By recognising that “freaking out” doesn’t actually have the power to harm me. But that will sound flippant, like I’m saying “to solve your problem, I would simply not have emotions”. That’s not what I’m saying. In the short term, you’re stuck with your habits. That takes a while to change. There’s no magic incantation I can utter that will cause you to stop habitually being anxious. It’s just that you should take the contents of your mind less seriously.
I’ve used the analogy ITT before of a dog barking at a thunderstorm. If you could educate the dog, you would talk to it about the nature of weather patterns, i.e. that they are transient and that there’s a very dubious relationship between sound and fury and any real danger. The sense that there is real danger comes from this notion - common among people like you and I who live in our heads a lot - that what we are is the contents of our minds. This is not true. What you are is the body sat in a chair or whatever, reading this, in absolutely no danger whatsoever. Even if the worse happened and, I don’t know, I am having trouble even making up a bad scenario, but you got fired. So what? You’re an educated person, with plenty to fall back on. You’re hardly going to starve.
This whole notion that you need to somehow defeat your anxiety grants it a power it does not possess. You can just wait and it will, at some point, go away. This might require you to feel unpleasant in the meantime, but that’s it.
I just ignore my anxiety most of the time as well but it can be difficult when it comes with physical symptoms - I get a very sensitive gag reflex and will start retching for no reason, I will start getting heartburn and diarrhea, cognitively I won’t perform as well.
It’s treatable - anti anxiety meds are super effective. I don’t take them because I don’t like the side effects and I’ve managed to keep my stress under control in the last year or two.
Today I was thinking about how terrible it must be for Trump to keep catching rabbits that never satisfy him.
There’s an old video of Matt Damon talking about winning an Oscar at such a young age. He says he felt blessed to realize how fucked it would have been for him to be 80 before he got his first Oscar…and to look back on all the people he fucked over to get it, only to realize it was never going to make him whole.
Or this moment from the Justice League cartoon where Superman is transported to a dark future where Vandal Savage defeated the Justice League and destroyed the entire planet. Wiped out all of humanity and now rules a barren husk.
As a supervillain, he finally accomplished his ultimate goal but then experienced how empty the achievement truly was. For a time, he considered building a spaceship and seeking out other worlds to conquer and destroy, but just like Matt Damon, Vandal says that if that’s a hole in your soul, no amount of genocide will ever complete you.
That was basically what drove me out. There’s real pressure to pass everyone because of budget cuts and they figured that out. Also millennials.
I’ll share one story that doesn’t even involve me because it’s so incredible. I still had inside contacts at the department I had graduated from and started hearing about this new student that was causing a lot of problems. Some of his behavior was extremely bizarre. Anyway, it was relayed to me that he pulled almost exactly what you’re describing: challenging every grade with threats of filing complaints with the ombud. One faculty member called his bluff and they finally met with the university ombud, who ended up taking a swing at this kid.
There has to be some kind of power structure though. Students don’t get to challenge and contest every point deduction otherwise it’s just not going to work. What I tried to do is protect myself by knowing all of the rules and policies extremely well so I’d be prepared for those situations if they came up.
Have you ever met the people in a graduate quant department? A decent percentage are just incredibly eccentric. I only saw this guy a couple times and never interacted with him, but they told me he would roam the halls making strange animal noises and also demand that professors use the color of dry-erase marker that he preferred in class. He may have threatened violence too, can’t remember exactly. An ombud throwing a haymaker at a student is just incredible though. It’s weird how it only takes a few or possibly just one crazy asshole to make your life miserable and bait you into terrible decisions.
Back to gambling. My health keeps me out of normal work for more than a few years at a time. And to be clear, I don’t dislike students or teaching, it’s busybody admins I have no tolerance for because they’re enabling the problem students. I can post more in the education thread if you’d like me to share experiences that you might relate to.
I had the polar opposite experience with a professor who had tenure, was <5 years from retirement, and hated teaching. Young dumb me took one of the classes the department made him teach that had other options because I liked the schedule better… and ended up getting stuck leading the riot when he failed 14/15 out of class of econ majors in Econ 301. We lost but he didn’t teach any more classes that involved him torturing double digit numbers of students after that. So he got exactly what he wanted lol.
I made a 105 when I repeated the class and the kid he randomly gave an A is a mediocre brown noser destined to spend his career in lower middle management. I do not accept any responsibility or the label of problem student over that affair. I’m still pissed I paid for that experience.
I think I just have to stop caring so much. I know that sounds ridiculous but it’s probably best to harden your heart, give the grades and shrug the rest of your way through any other bullshit that happens.
