Heatwave and brains

We are basking in glorious heat finally. 30c today and I am warmed through like a happy lizard. The one time of year where a 160-year-old thick stone walled northern cottage comes into its own, ice cold inside still, no heat penetrating these walls. I cool off in the gloom of the kitchen, feet cold on bare tiles, then out of the door back to the thick heat that wraps itself around me like a blanket of sunny joy.

Great tits and blue tits flit through the garden, branch to branch, endless caterpillar search for nest boxes of hungry hatchlings. Newly fledged babies hide in the fir tree, learning about ‘balance’ and ‘shuffling along branch’ in between caterpillar meals brought by busy parents. Under the birch and willow, shade is dappled and life is good.

This week has been one of those weeks of pushing myself through scary things and attempting to detach myself from my catastrophising, rejection-sensitive brain thoughts . ‘Scary things’ being things that probably aren’t scary for many other people, like making a survey live (I have definitely messed it up, it will ruin all the data, people will hate me, they’ll all fill the survey in with how awful it is), and getting second revisions on a paper (the reviewers think I am awful, I am not good enough to be an academic, why did I ever feel I could do this, everyone else is better than me, I’ll fail my phd and just live under a rock).

It’s interesting looking at the random awfulness my brain comes up with once I’ve disentangled the RSD thoughts from actual thoughts, but it’s not so fun in the before stages where all of it is real and painful. But I get through it, mostly, and this week is one of those.

In between the general academic anxiety, I’ve been marvelling at the sky and really feeling like wow, we’re on a planet! A whole planet, in space! And this is what the sky looks like on that planet! I fully recommend, if you want to feel intrepid and very small and lucky and overwhelmed by awe. Way better than watching the news.

In ‘news’ news, actually, I’ve been getting all of my news updates from BBC Newsround. Instead of war and death and awfulness, there is a baby aardvark, some footballers winning a thing and being happy, and lots and lots about space. Fantastic.

I also read 1984 for the first time ever, and then immediately read Julia afterwards (the retelling from Julia’s point of view). I’m not sure which was the more miserable, I definitely didn’t enjoy either, but in that good kind of way where you hate everything and everyone in the book but still know it’s really great.

This week’s project is trying to make myself like espresso tonics. The important things in life.