fickle relationships

At the beginning of the week my niece in Cape Town asked me how my work was doing. I replied that I wasn't friends with my PhD any more. How ironic that I'm reverting to the key interpersonal relationship descriptor that 4-6 year old's use to describe my relationship with my PhD (albeit a process or eventually inanimate object, which of course is another problem). Well as a 5 year you fall out with your friends for the most trivial of things – they don't want to share their toys, they don't agree with what you are saying or what you want to do, you don't like that they are playing with someone else. And then you just call the whole friendship off - just like that! You're not my friend anymore! A day later, no a couple of hours later and hey, you're bestie's again. And so it goes on.

We at the moment, this seems the perfect way of describing my relationship with this process and inanimate, but larger than life friend, 'the PhD'. One minute I love (him or her? - it's definitely gendered just not sure which one yet!) and the next moment I'd rather (he/she) wasn't my friend at all. C'est la vie! I think this sensitivity about the friendship I have with my PhD is spilling over into my interpersonal relationships too. I'm on a very short lead at the moment, very sensitive and unable to tolerate much - it's almost like I just want to be on my own, working silently, in a room hidden from view, all by myself. The less I have to talk at random about my PhD and how it is going and what I have done and comment on what another student has or hasn’t done; all the better. Very fickle and tenuous it all seems at the moment. 

I submitted my research methodology chapter yesterday after some drama (naturally) as I'd been slightly ill with mild food poisoning. In retrospect being sick was ok, I had to slow down, nothing I could but wait for my body to recover and step back from working while this was all going on. So on Wednesday, which was the original deadline, I sat down and tried to do the best I could to iron out the some of the wrinkles on a very 'wrinkly' piece of work. On Saturday I knew, way before I got sick, that there were certain sections I just couldn't adequately deal with before the deadline. I accepted this fact in principle but in practice I was so panicked so much so that it was hard for me to work on the sections I could actually 'complete' – my brain and headspace completely fragmented and lacking focus. Ironic contradictions – a draft is never a draft worth submitting!