I feel like my career is failing. I was on an "upward trajectory" until mat leave 4 years ago, and since then the discontinuity (missed out on 2 rounds of PhD students, so ended up with an empty group after one graduated right after mat leave), plus the need to care for a child has 'unmasked' serious health issues (I can no longer spend nearly all my time not-at-work asleep, like I used to), and I'm only managing to work 37-45 hrs per week. I exaggerated my hours up to 50 and told a colleague, and she said, "Oh, that's not enough". This was a single mother of a preschool-aged child. I have no idea how she manages more than 50 hours a week, but clearly she does.
I've applied for over a dozen grants in the last four years, unsuccessfully. Got another rejection earlier this week. The reviews are starting to come back with criticisms of my track record that I haven't done anything 'recently'. Without funding, I'm never going to be able to do that. I feel like I'm running in a race I can't win.
Two staff (one male, one female, both with multiple small children) who started when I was on mat leave have just leap-frogged me - promotion from Lecturer to Reader. I went for SL before mat leave and "sailed through" according to someone recently who had been on the panel, despite having been heavily discouraged from going for promotion at all and talked down from Reader. Not that I'm competing, just that the comparison is so obvious that they both have even more family commitments than I and yet are doing better.
It's so hard to get up the motivation to write more grants, which will fail. And yet I desperately need funding - my work is computational and all I have to do it on now is a computer purchased in 2010 and I desperately need a new one. The Uni, if massively pushed, would buy me a £200 laptop for word processing and email, but that's not going to enable my research. I need a grant to get a machine to enable me to do my work. I can't get a grant without doing more work. I can't do more work without anyone in my lab and substandard equipment and massive teaching and admin loads.
And outside of work, my health is shit and I'm celebrating small victories like both cooking dinner and then sitting at the table to eat it with the family -- once in a week. And that's all I can physically manage. I'm just near tears at the crashing of my dreams and seeing that this is probably the end. At least my Uni isn't doing redundancies yet, but if they ever do, I'll clearly be one of the first to go. And I so wanted to be a Prof one day. I don't know how to get out of this funk. I don't know if it's even worth it.