…and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

At some previous point, I stated that the intent of this blog was to chronicle my experiences as an academic with ADD. For some reason, it seems that everything I’ve written recently has been about our wedding, not academic life!

From one perspective, academia is a life-encompassing choice. When I decided to embrace the identity of academic, I knew I wasn’t just choosing a career. Deciding to become an academic also means that one’s career is inevitably connected to one’s life and vice versa. As a developmental scientist, I view marriage as just one of those life transitions that inevitably impacts the rest of life. Getting & being married definitely impacts my work & my identity as an academic as a whole. I don’t necessarily see a clear division between my work and this aspect of my life. Naturally, it could just be my tangential ADD-type thinking that has led me to this conclusion.

From another perspective, me writing about our wedding is just fluff, and nobody really cares anyway. Get to the good stuff, Addled!

Regardless of your perspective, please let me state for the record… the wedding stuff is almost entirely over. Aside from stating now that our professional pictures have been formatted on DVD, which Hubby’s mom will send to us via snailmail tomorrow. Beyond posting a link to these pictures, I anticipate just one more entry reflecting on the whole experience following our stateside reception, which will occur in two weeks. That’s it!

Without further ado, here is the planned entry about academic life & ADD.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an announcement requesting diaries from this year’s batch of academic job seekers. I hyperfocused for a few enjoyable hours while preparing my submission. Naturally it’s about my looming job search, starting with my experiences the last time I was on the market (pre-diagnosis), continuing on to my anticipated assets & constraints this time around. As this is clearly relevant to my blog, I’d post it here now, except that could lead to plagiarism concerns. I will link to this submission if they choose to publish it (under a pseudonym, of course), or will post it here myself if rejected.

In other news, the job market madness has now started in earnest. There are now officially 18 jobs for which I will apply between now and December 1. I expect that number to climb substantially during the next two months. The jobs are primarily in psychology departments, at universities and colleges of varying sizes, and are located from coast to coast. There’s a good mix, and hubby and I are pretty excited about some of them. But please let me reiterate yet again… to have so many ads posted so early is quite unusual. Usually the postings don’t begin to pop up like weeds until after Labor Day (maybe this is another effect of global warming?). I’m not complaining about the early start, because later postings make it harder on applicants to get their full packets to the search committees on time. It’s always better to be early than to be late… and as I know I have to worry about at least one letter writer being late with her materials, I’d better get my apps in as early as I can.

True to form, I’d intended to start revising my materials directly after returning home from the wedding. This hasn’t happened yet. I have revised outlines on my hard drive at work, deadlines set with colleagues who are also working on their materials, but am still procrastinating. Why can’t I hyperfocus on this important task instead of on cheap J. Crew dresses on eBay?

Last but not least, I’ve already restricted my profiles on sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook to friends only. Just as a reminder, my blog will become much more anonymous the night before I mail that first job application in approximately another month. All personal pictures & the remaining identifying details will be removed. Although I don’t list my blog on my vita, I don’t want to run the risk that somebody on a search committee will find it accidentally or on purpose. I can’t anticipate how search committee members might react to learning that I’ve struggled with depression & am being actively treated for ADD. I can’t think that it would help my prospects. It’s always just better to be proactive and cautious.

last day at work before the wedding

It’s my last day at work before I depart for the wedding. Notice I wrote “at work” and not “working,” because I’m not actually doing that so much lately. Oh well. Good thing my boss is at a conference overseas, and I doubt anybody will “tell” on me once I get back because they’re all slacking too!

In essence, my office has become the place where I drop my bag while I run to an appointment (e.g., shrink for med management), or while I’m on the way to purchase something else we need (e..g, makeup from the pharmacy down the street, or wedding presents from the shop around the corner). I’m not actually getting any work done here.

Lately I’ve been rolling in closer to 10 and escaping closer to 4, if not earlier. I’ve been gone before 3.30 for the last two days in a row. I left around 2 on Tuesday because I had a list of shopping that required I drive out to a mall 16 miles from the house. I left at 3 on Wednesday because I had a major tension headache from clenching my teeth. I think this was the result of Tuesday’s shopping trip (plus overall stress plus ritalin); I brought home 4 bags and the contents of 3 of them will go back to the stores tonight or tomorrow morning. I had a massage this morning. Aside from the fact that my therapist looked like she’d spent some time in prison, it was enjoyable. It helped but not nearly enough. I still feel somewhat relaxed but also a little sleepy and just…weird. I can honestly say that my back muscle spasms are the worst they have ever been, and consequently I now have a membership at our local Massage Envy franchise. Amazingly, with a membership, it’s cheaper to go there than it was at the rec center at Big Rural Alma Mater.

