so close to quitting

I have never been this close to quitting my PhD. The speed at which I have been able to clearly see the alternative, non-academic path is really alarming: about 36 hours from irrational panic to unnerving calm.
(The surface of the sea, seen from my window, has also been flat and opaque, shimmering and restless: the weather dark and light, yes and no.)
This morning I went into Kemptown to do some chores. I was unable to meet the eyes of anyone in the post office, the grocer - an old woman was talking to herself, I felt sick. I walked back up to the flat and felt certain I was on the edge of a nervous breakdown and should be signed off work.
(Except when I imagined what I might say to the doctor, the unfolding internal scene felt like a silent film mime of mental illness.)
Then a chain of internet searches, like the snapping of synapses, led me to the search-term (thought): should I quit my phd?
There were people commenting on the post who were just like me, stopped short by horrible crippling doubt. Will I get a job? Will I go insane? Am I an academic? Is it worth it?
Now I can't do any work: I love the work, but I can't bend my words into a useful shape. I can't write about this stuff and also engage with the academy.
Have I simply switched the tracks from quitting a job, to quitting the PhD? Am I on the wrong or right track now?
My job though, as a research officer, highlights the very worst of the academy: getting funding, being in the right 'sandpit', being the one they suggest to help out, being alone and churning out page after page of fundable, safe 'outputs' with massive socioeconomic impact. I WRITE ABOUT NOSTALGIA.
I don't think I have the ego, I am not a cat (see http://www.triarchypress.com/pages/Herding_Cats.htm ) I don't want to be working in Marx's sausage factory churning out new ways of saying old truths, churning out people who can pass exams.
If I don't do the PhD, I am back at square one. No right to write.
Still - the PhD is just not creative any more.

the self myth

When I sit down to study, very often I am struck by an image of myself as a great writer. It's a cartoon image of a writer: there is some tweed, perhaps a dark coloured rug, books about the place - I am inserted into my canonical image of a writer. Sometimes I even get the music from 'Murder she Wrote' in my head, or I think about accounts of Jean Rhys driving her daughter out of her workspace in a rage. When this happens and I reflect on how ridiculous this image is, I am struck by two things: first of all how far this image is from my own situation, and second how embedded our fantasies are in the stuff of images (and then fears and the unconscious and the dream-work).
The former realisation, that I am certainly not the person I imagine in these moments, makes me stop short. I try to reflect on the writing I have actually completed and the courses I have taken: I am at a complete loss to remember the contents of the pages of work I have written. What I do remember, I feel ashamed of. I feel stifled and pompous at the same time, and the mocking voice starts: the one that tells you to stop everything.
The latter aspect, that we have so many cerebral associations between quite intact images, reminds me of my thesis and how we are all harbouring fantasy versions of ourselves based on a collection of memories. These avatars are at once constant (surely we have myriad reflections for different aspects of ourselves, or who we want to be) and interrupted (like archipelagos, marking more or less stable land in a sea of unknown); we can't really see ourselves, so the inner critic highlights and taunts those wishes the ego expresses in arrogance.

shade

When you live by the sea, there is always an 'out'. There is always one side of town that is gone - a ledge, a platform where we all look one way and where hardly anyone is looking back at you. Perhaps it is the only place where there is no mirror, only the unconscious breathing of the sea.
If I move to Leeds, I'll miss the sea. I will be surrounded by various areas and places, all making a reflection of the other. There will though be the moors - perhaps the rising and falling of the moors, the wind, will be like the sea. Except of course it is earth and therefore too knowable to be illiterate and therefore 'true'.
If I stay in Brighton though, I will always have an 'out'. In fact, I will have to because the landscape, the people are always in transit. I would always have to change. It's change that I know, but it panics me and I am tired. I want to come home on a rainy day and make tea, while watching the very green trees against a gray sky. I want to be home, and I want to be a woman in that home.
This bothers me: is it a desire to fall into the groove of existing roles, or do I just know who I am now? No: I don't want to stay home, I want to be home. I don't want to be a child anymore - that isn't the same as giving up, in fact it's the opposite.
The thing that panics me is the resurgence of those feelings I had when I was a child: mistranslated, lonely, ridiculous. The sea gives me an out, which is on the surface re-assuring, but also makes me a child. I don't want to be playing at life anymore, I want to see the sea, see the unknown unknowables and then go home inland to fold a family out onto the world.

