Anxiety, Loneliness, and Life Planning Revisited

I realise I’ve been very quiet the last few months, maybe the last half year. At first, it was because I was not doing well. It was too difficult for me to do anything beyond the necessary, and my online (creative) life was the first thing to go.

Since then I’ve been feeling better. Yay! The overwhelming lethargy has faded, the constant anxiety retreated to the background. Another piece of fantastic news is that I feel less lonely than I did before. I’m reaching out to people consciously, and their responses have been lovely. I am grateful for the awesome bunch of friends that I have, that make everything easier and more fun.

Why the return of my energy and excitement did not spell the return to my blogs and social media is something I have been thinking about. To be honest, I have not been feeling very much motivation to be on Twitter or blog constantly. Digging a little deeper, I think much of my online behaviour stemmed from loneliness. My online presence acted as a substitute for the companionship I was missing in “real” life. Now, I am more content with the social contacts I already have, and I don’t feel the need to search for more in the digital world.

Secondly, there has been another shift in my life. I’ll probably blog some more about this later and/or on Nyx Book Reviews. For years I had a clear idea who I was, who I wanted to be, and how to go about it. I was going to be an author, a writer of speculative fiction. I would graduate from university, and get a part-time job to pay the bills, and write.

I’ve graduated. But I have no inclination to write fiction.

To be very honest with you here, I feel out of touch with fiction books on a whole. I barely read them anymore, and when I do, they tend to leave me cold. This is a subject I would like to discuss in a separate post some day soon, because I find this quite interesting.

At first, that was disconcerting. If I wasn’t going to be an author now, what was I supposed to do with myself? Who would I be, without the SF/fantasy love? Without a book blog, Twitter parties, and readathons? Deciding what I want to do instead has been a journey, and one I still haven’t seen the end of. I’ve been following my interests, and am now pursuing a PhD position in line of my master’s thesis (in case you’re curious, it’s about penny dreadfuls and gender theory). I have always loved to learn, to discover, to think, and academic research ticks all those boxes in the best possible way.

Getting a PhD isn’t a very straightforward process, so I have been sending out emails, inquiring after possibilities, while working on strengthening my academic CV by rewriting my thesis into an article, and sending out paper proposals for conferences. It might take a while until I get a position, and in the meantime I’m tutoring high school kids to pay rent. It’s frustrating that now I know what I want to do, it might still take up to two years until I truly get to do it, but I’m trying not to get discouraged. I’ll get there eventually.