I hate writing

The cold I thought I was getting over a week ago came to fruition that evening and has been with me since. I stayed home from work to try to get better and felt okay this past weekend in Chicago, but since then I've felt the same cloudy tired blahness every day. My teeth hurt from the sinus pressure, I break out into coughing fits that give me headaches. The other night I went through half a box of tissues, although things seem to have dried up since. In the middle of a long cold like this I begin to wonder if I'll ever be back to normal, if maybe this cold will stick with me forever and I'll be forced to drag through all the rest of my days sniffling and coughing and holding my head.

Maybe I need to be hitting the whiskey -- I seem to recall that working when I was younger, and in my prime.

Anyway, in the midst of this illness I had grantwriting group, where I was simultaneously slammed and complimented almost to an embarrassing level. Slam: Your sentences are hard to read because they have too many words and clauses and subclauses (this is what happens when I have to cram 10 arguments into a single page). Compliment: This problem may stem from your extreme thoughtfulness as manifested in the fact that you are the best reviewer here and your comments are always wildly helpful. I was a little stung by the writing comment, as I've always considered myself a good writer, but I have always tended toward sentences that require a diagrammer's mind (like mine) to fully grasp in one read. But I was pleased with the reviewing comment because if there's one thing I think I'm actually good at in this world it is editing and, more broadly, figuring out how a piece of writing could be more compelling. I get to do some of that in teaching and advising and working with other colleagues, and those are the times I feel most useful as a human being.

Going down the spectrum of feeling useful is when I have to do any of my own writing. This week's task was to fix those Specific Aims we tore up last week and add a whole Research Design section. Fortunately the National Institutes of Health are soon moving to a shorter application length, meaning I only have to crank out 6-8 pages instead of 14. But the first thing I did yesterday when I finally got going was to completely re-write the Specific Aims page, by which I mean I wrote up Specific Aims for an entirely different study. I think it's a more interesting study (writing up the research design for the prior study sounded so boring I just couldn't do it), but it didn't move me forward terribly well. I need to write up some semblance of a Research Design to turn in tomorrow at group. I'm procrastinating, and my teeth hurt.

Because even further down the spectrum of feeling useful? Planning actual research. I know I managed once upon a time to pull it off, but often I have no confidence that I can do it again. It involves talking to people, building connections, relying on others, filling out paperwork. Everything that makes my stomach churn with anxiety.