u/mullet_frizz

My phd is finished. Thank God. I still however need to defend in June. I don't really know how to express this except being completely honest and letting it pour out. I feel extremely burned out and depleted. Like my divine spark and drive has been sucked out of me. My family say my supervisors drained everything out of me that I had to give. Like a parasite. I know they are right. I am a different person on the flip side of this. I just can't seem to regenerate energy? I am not overweight - go to the gym, eat relatively healthy, don't drink or smoke, work outside part time. What is the source of this depletion? Is it the burning hatred I feel for my supervisor? Is it that you're never really finished because you still have to jump through the hoops and bend to the will of the reviewers to get my thesis chapters published? Is it the bitterness at my past self's naivety and lack of prospects for us? I sleep and bedrot and travel and golf - anything to rejuvenate and inspire but I feel like I'm trying to draw water from an empty well. I'm starting a postdoc soon (different lab obvs lol) so will just be stuck in the same paradigm except with more responsibilities. I meet with friends from the PhD and they are stressed and looking for jobs. I see pics on LinkedIn of others from my cohort with their supervisors smiling and feel jealousy that they had such a supportive and immersive experience. I don't know why anyone would want to do a phd and subject themselves to pure torture. No amount of talk therapy or ssris would right the wrongs my supervisors inflicted. No quantity of citations or LinkedIn followers would make me feel less dead inside or that academia is a worthwhile pursuit. What a waste of my time and energy. Only small win is not letting my supervisor bully me out of the project like he did with several others and everyone in the department and country even knows what he's like now - I made sure of it. How such truly deplorable and evil pieces of sh1t wind up in positions of authority over vulnerable young adults is definitely not an accident.

Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhh I hate it :( 64 phone pick ups today. This shit is psychotic.

I got spun back up into the daily coffee cycle thinking I needed it for productivity in the way that it makes staring at a screen for 8 hours when it's sunny outside tolerable. Have cut it out now for a week and have been having extremely intense and vivid dreams where I am remembering every detail. I definitely think there's more to coffee specifically than meets the eye.

If you read the book "the Devil's cup" you learn that coffee originated from the Muslim world. When coffee spread from the Middle East into Europe (around the 1500s–1600s), some people--especially in Christian Europe--were wary of it:
-It came from Yemen and Turkey and was considered "foreign" or "exotic".
-Some clergy thought it might be morally corrupting or even linked to non-Christian practices.
-In the book, locals use coffee as part of a ritual.
I think it is self-explanatory that the majority of us in the western world do not find Islamic practices tasteful. It's not the most enjoyable read but I need to remind myself of the origins of coffee.

Apart from frying your hormonal system I am personally beginning to believe it opens portals to spirits the way other hallucinogens or psychedelics do or maybe even blocks our connection to the Divine.