irritated and panicked

That's how I feel at the moment. How I've been feeling for the past few days. Just irritated and irritated with all things, but mostly the freaking PhD. I just want to enjoy the experience - really that is all I want but it feels like the whole freaking world is conspiring again this wish of mine.

Of course this isn't the whole story, it never is - I can't tell the whole story, the whole story only plays itself out in my mind at 1 or 2am at night when I can't fall asleep because my brain won't shut down with all the thoughts, ideas,anxieties running through it. I'm thinking about deadlines - the small little deadlines, like writing up a draft case study due on Thursday - and the big one, writing a thesis of 80 000 word by September 2012. The deadlines and its weight press down on my chest and I feel like I can't breath. Of course my rational self says, "take it one step at a time, once you get going you will be fine...this too will pass". But my rational self is having an immense battle with this other irrational, irritated and panicked self, practically paralysed by the deadlines and the amount of work that still needs doing. I just so much want to enjoy this whole process and the more I don't enjoy it the more pressure I put on myself to enjoy it and the more critical I get at myself for not freaking enjoying it. Oh how I am my worse enemy.

Anyway - psychosis aside - I've just completed my first coding cycle of about 60 documents. Tedious and at times monotonous but interesting and affirming - connecting me back to my fieldwork, the participants, the sounds, smells, the texture of that context. My categories need refinement, they need to be sharper, more precise, clearer and strangely I'm looking forward to doing that. To finding the story I want to tell. But the deadlines, the freaking deadlines and me wanting to do everything right the first time...working against me. My rational self is saying, " take it easy, you know what you need to do, write the freaking case study, write what you have at the moment, it doesn't have to be perfect, you just have to get it down, your thinking at this point in time". Yeah, yeah rational self I hear you.