I’m stressed now about family stuff: I just realized this morning that my mom & grandma, brother & friend, dad, grandpa, uncle and uncle’s uninvited girlfriend will arrive within 6 hours of each other. Mom & grandma land at 7.30, brother 3 & his travel friend land at 9.30, and dad, grandpa, uncle & girlfriend will arrive at 11.30. Hubby, Brother 2 & his fiance will all arrive the next day. Although this does not sound like a problem, anybody familiar with the history of planning this wedding will know why I’m alarmed (there are too many posts about the wedding to add individual links, so it’s better just to look at posts with the “weddings” tag). In a nutshell, I’m not sure it’s such a great idea to try to put all these people in the same room together, WITHOUT my hubby along to help me keep everything in perspective. Keep in mind that I will be staying at my mom-in-law’s house, with her and Hubby’s brother 2, and that the three of us will be the only non-jetlagged people in this equation. Not a pretty picture, huh? At least if things get bad I can retreat to hubby’s old bedroom and hide under the duvet. Or I could just escape (thank SCIENCE I know sufficient Danish and enough of København to get around by myself), although that would be truly cruel to my sweet mom- and bro-in-law.

Trying to destress….trying really hard to destress… in a little over a week, it will all be over, and life can get back to normal.

pre-wedding anxiety dream

As a psychologist, I don’t “buy into” dream analysis. All in all, I think it’s crap, because I subscribe to the theory that dreams are the product of random neuronal firings. Our neurons get active in weird ways while we sleep, and our brains try to make sense of it by building a story around it.

Last night I dreamed that it was the night before the wedding, but I was already dressed. All of my hubby’s Scandinavian relatives were staying in the same house with us. The house was totally surrounded by water, and the cats went swimming in it for koi-like goldfish and what appeared to be deep-fried shrimp. While swooshing around the house in my entire wedding ensemble and trying to get the cats out of the water, I suddenly remembered that I’d neglected to buy Christmas presents for hubby’s younger brother, and that I still had data that needed to be analysed. I plunked myself down a table in order to crunch some numbers on my laptop, when hubby’s big brother came by and said “You’re doing that wrong… you need to analyse the covariance matrix instead of the raw data” [keep in mind, IRL, hubby's big brother is in business management, not statistics!]. He then sat down and proceeded to modify my data file and do my analyses for me. In the meantime, hubby came by and started whining about my eye makeup and veil. It seems that he didn’t want me to wear my veil at all, and that big brother also had some ideas about my eye makeup [NO IDEA where that one came from.... big brother is married, has 2 beautiful kids, and to my knowledge, has never worn eye makeup!]. At this point of the dream, I locked myself into the room where all the Scandinavian aunts and girl cousins were also getting ready. Hubby knocked and banged on the door, pleading with me to come out and get married. Yet, when I opened the door, his brother still had his ideas about my eye makeup…

At this point I forced myself to wake up, thank goodness. Some of the details make me laugh a little bit (the eye makeup, and that I can’t get away from data analysis, even in my sleep). Others are just weird. For example, my hubby is one of the most easy-going guys in the world, and has no preference about whether I wear a veil or not. He just prefers that I don’t wear it over my face when I walk down the aisle. As I’m already pretty clumsy, wearing a layer of netting over my face for a ritual walk seems like a very bad idea. He’s also been a little fussy (or in his words, “fuzzy”) about the processional and recessional marches, but certainly not to the degree that I’d lock myself in a room and not come back out.

I guess it’s all just stress and my brain trying to play tricks on me.

a little too much ritalin turns me into one of “those” brides…

Yesterday was the last day I will try the extended-release ritalin. The dose is too low to work yet I still get really anxious. Not just a little jittery anxious, but full-on OCD-like anxious that just doesn’t occur when I take instantaneous-release ritalin. I was not only unable to make a decision about how to deal with some data, but I also obsessed about the wedding for the entire day. Being unable to divert my attention from attempting perfection in work and the wedding was the overall theme of the day.

