Some days just make you want to curl up and cry

[shapeofthings]

Bad days are never pleasant, and I know it could be worse but I've been rather fragile of late and today has knocked me for six. I'm sitting at my desk during lunch break and trying hard not to cry. The combination of being unwell, lingering depression and stress I was finely balancing has been overloaded with the sudden appearance of more work and more stress.

The conference people emailed me today requesting major edits on my paper for next month's conference. Their comments were fair enough - I didn't really give enough supporting statistical data for my conclusions. It's kinda hard when you're summarising three 30 page documents from a major research project into a six page paper (including references). It's also kind of hard when you didn't do the study, the people who did do it have left the work unit and all the statistical analysis was conducted by a CSIRO mathemetician we hired in and goes way beyond my university statistical knowledge. *deep breath*. Ok, I coped with that. A little extra stress and the loss of my precious weekend to trying to wrap my head around the stats and re-write the paper.


Then the Project of Doom struck. I'd finally got my head around the project, got consensus from all involved parties on what we were trying to acheive and had my draft process approved. I was working on the details and supporting documentation, to be finished this week, and really nutting it out until half an hour ago I recieved an email...

The policy staff have gone and changed what they want out of the project again, removing several of their most recent addition requests and putting back in stuff they told me to take out 2 weeks ago! It'll take me the rest of the day to get my head around what they want now and then I have to go back and re-write the supporting documentation to match the new process. Oh, and this project is supposed to be finalised by the end of the month (before I go on holidays). Now I'm going to have it hanging over my head while I'm in Melbourne and I'm going to have to dedicate time to it that should be spent on other tasks, putting me even further behind schedule than I already am. This means all preparation for the Launceston conference will now have to be done in my own time, deadlines are going to get awfully close and free time is going to be sparse right when I'm needing it most.

I'm so stressed and frustrated and goddamn depressed. Life should not be lived this way!

*deep breaths* I'll be fine - I just really need to vent right now. I'm already developing a coping strategy, I just need to let the bad stuff out. And I need a hug :-(