The ghost of "I'm-so-free-I-have-nothing-to-do!"

I guess it's karma. It all started about a month ago when I started ranting about how much free time I had and how free I was. Now the " I'm soooo free I have nothing to do; I'm sooooo free I don't know what else to do" has come back to haunt me. Damn it! Now all my work is piling up and I have no idea how I'm going to finish all of it in time. I'm running out of time and I don't know If I'm able to cope..I feel extremely demotivated and upset. This month hasn't been treating me well AT ALL. My lab-work hasn't been going well one bit and it's really unnerving. I hate this feeling. It is evil, what it can do to you and to your self confidence.

In an effort to try to explain why I'm so upset about my poor results (from the lab-work), I have concluded two things: I don't like to depend on luck and I need to be in control of the things I do..all most all the time.

From the short 5 or so months that I've been working in the lab, I have learned that research does not only depend on brains and patience but depends a lot on luck as well. Luck is one thing I have never been known to have. I have never won anything based on luck. Never in the 21 years of my existence. Everything that I own, I deserved, I worked hard for. This is why I think that nothing comes easy and if you want something, you work for it. My dad has always said this to me: "Our family has never been lucky in life. The only aspect of life which we are lucky in is that our family has been blessed with good health and prosperity. Everything else we strive for, we work for. Some people are born lucky, they are intelligent. WE are not. Smart people study for an hour a day and score in exams. We study 10 times harder to achieve the same thing. It's just the way it is. We are not lucky. Accept that."

I rationalized that because I'm brought up this way, I constantly think that nothing comes without some sort of effort first. That's probably one of the reasons why I need to be in control of whatever I'm doing. I don't like to leave it all to luck. Of course some things in life depend on luck but whatever it is I can control, I want to and I will. Coming back to research, sometimes it's luck that your hypothesis checks out, most of the time it just doesn't. You can't tell the organism you're working with (or science in general) to change to suit your ways--You would be fighting with nature..and it's crazy. you'll never win.

I can't control many aspects of the experiments I'm performing and it's demotivating and a lot of times disappointing. I don't like being nagged at for obtaining results I have little or no control on. Being nagged at something that you could control but didn't is better than being nagged at something beyond you. So I suppose I don't have what it takes to do a PhD. It's not so much about having the brains, It's more about having the patience and the determination to continue. Right now it doesn't seem like I posses either.