when do you choose who you want to be?

The other day i was thinking about my "little ways" as my mother likes to call them. I was trying to decide if i should just chuck the phd / research altogether and do something else. Like, i don't know, become a ..... well to be fair i hadn't actually got to the part of "being" something else.

I was trying to decide if i should get some therapy and/or meds to try to remove my "quirks" so i could have a better life or more accurately a better quality of life. It is a big decision to make. As i am an all or nothing kinda person i can't do, as one friend suggest, just pick the bits i don't like and get rid of them!

The thing is that i am and always will be an obsessive compulsive with addictive tendencies. These proclivities take a lot of controlling. I spend an inordinate amount of energy just controlling myself so i behave and appear to be "normal". Well, not normal but i try not to draw much attention to myself. I will give you just one example: i don't go on dates. It is really tricky for me for a number of reasons but chiefly:

• I cannot stand having to explain myself when i don't want to do something (for no apparent reason - but i maintain perfectly logical to me)
• dining out is tricky (i can't being to tell how much i HATE my food stacked, or sauce over everything!!)
• i can suddenly have a brain wave and have to write it down or worse, go home and code it up

My life could be radically different if i didn't have so much going on in my head.

But here is the thing. I really don't think that i would be able to do my job with out my compulsions. I mean, working with satellite data requires patience and coordination. All the programming i do and research wouldn't get done i think. So that is my dilemma. I could get a vastly improved personal life but at what cost?

So i think that means that i long ago chose to be who i am. It has just taken a while for me to catch me up and let me know.