Originally Posted by Laupala

I'm also about 20 months in, and while I've certainly had some improvement, I'm still struggling quite a bit. After taking about 9 months off of graduate school I resumed last February, and have been plugging along at a much reduced pace and intensity, not making the kind of progress I need to make. My advisor and committee have been supportive, but I'm not really being a good graduate student, and that's becoming more and more apparent.

I've been feeling a bit worse the past month or so, which has brought me back into grieving the loss of my former self. I seem fairly stuck here, in this mode of grieving. It sort of drifts to the sidelines when I'm feeling relatively better, but the source of that grief is always there - the fact that I just don't like who I am right now and the circumstances of my life. I feel like I've reluctantly accepted that this is where I am now, that I can't do all the things I used to and that I hopefully will in the future, but I don't know how to not, at least periodically, dwell on how much my life has changed for the worse.

I guess I just don't know how to move beyond grief. I feel like I have fits and starts to get past it, and do OK for a while, but it just comes crashing down again eventually. Dr. Roberts Stoler's book talks about the importance of grieving the loss of self and suggests things like holding a funeral for yourself, the idea of which just seems so repugnant to me, but I clearly haven't been able to move past this grief. I guess I can't even imagine what it would be like to just accept that the old me is totally gone and not look back, only forward, acknowledging that I can't be in the world like I used to.

Sorry for rambling, just been extra down lately.