for the last two hours? I ask myself. Well, sometimes lately it's a few episodes of LOST checked off and sometimes it's more knowledge about a PhD program I'm considering... but lately my accomplishments are a little less tangible and I think I'm struggling with that too.