craters

I'll tell you about something nice. Today was a nice day eventually. The sun shone, it was a little warm on my body for a time, walking down the long steps to our block. I enjoyed, as is my wont, watching The Gilmore Girls under my red blanket when I got inside. All afternoon I resisted the urge to do anything useful; except on reflection I did dye my hair and clean the kitchen...
I looked at our little fledgling plant in the box on the balcony and thought about homing a cat with FIV. The radio was on in the kitchen like a sonic link to the rest of the world: while listening I imagined the DJs in their booths with their crumbs and emails and problems-at-home. I remembered when I was doing A-level art and we would sit together listening to the radio. I wished my job was like that, nice people sitting in a comfortable silence making things. I supposed that is what everyone else wants and hence the fuss about holidays, and weekends and the Sunday Blues.
I am probably at a pretty good age to have a little crisis about this and that - time, almost time, to re-order and to 'fit'. My supervisor said yesterday in his Marx lecture that education is the same as discipline. Maybe the dread made me get into all this crap. Maybe I should get as far away from education as possible. Dry Stone walls.

ah yes, the dread

For the last few days, I have had a feeling of increasing dread. I do get this from time to time. It usually comes from somewhere, or I can at least in retrospect attribute it to something - tag it with a reason and release it. My inadvertent homing pigeon metaphor does of course imply that the dread will almost always come home to roost again.
I have a new job; new as of the start of January. It's part-time so I feel a little like a temp - the unexpected feature on the landscape of the office. I also don't have much of an idea of what I'm doing yet, so I feel on guard and insecure. My old work had its very annoying days, but I did on the whole like and get on well with my colleagues; I could be myself, and usually know what to do if the unexpected cropped up. Here there are higher expectations, which are as yet oblique.
I have also felt pretty lonely. M was away over the weekend. I didn't like the dawning realisation that I need him. I know that sounds strange - I have kept myself on safe ground with internal assurances of independence.
It's like without M I am without a voice. How I used to feel before him: frustrated, ghostly, inert, inconsequential. I know this sounds like it's all about me - I guess in the foggy dread, that's all you can see immediately. I hope, but I can never know for sure, that I am all this to him.
My friends have mostly gone or changed - I miss them. I miss playing in our band too, I miss writing songs, I miss feeling capable. I know they miss me.
It's like we're all out in our life-boats, in the fog, headed to more fog.

Feal the Fear.... (and run away)

Right, I think I may have finally finished a passable draft of my Vintage chapter to send out to John. I still don't think I have that 'academic' voice down; a feeling of crushing doubt when I try to daub some kind of methodology is screamingly obvious from the page. Lindsay's comments really helped, although when she was a bit worried about my lack of response, I did worry that she thought it was poo! Oh, the swings and roundabouts. At least I am finally thinking 'ah so what' about someone reading my stuff now. Paf.
I have also been rather naughty not chasing Gina up about the comments on my last draft. I have made so many changes though that it is kind of redundant. I day-dreamed she was going to my old Head of School demanding my hands be chopped off so I could never write again - always think of the worst, then you'll be pleasantly surprised....
Anyway aside from the wittering and stabs of doom, the Fear is somewhat diminished. I can see a version of my life where I scoot away from academic work with my tail between my legs and I can see one where I am the queen of everything and am always right. I suspect the two will both happen from time to time.
Tomorrow I start my new job as an Academic Research Officer - another chance to feel a bit out of my depth. I have been nice and safe for six years and now into the unknown.. I won't run away though, I will do it any way.

Writing for Academic Publication and that novel I always meant to write

So I have started this course at Brighton University called 'Writing for Academic Publication' which is a bit like 'Writing the Greatest Novel in the World Ever' in terms of the 'gulp - I can't seem to write a word' intimidating task factor. I have just re-read my vintage at goodwood diary which is clunky as hell. Turning to Susan Stewart I find the notes I made two-ish years ago are scant (and a bit embarrassing)- realising a trip to the bookshop would be wise I am suddenly very happy to have a distracting task.
Factoring in some TV watching also seems crucial, but I know it isn't.
Still, when I am away from my desk the idea of writing this paper seems really exciting - I guess I just have to limber up like a ballerina.
Part of the problem I think is the fact that the Vintage festival itself threw up a few issues in terms of identity and (I am searching for one of those American words like 'closure') legitimacy (that's not the one, but it will do): Who am I, why am I writing this, am I creating a nice critical academic distance from the things that matter to me in order to make an emotional raft for myself? Where does the vintage-fan end and the researcher begin?
So when I sit down to write my paper, I feel like there is a version of me saying 'aw, look at you writing your little paper: tinkering with these ideas won't save you' and 'making something out of nothing, just like Seigfried (see the entry under 'Criticism' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Kracauer )' and then another one says 'as if you could even write about nothing with anything near the elegance of Siegfried you silly girl'.
I have to remember to transcend these, to leave the suitcase of critical papers at the door and just write - just write!