I know all the congrats are probably not uplifting your spirits, but I’ll say it anway. Congratulations, man. I hope you were able to at least let out a sigh of relief.
In a previous thread, I told you that I am you and you are me. I remember exactly how I felt after I got my Ph.D. It was not the best day of my life. It actually felt like the worse. Five years of stress, worry, self-doubt, self-absorption, obsessiveness, etc. and then I get pulled aside by a professor on my committee a day before I defend and he tells me that my research was just a corn kernel shy of being absolute crap. He also warned me that I was about to head towards the worse depressive state that I could ever imagine. He went through it too despite having been published eleventy-billion times in all the top journals. So it was definitely going to happen to me.
His prophecy came true.
I didn’t have a job after graduation. My stipend ran out as soon as they put the hood around my neck and suddenly I was living off my credit card, in one of the most expensive places to live. I didn’t want to go into academia, being the rebel I was (am?), and I thought that would give me a leg up. No post-doc for me! Hurray! Wrong-o. I spent three months in pure melancholia, just riding my bike and taking extremely long walks leading to nowhere in between sending out my resumes to places that I knew would reject me. Trying to cheer myself up by occassionally going to Manhattan and grabbing a cheap slice of pizza. Just to keep up appearances.
But…I eventually got something on my hook. The summer was almost over and my credit card bill…well, let’s not talk about that. But I finally got a job. It was a post-doc research position–something that I was adamant about not getting (because, just like you, I didn’t think I was good enough to do one). I moved from NJ to south Florida over a matter of two days. All by myself. Drove a U-Haul in a tropical storm AND a hurricane. To a place I’d never been before, to work for a professor who I would learn had second thoughts about me after he’d read my dissertation (but got chewed out from my graduate advisor when he tried to pull his offer).
You know what? Through it all, I was still screwed up psychologically. My self-esteem was still horrible even when I proved my mettle to my boss (he was upfront about not wanting me when I showed up to work and then later upfront about deeply appreciating me…so I gotta give him his props). I was messed up when I eventually left to work for VA. I’m STILL messed up, but it has gotten better. Because I finally have time to think about improving myself and seeing my worth through good works rather than abstract stuff.
The older you get, the more settled your life will be, and the less horrible you will feel about yourself. I have suicidal thoughts too. I guarantee that tonight when I’m in yoga and everyone’s standing on their shoulders except for me, I’ll be looking at the rope wall with deep, sincere longing. Then I will go home, finish up my flower pots that I’m making for a co-worker’s friend, eat a blueberry donut, and then go to sleep with the help of some benzos. I will wake up tomorrow with akathesia, my hands and toes clinched and writhing, but I will have energy and I will not want to die. And I’ll see hope in the sunshine coming in through the kitchen windows and that will make me walk fast to work.
One day this will be you (hopefully without all the movement issues!). One day you will wake up and see hope.
If you’ve got to go to the hospital, there’s no shame, man. Do it and come out better and face the world with whatever they equip you with. I know you don’t believe this (because I didn’t either), but you have what it takes to do anything. Not because you have a Ph.D. But because you are still here, with your healthy body and your intact mind. Your chemistry may be screwy, but the person who is you is okay. You are not your brain or its juices.
Take care of yourself.
