Why do you need your wife to get into exercise? Why can’t you go for a 30 minute jog every day on your own?
I find this very worrying. Alcohol is not an escape.
Well, for Christ’s sake, man, there’s your problem. You should get into shape and eat a better diet. I know it’s easy for me to just say that, but really, you need to hear it all the same. It’s totally within your reach. People routinely lose twice the amount of weight that you’ve gained. But most of all, my friend, RELAX. You should diet, and exercise, but most of all you should relax.
Alcohol fixes nothing in this situation, and is almost always an aggravating factor. It can seem to help one sleep, but is actually a sleep disruptor. It can seem to make one feel better, but is actually a depressant. It is bad for you in a caloric sense, and bad for you in a motivational sense.
You are fortunate enough to have both an SO, and a future that is bolstered by a high level degree. You are in the home stretch, and it’s starting to wear on you. that’s to be expected, but you are far from hopeless.
I’d be willing to bet that whatever meds you have been prescribed also have a “do not take with alcohol” warning an them as well, take heed.
You said yourself that you might not make it until you graduate. Own that. Don’t make it you’re wife’s responsibility to fix what damage you’ve done to yourself. Is that fair to her? Does your happiness outweigh that of your wife’s? You know what to do. This situation is yours to win or lose.
I have no idea where you’re located, but it took me about 5 minutes to find more than a dozen, free things to do in my fair city using just a copy of the local newspaper. Museums, parks, neighborhood festivals in places I’ve never visited, local attractions I’ve never heard of, and even a church I never knew existed.
Adventures don’t have to be big, grand events. Pick something you’ve never done - hell, you may never have even thought about doing it. Then, go do it. Make the getting there adn back part of the adventure. Walk to the park, museum, etc. You’ll see people along the way that you may never have seen before. Strike up a conversation with a stranger. Who knows, maybe you’ll make a new friend. As you go for your walk, you’lll pass stores and shops that you’ve probably never been it. Go in one (or two, or three) - you’ve just added to the adventure. Say you walk by a sporting goods store and go in. “Wow, the sell fishing poles. I havent’ been fishing in years.” Next thing you know, you’re by the river with a pole in your hand and you’re enjoying yourself.
As exciting as jumping out of an airplane? Maybe not, but an exploration of your surroundings costs you nothing, takes no equipment or training, and can be done at the spur of the moment.
Get busy living or get busy dying. Choice is yours.
Happiness and exitement are two different things.
My life in the last two years was anything but boring: divorce, new love moving in, two pregnancies, two miscarriages, moved house two times, set up house two times, volunteered for political party, ups and downs in job.
And I was depressed most of that time. It felt like you feel: just ploughing on, hoping I’d feel better eventually. I don’t know if my depression caused or followed all the changes, but that doesn’t really matter. My point is that happiness and exitement are two different things. Maybe you are just depressed. Well, you’ll know in three months.
Not sure if that is a comfort to you, Christopher, but that’s my two cents.
I think I’m like the exhausted guy crawling to the finish at the end of as marathon. The closer I get, the further it feels. Now I find out I have to change my commitee again because the new member I just added can’t make it to my defense. The graduate school is extremely slow when it comes to things like that. I also have to talk to the crystallographer again to get a new drawing of one of my compounds. I hate talking to this guy. Not that I don’t like him, but why can’t I just give him a rough drawing of what I want and he make it. The whole thing takes an hour for every drawing. I just hope my commitee doesn’t notice that a few of my drawings, while obviously representing the same thing, are represented somewhat differently. That would be a whole day of work for something that should take 30 minutes. I have to go in this afternoon to enter some NMR data and finish up my experimentals.
On the bright side, after today I can start putting my dissertation together into one document. Then I can actually start doing the table of contents and the appendix. I really hope that appendix formats itself.
Oh no, it’s not really a stress on my wife. Once I am out of this miserable place and with her I am a completely different person. My alcohol intake goes to nearly zero automatically. She doesn’t drink at all, so she will constantly nag me if I take it too far anyway. In that sense we are a perfect couple. As far as the fitness goes, it is just a mater of me going to the gym with her, or taking a run with her (as far as I can make it.) I am a fitness freak at heart, but the psychology of my situation has eroded me down to nothing.
I have nothing but hope for you, Christopher. Just start small. Take a walk and do it today. Just take plnnr’s advice and walk, trying to look at things in a different way. Observe your surroundings and breathe the air. It can be uplifting. It’s May and the world is gorgeous right now. It’s the perfect time to let nature give you a lift.
Good luck. I hope you summond the energy and courage to press on to the end.
Thanks actually. Thank you to all of you. Instead of driving to work today, I will walk to work. I get to cross the Willamette River on the way. It will be a nice walk. My boss has just e-mailed me. Apparently he wants to talk about a few things. Its about time.
Just remember man, baby steps. If nothing else, thinking about the movie “What about Bob?” should cheer you up a little 
Ive been there too. My senior year of college seemed to go on forever! I love school and learning and all, but it was time for me to be elsewhere. If you don’t already do this, get a wall calendar and mark off every day as it passes between now and when youre done with school. Seeing the days as you mark them off is really helpful and makes it feel like you are achieving a goal as opposed to running in place. Also read Stephen King’s The Long Walk to make yourself feel a little better about your journey. Take long baths, read interesting books, have some kinky sex with your wife…do whatever it takes to mentally pull yourself out of the situation you are in for a while.
My last year of school I spent the week of Valentines Day in and out of the hospital, in and out of cardiologist offices, etc. because I was so stressed out my heart would just stop beating for 15 or 20 seconds at a time. If I hadn’t learned to cope with it I would have been in much worse shape before I graduated.
Arew you sure that’s the only solution? In my program there were two solutions in cases like this. One was having the member participate via conference call–this happened a lot because sometimes committee members move to other institutions during the process. The other was to have a proxy. I about shit bricks when one of my most sympathetic and supportive committee members had an unbreakable conflict come up after my defense was on the books. But as it turned out, he could appoint a proxy. We found someone with a PhD in our field–we didn’t even have to scrape up a faculty member–who was willing to read my dissertation on short notice and sit in on the defense portion only. Worth looking into.
If I were you, I’d just channel some of that annoyance into anger into finishing. That’s what I did–I operated on raw anger for that last bit. You want your life back, and you will have it back once you get done. Power through these last 3 months–you can do that–and then go start living life the way you want to, with your wife and decent eating habits and personal goals that are meaningul to you, whether that’s boxing a kangaroo or skydiving or just watching the grass grow. The PhD process can be absolutely soul-crushing, but you can get through it. You’re so close.