self-fulfilling incompetence

I have not been having a good week. I was trying to be productive last week and got some experiments done, but after spending Friday morning in a class on Matlab that made me feel dumb, I got the results of three different experiments and found out that nothing had worked. I had a fun weekend and thought I could start the week afresh on Monday. But, after hearing a post-doc candidate from C'land talk about all the impressive work he got done in his 3 year PhD (and unfavourably comparing my own progress), I discovered that I had hugely messed up my taxes, in a way that also made me feel incredibly dumb. Trying to fix that wasted most of Monday and Tuesday and today I was still feeling miserable and useless.

I don't think I deal very well with feeling stupid. I'm used to easily understanding things like Matlab so when I had no idea how to do the first basic exercise, I felt like crying. Not because I can't ever handle having to work at something, but because the one thing I can believe I have going for me is that I'm good at logical, maths-type things. If I can't even learn basic Matlab, then I have nothing left to feel good about. The instructor eventually admitted it was a poorly written question after most of the class had wasted half an hour on something that was supposed to take 2 minutes, but by then I was also feeling pathetic about getting upset, so it didn't make me feel much better. The tax problems left me feeling similarly stupid and pathetic, with the added bonus of having to pay a heap of money.

Feeling incompetent makes me just want to curl up in bed and hide. Except that then I'd dwell on how pathetic I am, so I've been glued to my laptop, obsessively playing Scrabble to distract myself. Initially, the Scrabble was supposed to help me feel better, but apparently feeling incompetent also does wonders for my Scrabble skills -- my score has fallen almost 200 points since Sunday.

I keep wanting to start again with being productive, but I'm having trouble forcing myself to think about experiments, too. Thinking about them just makes me feel more incompetent, which makes me want to ignore them and keep losing at Scrabble, and so the cycle continues... I know the only way to stop it is to make a plan and actually do the things I've planned, but so far I've resisted that because I'll probably just mess up the experiments and not get anywhere, anyway.

Despite that, I'm going to try again and I'm hoping some accountability will help. Tomorrow I will:

• order the antibody I need
• figure out what to do about the missing plate
• stimulate my cells
• dilute primers
• deal with the old B6
• take primers, cDNA and sups to the other lab
• update primer database

Oh, I did get my watch back yesterday, at least (but without even an apology for losing it for so long, so I still managed to feel cross after collecting it).