It is under 90 days to the end of my tenure at my current job and I have become a bit melancholic about leaving. Don’t get me wrong. I am very happy about the next steps in my life and being able to follow my dreams. I am mournful for leaving a lot of the people behind that I have come to know over these past eight years. I realized this as I was doing a property walk and people would wave and say hi. We would have conversations about life, love, happiness and generally everything. These conversations were truly highlights of my time and will miss those moments. However, I will make new moments.
At the same time, there are moments where I am ready to finish these last few weeks. I look at my to do lists and it reinforces how burned out I have become. I have been taking some PTO since it doesn’t pay out when I leave. This has been helping tremendously with my mental health. I have also been able to experience and discover new feelings in my body through my other events and continuing research.
I ended up not putting the pressure on to make sure that I submitted the abstract for the paper. Not because I think my research will be terrible or that I will not have the support for it – I decided to not push for it with the current stresses going on with preparing to uproot my entire life for at least the next five years and potentially up to ten years. I will say that is also one of my strange thoughts that in five years my goal is to be Dr. Pierce and my ten year goal is to be close for being approved for tenure (ha – get it ten year / tenure). Going back to the research, I am still working on it and collecting my thoughts regarding the potential for the entire project. I do want to talk about a strange phenomenon that I have noticed.
Music tends to be highly present in the backgrounds of all dungeon spaces for (in my opinion) reducing ambient noises, provide consistent auditory cues for scene development and for mental stabilization, and keep people from talking too loudly and potentially interrupting scenes that are in progress. Strangely, as a scene unfolds and begins to intensify, my brain shuts out the music and majority of the sounds occurring in the dungeon. This leads me to the thought that our brain considers music unnecessary when processing all of the extra sensory inputs. If these extrasensory inputs can override other auditory processes, what other sensory processes could be potentially overridden to heighten or change the scene? Could it be possible to override those other processes to bring back the dungeon soundscape while the scene is ongoing? These questions keep evolving and expanding giving me the idea that I should talk to a psychologist about these phenomenon to find literature about and if these are already well understood.