I’ve been going insane for the last week. I noticed another binding loosening at the waist on my guitar, so I googled it, as I have done before, and numerous other people complaining of the same thing and saying Martin fucked up. Then one post mentions humidity. So I decide to finally buy a digital hygrometer for my guitar case. So I order one and get another one for the apartment and then reading up, order a calibration kit. Fresh out the package, I put the one in the case outside the sound hole and it reads LL, which means less than 20% RH. I use the Humidapaks where you put 2 in the body and one under the headstock. So I put it under the headstock and it read 35%. Recommended is 45-55%. So I freak out. The other hygrometer for my apartment reads like 18%. Neither is calibrated at this point, but they can’t be That off. I google low humidity and it warns about nose bleeds, wheezing, coughing etc. I sometimes wheeze lightly when I’m going to sleep, which I chalked up to smoker’s cough. So I freak out and start boiling water on the stove and fog up the windows. I’ve been obsessed with humidity and boiling water off an on throughout the day for 5-6 days now. I feel like a lunatic. I placed an old crystal based humidifier (Oasis plus, for harsh environments) under the head stock in addition to the humidipak there. Leave it overnight with the hygrometer with it. Next day, it reads 40%. WTF!!! So then I ordered additional humidity paks and placed them around the guitar in new places, now waiting for the hygrometer calibration test to finish, which currently suggests it reads around 3% low. I’ve been googling room humidifiers all the time. I found one that I like but it won’t take my crap tap water and I’d have to buy distilled water. 6L every 3-4 days. Fuck me, I don’t even enter grocery stores. I gotta stock up on fucking gallons of distilled water. Fuck that. Today I took the other hygrometer into the hall and when I went near a large vent near the elevator it read 9%. Jesus Christ! I’ve seen other units with blankets/towels jammed under their doors. I’m guessing this is why. I’ve mostly been going out to the street to smoke to avoid letting cold dry air into my unit. Add onto that the icicles on the roof above my balcony have made my balcony an ice rink again, which I emailed the condo mgmt about yet again. Car battery died again due to never driving. I was supposed to quit smoking for Lent, but bailed. Now I don’t even want to live in the condo I own and have lived in forever. Today I looked into selling but the market is shit and I don’t want to move during the pandemic. I’m just pure stressed out and going insane. The air in my condo that I’ve breathed and lived in for 11 years is now a giant problem that I have to obsess over. I just want things to return to normal. Staying home forever, I just end up finding some new problem to obsess and dread over. I sort of recovered some sanity today, but it bothers me how fragile I am about any problem that surfaces. Even new ones that were always there and I never cared about before.
Plan is to stop boiling water and obsessing over humidity in the condo. Check the humidity in the guitar case with the calibrated hygrometer and add humidifiers as needed. Once condo hygrometer is calibrated, consider getting the room humidifier. Until then, stop worrying about it. Consider placing tape over the humidity reading on the room hygrometer and just use it for temperature. Don’t let minor problems, that were there before and were not a problem, ruin my mind. Take care of the guitar and just live your life like you did a month ago. Condo board is going to fix the ice dam problem. Probably in the spring once everything melts. Live with icicles like you have for years and if any water leaks into the unit, then call condo mgmt and demand they replace anything that gets damaged. Buddy is coming by on Saturday to boost car. Drive for 1 hr afterward. Get groceries and buy distilled water for old style guitar humidifiers. Go for more walks now that it’s not -30 anymore. Get a good night’s sleep and return to sanity.
It’s really easy to obsess about things in the current climate/situation. It’s great that you realise what you’re doing and taking steps to rectify things. You’re not alone in this, my bf has been second guessing so many different things that normally wouldn’t worry him. He is like you and does realise what he’s doing, it’s just tough to stop so it’s great you’ve got some strategies in place.
Schoolmates whose friendships ended during the year were three times as likely to bully or victimize each other in the spring, while those whose friendships continued over the school year were over four times as likely to bully those friends, researchers said.
I think this is partly why bullying is so easy to miss in ourselves. The study indicates that while there is a justified concern for bullying toward outgroups, bullying is primarily cultivated among in-groups. Friends bully each other as their primary method to express their thoughts, feelings, desires, and boundaries. It gets us what we want, increases our popularity, and shields us from bullying while unwittingly cultivating the very bullying culture we fight against.
The case illustrates the need for research in this area: “… contrary to the once-prevailing view of bullying as a maladjusted reaction to psychological deficiencies, emotional dysregulation, empathy deficits, or problematic home lives, [the perpetrator of the bullying] is one of millions of adolescents who has harmed a schoolmate for instrumental reasons: to exact retribution, achieve prominence, or vanquish a rival,” researchers said.
It isn’t just the person engaging in bullying behavior that lacks awareness of the harmful impact of their behavior. The friend being bullied perceives the other person as a friend, and so in the same way racists excuse their racist positions because they conflate intent with impact (it’s only racist if you declare racist intent, right?), the friend being bullied will perceive the “friendly” intention and excuse the harmful impact as what friends do to each other. Mean Girls got it right after all!!
Compared to schoolmates with no overlapping friendships, those whose friendships are perfectly overlapping are roughly three times more likely to bully each other, and those who share the same bullies or victims are more than twice as likely to bully each other.
When a student complains, I first go back and make sure I wasn’t just in a bad mood or missing something the first time around. If I think the grade was right, then what I usually do is write new, very honest, comments on the essay (or whatever). My normal feedback might point out every third or fourth problem with an essay to avoid making anyone cry or feel discouraged. If the student complains, then I write out every problem. This will take a while, but whenever I have handed back a paper completely covered with fair criticism, I haven’t heard any more complaints.
I completely agree with the admin stuff. This is a disaster because it’s terrible not to have people like you teaching if dealing with crap is the reason you’re not.
I would absolutely teach high school if it weren’t for all the bullshit and I would be an incredible high school teacher. I don’t even care about the money, I just can’t deal with absurd standards and whatnot.
(closest category I&E; biggest clobbering N>S)