#him being my Advisor on literally everything has git to be exhausting for him :(

[29121996]

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[steelwoolf]

Feeling pretty down after a conversation with my dad. I know it’s not a super good idea to talk to him anyway, because he’s a selfish, abusive git, but sometimes I forget and feelings just come spilling out. Anyway.

I have a Master’s degree in a STEM field and took a lot of time off after my Master’s to recover because my advisor was deeply horrid, and the experience made me question everything I thought I wanted. I took a bunch of jobs in retail, outdoor guiding, tutoring, substitute teaching, lab work, etc., and couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Nothing seemed to capture my attention the way my previous field had.

Five years later, I finally found something in a different field to get excited about, and I applied to PhD programs, and somehow, without having any real experience in this field, got accepted to some really prestigious programs. I accepted one offer and moved across the country, and now I’m working in a lab under a professor who is in some ways better than my old advisor and in some ways worse. I’m bored and mentally exhausted, vastly overworked and underpaid; and while my boss doesn’t outright refuse to help me with science problems or pay for my work supplies like my old boss, he’s subtly sexist and outright abusive around some of my disability issues. So I’ve been toying with the idea of finding a way out.

I found out that another department on campus (the one my Master’s degree is in) gets paid more than we do and has reasonable work hours (they leave at 5pm!), and has a prof whose research interests match mine better than my current lab, so I was kind of thinking about whether it would be possible to switch departments. And I blurted that out to my dad while I was telling him that there will literally never be a time I can get to a post office while it’s open until I’m done with my PhD because I’m in the lab 10 hours per day, and wouldn’t it be nice to at least be able to leave at 5pm so I don’t have to have pop tarts for dinner most nights because I don’t have time to cook or even prepare food to put into a crock pot, and all he could say was that at some point I’d have to pick something and stick with it. Which is something I’ve already thought to myself every single day since 2011, when I started having difficulty finding a new job, and I keep seeing it as a moral failing on my part that I can’t just fucking pick a career path and stick with it and not think about leaving it every time things get difficult. And I know that “difficult” and “abusive and exploitative” are not the same thing, but it seems like I’m the only one in my program having these feelings, and I was wondering if anyone out there also had the same problem, because I’m literally crying here in my lab, thinking that I’m broken or something for not being in love with where I am in my life right now.