totally unmotivated (or, reaching a new mental low during the job search)

I’d planned to blog about the imposter phenomenon today, but it’s just going to have to wait until later in the week.

I have phone interview #5 tomorrow afternoon, and am totally stuck on preparing for it. I’ve been staring at a blank sheet of paper for 15 minutes and can’t think of any questions I want to ask the faculty interviewers tomorrow. Needless to say, this does not bode well for the interview itself.

Yes, I know I am burned out… believe me, I’ve been trying to just muddle through it for over a week now. I’m hoping that I’ll feel better after this week’s massage, haircut, and visit with a friend who is in town for a conference this week. Unfortunately all of these are scheduled after the phone interview, and thus cannot help me gear up for it.

I should feel excited about this interview because it’s with a great mid-sized state-funded university on the east coast. The teaching load is agreeable (3/3), and I’m starting to think that this would be a decent balance for me instead of all research all the time. We’d have our choice of airports, so Hubby would be able to keep his current job easily. Plus, we’d even be within a reasonable driving distance to a church of Hubby’s faith, something that will probably/definitely not happen anywhere else. From what I can tell over the internet, the community seems nice, but it’s just so urban/suburban. After 3 years in our mid-sized urban neighborhood, Hubby and I are definitely feeling the need to relocate to a place where we’d have more than 6 feet between our windows and our neighbors’ windows. I can’t definitively tell if this would be the case in the neighborhoods we can afford.

[Later]. I made up my list of questions. I’ll get through the interview and will take it as it comes.

I was just contacted for an informal “conference interview” (i.e., “If you will be at X conference later this week, we’d love to meet with you and talk about the position”). As it happens, I’m not going to the conference but live in the geographic area and can meet with them anyway. So I guess this means I could have two initial interviews this week instead of just one. At least I will have implemented my anti-burnout plan by the time the 2nd initial interview rolls around.

The bigger worry in this jumbled post… I am so burned out that I am totally unmotivated and am having trouble making myself work on much of anything at all. I can’t tell, however, if I’m just burned out after an extended high-stress period, or if this is leading to something worse (i.e., another episode of depression).

All I can make myself do is work on another couple of job applications…. one at a so-so college in my home state, and another at a small, strong college in another state. I am struggling to work on papers, even those that are nearly ready for submission. For example, my supervisor sent paper changes back to me over the weekend. For the most part they are pretty easy, yet today I have struggled to string together 2-3 coherent sentences about how we operationalized a particular construct. I certainly can’t make those sentences fit anywhere in the paper. Most of all… I just don’t *feel* like doing any of it.

What’s more is that I can’t tell if this is hormonal (e.g., PMDD-related, or due to the progesterone-only birth control pills I started taking 2 months ago) or situational. It’s probably both, but regardless, I can’t make it better if I don’t know what’s causing it.