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  • Writer's pictureJess Eastman

Life is Chaos


San Marco, Venice (April 2019)

I know it's been a while since I last wrote a blog, I told you it would be a while didn't I? My life is a rush at the moment, moving from one big event to the next. I'm writing this from my apartment in London, yes London, I live in London now and no matter how many times I say it, it never feels that real to me. I'm here for two years of my life, a long time but also a fleeting time in the grand scheme of things. It feels so temporary, just one small step in my life choices.

The month leading up to my flight to London went by so fast that I barely remember any of it, just the overly anxious and stressed out feelings of a mad person trying to sort out their life before starting a new one on the other side of the world. I truly did feel crazy, and looking back on that, I can realise just how stressed I was about it all. There was so much to do, so much to sort out before I left and I didn't even get it all done in time. I'm still figuring out all the things I forgot to do when I was in Australia.

On the plane I had a strange sense that I wasn't really feeling anything, that my emotions were frozen inside of me, like if I felt anything I would cry, I would panic, and I just shut that off. It was easier to not think about things, to distance myself from the reality of such a big change. And that sort of continued for the first few weeks, while I moved from airbnb to airbnb, not really belonging anywhere.

I finally moved into my own apartment half way through March and things started to get easier after that. I still had so much to organise but I had my own private place to start unpacking my life and my thoughts. I finally started to feel the things I had put away. The sadness, the loneliness of it all, and it is terribly lonely. I missed my family, I missed my friends, everyone I had left behind, the sacrifices I had made for this new job. I hadn't realised how hard it could be until I was in it. How much everyone else has to sacrifice as well when they choose to be a researcher.


While I was working on my PhD I spent my life surrounded by the people I love, they were there to support me through it, how do people do it without that support? I think it's important that we talk about these kinds of things because I know there are a lot of people out there having to deal with doing a PhD on their own and it can be a really hard time.


I went to therapy for my anxiety and stress when I was undertaking my PhD and it taught me a lot. It taught me skills that apply to everything in life, self awareness and self care. So since I have been living in London, I have focused heavily on self care and going easy on myself and maintaining self awareness. It's important to check in with yourself to make sure you are really coping with things and manage the things that are hardest to focus on. Right now I am still working on finishing off my thesis. It can be quite frustrating and I know that I need to engineer the right environment to work in otherwise I find it impossible to focus and impossible to write anything. So I have spent quite a bit of time in the last month engineering my environment and building a routine so that I can work as efficiently as my anxious mind will let me. I have found that working in a cafe in the mornings with a fresh coffee in hand is the only way I can clear my mind and focus on the task in front of me. I know that for a lot of people, its impossible to focus in a loud environment with lots of people around you but for me it’s the only place I can focus right now. So I added this to my routine, every morning I was going to the cafe, ordering the same thing: black coffee to have there, and sitting down with my laptop to work. I've also been taking time out in the middle of my days to stop thinking about work and just write in my journal. Writing anything that comes to mind whether it's ideas for my thesis or ideas for a story I want to write or just what I'm observing in the moment. This is a part of being self aware and living in the moment and accepting thoughts as they come.


Last week I went to Venice for a conference. Probably not the best time to be going to a conference in a different country, I'm still getting used to my routine here in London after all but an important part of being an academic is presenting your work at conferences and meeting new and interesting people in the same fields as you, it’s a chance to socialise with like-minded people and to get some ideas for my own work. I was extremely nervous about going to Venice and giving a talk but one of the things I have learnt about myself is that if I don't just jump into things I will hide away from the things that makes me anxious and that just increases my anxiety even more. And by now I've thrown myself into giving talks so many times that it's not really a big deal. I stressed the night before the talk, mostly because I had been so relaxed that I hadn't practiced until the last minute. Then I gave the talk and the rest of the conference was so relaxed after my talk was done. And I realised that I loved the social aspect of conferences. So many physicists in one place and they all think like me and I am actually enjoying talking to them. Wow.

So the conference turned out to be a good thing. And of course I explored Venice as well, and I love that city. The thing I love about Venice is that it has no cars, the streets are so tiny and adorable and you can wander through them for hours and just get lost in the city and I had the best time getting lost. Because I never really got all that lost, the city is too small to be truly lost but I did break away from the tourist filled streets, heading for the quieter streets of the island and I did get lost in art. I stumbled upon a contemporary art exhibition while walking and the art was so amazing and made me feel all the emotions. The artworks made me feel alive, like staring into the artwork was like staring into my own soul.


So jumping into going to a conference in Venice turned out to be a really good idea and it gave me perspective which is hard to get when you are in the process of writing a thesis. I want to be a researcher but I also want to be an artist, and I can be both things at once because I'm ambitious and want to do all the things at once.


By the way, while I was at the conference, the first ever real image of a black hole was broadcast to the world. If you're not aware, this is a really big moment for science and you should be super excited by it. You've never seen a black hole before, not a real one. All those pictures you have seen, including the image in the movie Interstellar are artistic interpretations of what we think a Black hole looks like. The reason it has never been imaged before is because it's really difficult to see, a black hole is so dense and so compact the gravitational force it exerts is so great that anything close enough to it cannot escape, even light. Actually its really cool, black holes just sort of come out of the mathematics of general relativity as a singularity in space time that is created when an object of a certain mass (like a star) becomes compact enough.

The effort that went into getting this image is insane and if you want to know more you can visit this website. Eight ground based radio telescopes were used and Petabytes of raw data had to be analysed using super computers just to get this image.

Science is exciting :D


I'm excited to keep writing blogs while I'm working in London and I'm hoping I'll have more things to say and more photos to share so keep an eye out.

Ciao! :-)



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