Somehow I got it into my head that it would be a good idea to do welcome bags for all the out-of-town guests. I purchased 40 clear gift bags and a pound of loose tea before I could stop myself. I emailed Jan’s brother about helping me on this project. I ordered cards, stickers and envelopes to hold the teabags I was going to assemble myself. A few hours later I returned to sanity, realizing that doing welcome bags is out of the question when I can’t even decide how to deal with data I’ve been working with for 5+ years, and when I can’t figure out how to get a prepaid Danish simcard for my phone before my arrival. canceled the order for cards, stickers and envelopes. The tea and gift bags had already been shipped by this point. Good thing that both my sister-in-law and I both like rooibos tea, because we’re going to have a lot of it for quite some time! 40 clear plastic gift bags will be harder to use, but use them we shall nonetheless. We’re still going to make a schedule and maps for all the guests, but are going to mail them to their houses next week.

Yet despite this resolution to relax about the wedding and just go with whatever makes the most practical sense, I still found myself at Michael’s, struggling to decide whether to spend $10 or $1 on spools of ribbon to tie around the bundles of birdseed. After 5 minutes of hemming and hawing, I finally was able to shout at myself “IT DOESN’T MATTER. It’s just ribbon, and the guests will only see it for the 2 minutes they have the birdseed bundles in hand.” Naturally, being the thrifty woman I am, I ended up going with 2 spools of periwinkle ribbon (the $1 option). They don’t match anything else, but too bad.

I will be so glad when the wedding is over, and when my medication will become a routine. I will get my brain and my energy back!

On an entirely different topic, I’ve decided to change my blog in three key ways for the future. First, my blog will be “sanitized” instead of making it entirely inaccessible during my academic job search. Over the next two months, I will (at least temporarily) remove all of my potentially-identifying information. If you noticed the new title, then you noticed that I’ve already started in this effort! Second, I’m also going to attempt to make it more about academia, the academic job search, and where appropriate, academia and ADD. This will naturally be easier once the wedding is over. Finally, I’m going to try to use more pictures because it just makes everything a little more fun. See, I’ve already started working toward this goal, too!

it seemed like a good idea at the time

I noticed I had split ends within days of my last haircut, but have been obsessing about them for the last week or so. It’s gotten to the point that I trim them off at work because I hate noticing them out of the corner of my eye. They also tickle my neck, which drives me absolutely crazy. I’ve planned to wear my hair up for the wedding, but down as always at all other wedding events. Split ends do not look nice, and I was starting to be bothered by the fact that my hair would look like crap for most of the wedding events.

So last night I decided to take matters into my own hands and did a home treatment in order to fix, mask, or prevent the annoying things. I decided to follow a recipe I found on the internet (Mix 1 tsp honey with 2 Tbsp olive oil, then beat in 1 egg yolk. Massage on hair in small sections. Wrap head with shower cap for 30 minutes. Rinse and shampoo).

Being a thrify girl, I opted to save my olive oil for my cooking, and chose to use the end of a small bottle of lemon-infused safflower oil instead. I added 2 t of honey to the bottle, plopped the bottle into some hot water to soften the honey. I skipped the egg yolk, thinking that if I made a mistake it might be embarassing to explain to the plumber why our shower drain was clogged with cooked eggs. I used less than half of the mixture on my hair and let it sit for 30 minutes. My cats sniffed my hair a lot during this time, but didn’t try to eat it, per their usual nightly routine.

When 30 minutes was up, I rinsed, and rinsed, and rinsed, but the sticky-slick mixture didn’t want to leave my tresses. I toweled my hair dry, only to notice that it looked like I’d never rinsed it at all. Two shampoos later, my hair still felt oily and I could still smell a little bit of lemon. I wrapped a towel around my pillow before going to bed, in the hopes that I wouldn’t ruin our brand-new pillowcases.

