Sunday, November 20, 2016

I [finally] finished the Garden Party quilt top

A mere 14 months after starting this quilt, I finished the top yesterday. It didn't take long which made me wonder why I it had been sitting like this since May.






As I drew circles, cut, ironed, pinned and sewed I felt better than I have in a long time. This made me question the recent University study I have taken on. I have thought about and talked about starting doctoral study for the last few years and finally this year committed to it. It is interesting and I enjoy the reading, but it takes up all my non-school time and given my school days are 10 - 14 hours I have done a 50 - 60 hour week by Friday night, so it's taking up my weekends and holidays. I now always feel like I should be doing University work. Sewing and yoga have gone out the window and they are the things that I find joy in and so are probably psychologically good for me. I came to the conclusion yesterday that I might quit my University study. I have never quit anything in my life, but I don't want to live like this for the five plus years it will take me to complete the qualification. I want to spend my Christmas holidays hanging out with my niece and nephew and not working on the next draft of my lit review. I will sit on that decision for a week or two, but I am pretty sure my mind is made up. 

3 comments:

  1. Don't think of it as quitting. Sometimes your health and happiness is more important than study/career. So glad to see you back here - hopefully a little more often now.

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  2. So glad you've got the top together, looks great! It's tricky getting that balance between work & play... but it sounds like the uni study was all consumming!

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  3. I never understand how people can do a PhD and work full-time, I found it a challenge just teaching part time and then having a baby, all that switching between mind-sets was incredibly difficult. The only thing that kept me going at the end was wanting to wear that cool floppy hat, and not wasting the time I'd already spent. It's definitely better to be evaluating whether it's worth it before you're so deep in you're kind of stuck like I was. And of course the good thing about something like this is that you don't really quit per se, you just stop doing it for awhile. Stop and re-evaluate in a year or two (or 10), there's no point in doing something like that if you're not enjoying it because it just gets more intense and more consuming the further in you get and you have to be in it because you want to be.

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