pennswoods | Feeling Foolish for Misjudging My Time

I had planned to submit an application to a leadership mentoring program that my university offers. It would entail shadowing and training - a lot of stuff I need. I think there is a huge leadership vacuum at my uni and I have started positioning myself to take on the task. The deadline for this mentoring program is today but it also requires a letter of support from my chair and it's just too much (I think) to ask for something like this at the last minute.

I have struggled these past two weeks identifying a path forward. There is so much I need to do and also it is complicated by my marriage. My husband is burnt out and I really need to take over his leadership role, but I think that this training would skip me ahead to higher administrative work, which I am not sure I am ready to do. In other words, I felt conflicted about the obligations. Basically when you move into these leadership positions, you sacrifice your research. You take on the grunt work so that others can be free to research. I would also be sacrificing having a sabbatical. Technically, my husband and I will be elligible for sabbaticals at the same time but that would be really detrimental to the program. He is the one who probably needs it most because he is so burnt out and his burn out is affecting his ability to lead our program.

But our department needs leadreship. And so does our uni. And to be honest, I need therapy to deal with my negative thinking that gets in the way of my ability to lead. And I am still president of this NGO for two more years. And I just got elected VP of Faculty Senate.

Anyway, all these problems run through my head when I sit down to write this application and I can't resolve them. And I have so many other tasks to do. Yes, I did see a movie last night instead of working on this application. I did draft things before the movie but I got stuck.

And now I have a bunch of other deadlines I have to see to. This is what is happening - I had so many other things come up (like prepping my classes, grading a backlog of papers, travel, jetlag, dealing with my breast health, handling the chaos of planning campus visits for the job search, online and in person meetings, etc.) I just kept putting this aside and ran out of time.

I feel stupid for this. It is probably a mistake but my thinking is blocked. But taking it off my plate also frees me up to finish planning my lessons and to maybe work on my book a little.

My poor book!