time and waiting

Recently when I've been waking up in the morning I feel like I can't be bothered. For most people I expect that this is a routine feeling and I used to get it any time I had to wake up and go to work or awful tutorials when I was an undergraduate. But since I have been doing this masters I have had no reason to feel like that and for a long time I didn't. Getting up for classes was fine because it was interesting and the people were intelligent. My job was so good that I actually miss that it is over until September. If I had work for university to do I looked forward to it, like I was taking a step in the right direction and what I was doing had an end point and a reason that made me want to put in the effort. Somehow that has gradually dissolved and I awake feeling like I just want the new day to shut up. Stuart will always come and sit with me for a few minutes before he goes to work while I start to wake up. I love that he does that. But now these feelings of pointlessness are so strong that I begin to associate them with the whole experience.

I said to him the other day that maybe I'm not as happy as I make out. I feel like a manic depressive, but I don't know if it'd just that I have too much time on my hands. I've stopped feeling guilty if I don't do any work for my thesis for a week. I've stopped worrying that all I have done thus far isn't good enough. I've stopped putting myself down because I know my modesty is for others, not for me. I'm really fed up of being told just how good I am, how I'm the best degree in history in thirty years, and yet I have no funding. No-one wants to continue my career. I am rational and I know that I will probably get external funding but it's the fact that I know that the only reason I will is because my supervisors are creating a shit storm to do so. I hate that there are people in that university sitting in some meeting room discussing applicants and deciding that I don't get any. They are deciding to give the funding to their own students because that's what they want. I am not naive. I know of nepotism and favouritism and self-interest. But how can life be the way that you work as hard as you possibly can, you put in your all, every little bit that you have, and it's the best, you are told so, yet it is still just not enough. Why should I have to wait for another year. Another year. Another fucking year of my life wasted. And that truely is what it is, it wouldn't be a choice and opportunity and travel. I would have no money, I would have to get a job, I would be overqualified, I would work in some dead end retail pit of self-loathing and I would have to postpone all my plans, all of our plans. Another year in the city, another year of waiting for security and the ability to start everything. Call me selfish. Tell me there are people out there doing so much worse with much bigger problems. People in debt, people without jobs. I don't care. I worked as hard as I could and I always have. I've always put everything I had into this and picked up the slack for the countless morons who lazed and stopped and now it's all come to this, that still I won't be given it. Because of select individuals and because of administrative monopolies of influence. The worst thing though, the worst of all is that I know I am a pawn. I know I am playing piece to use for influence and faction within an institution that is changing. I know I represent control for other people and I am being used, tempted with career and academia. Why did I never hear back about that prize? Why is my dissertation article not published? Where are last semester's marks? What about Sicily? And why do you conspire to keep me at arms length. I'm not a fucking toy. You can't switch me off.

It's not the things that are happening that make me not want to get up, I'm no coward, I can deal with harsh realities. It's that you wont tell me. And like a child, I wait.

I feel so disconnected right now. I have no structure in my life. Apart from my brother's graduation, the three-day trip to London and a session to get my eyebrows waxed, I have literally nothing in my diary. And it's not because I can't keep a diary. This week for example, I have nothing I need to do. Not a single thing. I await news of a sort of friend who may come down. And even then I don't know the day. I went onto facebook this morning and saw a post from a friend. She's been in Copenhgen. I didn't even know that she was going. And she was my bridesmaid.

Life has become a choice between living it in people and living it in myself. If I live in people I have to brace myself for constant emotional turmoil. Being let down and stood upon like some piece of shit lying in the street. If I live in myself I choose solitude and career and I await my fate with nothing but my own time to keep me company. I am an innovative person, but filling all this time is hard. I know the idea of all this time off seems like a heaven to you. It always does when you don't have it.