I’m have two supernatural figures sitting on my shoulders. Both whispering advice into my brain. Sadly, they’re both demons.
One is saying “You have to get this paper done, and done right, you’re running out of time. It’s so important to your future. You need this professor’s recommendation to advance toward your goals. You know this is important.” These are the words of Anxiety.
The other whispers “Forget about it. This is a giant source of unneccessary stress in your life. There is no way you can get anything worth doing out in the time you have. Give it up. You’re not even sure you want to go where this is taking you. It doesn’t matter. It’s not important.” These are the words of Depression.
The unfortunate fact is, in the time I have, I can’t produce quality work, and I don’t have the motivation to do so. I respect my instructor immensely. I feel like turning in schlock is showing her disrespect. I feel like giving up is an even greater disrespect. I have learned alot from this course, but I have burned myself out in the process.
Throw on top of this a demanding job, and a volunteer effort that has eaten up many an hour for the aclu, and the fact that I’ve spent 3 out of the past 4 weekends in other towns, and I plan on not being in town this upcoming weekend. And the weekend after that, one of my closest friends in town is leaving town. I haven’t really worked out since right before leaving for dc.
I am tired. No, strike that, I am weary. And now I’m biking home. I’ll talk with my professor tomorrow, which will be something of a first for me, admitting failure to an instructor.
SuperQueer
Some of us try to be good at everything, and feel upset when we discover our limits. When I discovered this trait within myself I started calling it the SuperQueer trait. Lion Cub recently spoke of this trait within a relationship and called it the PowerCouple trait.
Another way to look at it is this — you aren’t truly challenging yourself if you’ve never failed.
For sure failure is part of the road to success. The most cleansing thing about failure is it’s ability to teach you your limits. I don’t know of a soul who has not experienced it, but I know many who have not learned from it. Take a nap dude:)
This seems to be the advise theme(tm)…
Too much on plate… Makes more stress… quality of life drops… quality of work drops…
quality of mood drops…
Time management gooood…
and then pants can drop. 🙂
We love you sweetie. It’s okay to admit defeat sometimes. and sometimes some slack gets cut for you and all is happy in the end anyway.
Which brings me back to pants dropping.
Pants Dropping
My pants haven’t been dropping much lately. It’s been nearly two weeks. Life is hard =)
Is finishing this paper something you are interested in doing at all? Even if it is not something you might want to do in the long run, it might not be a bad idea just to see all the work you put into this class all the way through. The resulting sense of accomplishment might be a good thing for the spirits, too. =)
If you just feel overly pressed by time, I would talk to Prof. Fong and explain your situation, then ask her if you can take your time on this paper. Yeah yeah, there would probably be some accompanying grade deduction… but it sounds like that’s not the issue here anyway.
As far as getting your butt into gear, I’m not that terribly far along myself and will probably sacrifice a night of sleep to the gods of political economy. If you are interested in joining me, I’d be glad to team up. I find that when I’m by myself it is REALLY hard to start something like this, but with other people dragging you a long it’s a lot easier. Once you get started on the paper, it’ll be done before you know it. I’ve seen you type up a storm quite a few times. =) After a long night of work and I’m sure that you’ll have a significant fraction of the work completed.
Anyway, just a thought. I’ll be around…
Ugh… =( Sorry you feel bad…
Working full time and going to school and trying to grasp some sort of social life after a year of seclusion, I’m finding myself in the same predicament… I’m not putting out the quality of work that I used to, but I’m slowly learning how to destress about it…
I hope the rest of your week is better!
Be well and safe. =)
It’s pretty cool the number of fellow previously graduated students that found their way on to my friends list for completely unrelated reasons. Fortunately, I’ve been given a chance to redo this project.