I took another shower and washed my hair for the 4th time in 24 hours this morning. Lo and behold, all the oil washed out this time around. I skipped conditioner, and was more careful with combing, blowdrying and curling. An inspection at the office revealed fewer noticible split ends but overall substantially duller color. So it did what it was supposed to, but still doesn’t seem to have done much good for my hair. I have a feeling that today will end up as a ponytail day after all!

40 more days until life returns to normal, and I will be able to cut my hair properly!

“The only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity.”

Henri Bergson (French Philosopher, 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature, 1859-1941)

weekly update

Argh. I’d spent a half hour writing a post and the server timed out. Annoying, as the post and the half hour are completely lost. This post will consequently be much shorter than the original!

In what is hopefully the final installment of the AWOL psychiatrist… there was resolution on this issue on Thursday and Friday last week. I spoke to the psychiatrist with whom I do CBT (cognitive-behavioral therapy), and she interceded with her supervisor on my behalf. He contacted my med-managing shrink, who called me that night and said it was okay if I wanted my CBT-shrink to manage my meds until the time she returns to town (I already knew why she was gone — her mom has cancer and they don’t know how much time she has left). So that’s what’s happened. My dosage was increased on Friday, and thank goodness I can already see a little difference. Working yesterday was way easier than last week, and I’m not feeling my usual monthly downturn in mood thus far, with one small exception.

The exception is in relation to the wedding. Even though we’ve sent out the invitations to the religious ceremony, there’s still a big part of me that just doesn’t want to bother with all this any more. My heart just isn’t in it, no matter how hard I try to get back into it. Now it just feels like something very expensive that we need to endure (something like surgery?). I know that I’ll go through with it for hubby and our families, mostly because this ball’s already rolling down the hill and it’s too late to stop it. But I don’t really feel like doing much if any of it. I’m not looking forward to my shower, and I’m dreading having to put up with all the awkward parental interactions at the ceremony and reception. Part of me feels like I always knew this was going to be a problem and that it was stupid to even try to have a wedding (just knowing that there’s been so much conflict about it just makes the whole event still feel poisoned). It’s not that I’m trying to be a stick in the mud, a martyr, or a spoilsport. It’s just been a bad situation and extra stress that I haven’t needed, and I just still feel bad about it. True to CBT form, I keep trying to examine my automatic thoughts about it and keep trying to reframe them, but they seem like very small weapons against such crushing feelings.

Back to work for me… until later!

wedding conflict part 2

Thanks, Melissa, Ben, Dan and Derek for your posts/phone calls of support… I really appreciate it, and feel very lucky to have good friends/family…

(BTW, Dan, I’m not mad at mom… I’m just sad that this even has to be called a situation…)

So the drama just continues…So on Wednesday I spent 90 minutes writing a 4 paragraph email to my mom, telling her that she needed to get some help, because her issues with my dad are messing with the rest of us. Granted, this was written in a rather convoluted Kristin-like style, so it was probably not the best sample of my written prose…

For years, I’ve been asking and telling her not to put me in the middle between my dad and her. What I mean by asking and telling is everything between polite requests and screaming at the top of my lungs. We’ve probably fought more about this than anything else, and I still get stuck in the middle.  I get stuck in the middle often for various reasons, ranging from spiteful remarks behind his back to her friends to permitting her requests on the kids’ behalf, as requests on her own behalf will fall on deaf ears. Regardless of the motive of the action, these acts are hurtful, sort of like little shishkebab skewers to the heart.  Whenever we go rounds about this issue, she agrees to stop doing it, does better for a little while, slips up, then blames the slip-up on external factors. Repeat from beginning, over and over again.

I know that this cycle is because she’s not over it. But going through this cycle DOESN’T make any of it any better. Bitching to us about our dad just makes us kids feel bad. Bitching to her friends embarasses her friends and us. End result is the same… nobody ever feels good after these conversations, and no growth occurs as a result. This doesn’t surprise me, because I know even as a non-counseling psychologist, that contemporary psychotherapy tends to spend very little time focused on what the client/patient perceives to be the cause of the problem. Focusing the cause often doesn’t do anybody any good — it doesn’t give the client/patient any insight, and often just makes them feel worse. Anybody who sees a therapist in this day and age probably partakes in what’s called CBT, or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The gist of this is to help clients uncover and change their automatic thoughts, through changes in purposeful thinking and through their behavior. It sounds simple, but it works… change the way you think and the way you act, and your brain changes, too (I admit to being a nerd… I think this is REALLY cool). Don’t change your thoughts or your behavior… and you get whatever you’ve been getting, and perhaps it even gets worse.

