Stress ~Rachel

I had a really horrific week last week due to unnecessary chaos surrounding my job and dissertation. I met with the chair of my dissertation committee to talk about everything…he, of course, was awesome and supportive and helpful. We decided on a timeline with lots of intermediate deliverables. That kind of structure and accountability, in general, will help me be successful. It will also help him enforce the fact that I’m a student first. When I emailed the plan to everyone, it wasn’t really received as well as I would have hoped. Only one person actually agreed to it…I haven’t heard from anyone else. I also had someone tell me he/she worked 70 hours per week in the last year of grad school to get everything done and that I should be putting a lot of time into my dissertation. Well, yes, I agree…but when you are donating a lot of time to a job, it’s tough to do that.

Let me tell you all something. I’m not willing to work 15 hours/week for my job plus 70 hours/week on my dissertation. I have a husband…and 2 dogs…and my health to worry about. I need to sleep…around 7-8 hours per night. I need to eat healthy…that means meal planning grocery shopping, prepping meals and cooking. I need to exercise…that means spending some time at the gym. I need to have down time…that means reading for fun, seeing friends and family, and watching tv. I need to be a wife to Dave…that means actually communicating with him, instead of only having conversations with my computer screen.

My plan is to defend in early/mid September at the latest. If I can under promise and over deliver, I’ll be happy. So will everyone else for that matter. After all, the best dissertation is a done dissertation.

Anyways, the stress didn’t end there. My work laptop went kaplooey right before a seminar on Tuesday. I spent the rest of the morning and afternoon waiting for the IT guys to fix it but they were understaffed and couldn’t get to it. So I handed it over to them and left for the day around 3:30pm. I’ll pick it on Tuesday. However, in order for me to do my job and my dissertation, I needed to have my statistical software up and running on a laptop. So instead of selling the refurbished replacement laptop Dell just sent me for my other laptop that died (that happened in mid-December), Dave got it up and running with everything I need. Looks like I’ll be holding on to that laptop until my dissertation is done. Just in case.

The stress didn’t end there either! Let’s just say that the unnecessary chaos continued with my job. There was a lot of me yelling this week. Dave didn’t quite know what to do with me.

I’ve decided to set my boundaries and stick to them. I’ve decided to stop emailing with the people who make my life a living hell. I’ll email what I have to and let them dig their own holes because they don’t pay attention to things. My dissertation chair told me to stop the codependent relationship with my job and the people I work for. I am going to do just that!

So this weekend I enjoyed a night with friends playing A Game of Thrones card game, an evening with Dave and his Mom at the restaurant where we held our rehearsal dinner, and I took care of my emails so that I didn’t feel completely overwhelmed when I turned on my computer.

It’s time I get things under control and take back my life.

And since this is mostly a weight loss blog, let me end this whiny post with this: Even with the obscene amount of stress I dealt with this week, I still ate healthy, counted all my points (and stayed within what I was allowed to eat), and tracked everything. That includes dinner out from my now favorite restaurant…cracklin’ pork shank, blue cheese grits, sauteed spinach, pear brown betty and a piece of fudge. It was the best pork I’ve ever had in my life. That pear brown betty was pretty awesome too. And it didn’t even break the points bank because I had saved so many of my weeklies.

Weigh in was Thursday morning…I was down 1.2lbs.

We’ll see what this Thursday brings 🙂