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It seems as if my life revolves around discipline and patience these days.  I wake up in a foggy haze with the most prominent expression of movement in my mind being, don’t move.  There is no chipper welcoming of the day or bouncing out of bed to grab coffee and begin what needs to be done. Maybe I’m becoming depressed.  I took a weekend away from working.  All the way up until Sunday night at 7pm.  And I want another solid month.  I took a month off when I returned from Africa.  I’ve been working again for 3 months and I want another month off.  I can’t tell if getting a PhD is unusually stressful (or if I’m in a particularly stressful stage of mine), or if I hate what I’m doing.  There are a lot of thoughts that surface regularly that this is not the right path for me.  But I’m fixed solid, it feels, in the middle of a situation I would have to completely upend in order to change it.  Maybe a lot of people feel that way about their lives at some point.  Maybe there are times in each person’s life when getting out of bed in the morning becomes an exercise in discipline, and discipline is what’s available to live in a life that feels too complicated.  Maybe patience and acceptance are all we have to get to the next lighter place.

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