So, anyway, the gist of this email was telling her that what she’s doing now isn’t working… she hasn’t moved on, and at least some of this strife could have been minimized if she were further along in the grieving process. Some CBT-like skills training could also help her deal with some of this stuff (hopefully with the net result being that she’ll feel better and the kids will get fewer heart-shishkabobs).  This email was sent entirely out of concern for her wellbeing… because reacting this way to something that’s actually quite small isn’t a sign of psychological health.

The email I received back in turn was another overreaction, with additional oversharing on her behalf… details that don’t need to replicated here.

When I replied to the effect that I sent that prior message out of concern, not anger or frustration (although by now I am pretty frustrated), she replied that a friend had given her the name and number of a therapist (hooray!) and that she was overwhelmed and had to think. I haven’t heard anything since.  This is okay with me, because I don’t think I could do a phone call right now.

Friday morning, I received an email from my dad with an attachment… turns out my mom sent her letter after all on Tuesday. I’d requested to be left out of it, but that definitely did not happen in the letter. It’s all my mom’s interpretation of our Sunday conversation and the emails from earlier in the week… which contradicts what I actually feel/believe. It’s her feelings, disguised as my opinion. In a nutshell, it’s all my dad’s fault.

About 20 minutes later, I finally went into my therapy appointment with Dr. Susan and talked through the whole thing (yes, I have a therapist, and don’t think I could have gotten through the on-again/off-again depression I’ve had for the last couple of months without her help. I tried taking an antidepressant but it made me really grumpy and sick to my stomach. Plus, I already take Strattera, which seems to have an unfortunate side effect during the PMS-ey time of the month. I can focus okay during this time but primarily on how crappy I feel. Not so good!).  In a nutshell, Dr. Susan agreed with my assessment that this is not a sign of optimal health, and supported my urging my mom for help. She could also see that I’m at the end of my rope with being put in the middle. She even had a name for it, one that I knew but never would have applied to my own situation. She said that this is called “parentification” — it’s any situation in which there’s a role-reversal between kids and parents. I’d only heard it applied to situations in which parents rely on kids to do instrumental-type tasks (e.g., asking the eldest kid to babysit the youngest, clean the house, prep dinner, etc.).  This is not a good thing in the long run. She told me not to be too hard on myself — it started back when I was 11 or 12, and kids can’t be expected to set up boundaries with their parents when they are that age, and yes, kids in this situation have increased odds of depression later in life. But, they also tend to have better conflict-negotiation skills and overly-developed empathy.

It will be an uphill battle to change this behavior, but it has to be done because I know I can’t take many more shishkebabs. They just hurt too much, and make me feel like I’m making backward progress when dealing with my own stuff. This is so hard for me because it’s pretty normal for the parentified-kid to feel at least partially responsible for this situation. If  I’d just set boundaries sooner, maybe she’s have sought help sooner. Although I’m trying really hard not to, I just feel like a horrible person because I had to be the one to tell my mom that she needs help. I hate hurting peoples’ feelings, especially the feelings of people I care about. I keep trying to focus on the goal, that a little bit of hurt is worth it if she gets where she needs to go, but it still doesn’t feel good to make somebody else hurt.

I talked to my dad on Friday, and he’s worried about my mom’s mental health, too. My dad plans to try to meet my mom for coffee this weekend to talk with her independently. I’m glad he’s taking a part, because I don’t know how much more Danny or I could take independently.

Dr. Susan is strongly urging me to delay making a decision about the wedding, so we’re delaying on this… the invites are in a box on our dining room table for the time being. Jan (a.k.a. the sweetest hubby in the world) knows how to break things down into steps for me so I don’t get so overwhelmed.  Today he suggested sorting them into piles so we’d be ready when I feel like mailing them. I’d already done that, so now he wants to go buy the postage. We can stick the stamps on the envelopes, and then just drop them in the mailbox when the time is right.  I’m still not ready… but maybe in another week or two. Maybe by then everything won’t feel like it’s been poisoned by all this conflict.