When I get like this, I have to remember what works

I'm totally depressed. Feeling down and bluesy, and discouraged.

I'm in a hotel room until Monday with the sole goal to finish my dissertation between now and when I emerge. But, yesterday when I came in, all I wanted to do was sleep. So I slept a while, I read a while, and then I laid down to take a short nap, and ended up sleeping four hours. It's what my body needed, but damn it, I just need to be awake and feel like it has work to do.

The worst part of this, I have to say... the absolute worst part of it is the loneliness. This is an incredibly lonely project/process, and it totally sucks to have to get through it.

Yeah, it's the liminal part that hurts the most, and is the most uncomfortable.

Last night I had a dream that I went back to undergrad, and because of money, I had to be an RA, and I really didn't want to. I felt very down about that. Then I went out by myself in the middle of the night to this very old tower, and was sitting on a connecting bridge between two buildings, when all of a sudden a cable on one of the many connecting bridges somewhere else broke, and that generated a chain reaction where everything started falling apart. The bridges started swaying violently, and whatever was on them, including a large MAC truck, fell apart. And, all of a sudden things started catching fire, and sparks started falling all around me, including on the bridge that I was sitting on. I crawled carefully off the bridge, burning my leg in the process, and just ran down a ladder to call for help. But, I thought I should try to see if I could put the fire out myself. I tried the large fire hose, but it was stuck, and it was so complicated that I could not get it to budge. And so, the entire structure collapsed.

I walked away.

The next scene was in a funeral home, where some women were all dressed in black, and one of them in particular was holding a bouquet of very dark red and brown tulips.

I felt really bad.

I woke up with the realization that this dream is telling me something. It's time to let my dissertation go. I can't stay where I am anymore. I need to move on. This old structure is crumbly and stale, and I should just let it die and move on. I do feel like my whole life is about to change dramatically. And no matter how much I try to convince myself, I am anxious and scared. I don't know what will happen to me once I'm finished. I'm terrified about having to repay my loans. I think, more than anything else, that is the one thing that's absolutely terrifying me to no end.

That's very sad.

Ok... Time to get back to work. It's 3:56 am, and haven't gotten anything done yet other than this journal.