Trop Fatiguée
I have hit a new roadblock to writing my thesis: I am literally too tired to write. Regardless of how much sleep I get, after a full load of classes and work, I literally cannot stay awake long enough to write anything. I know what you’re thinking, “Just drink some coffee!” but let me inform you dear friends that I am drinking an excessive amount of coffee already and that is how I manage to function long enough to go to class in the first place. Today, I’m going to take a caffeine pill after work just to try to stay up a couple of hours to get a few pages done. I’ll let you know how it goes.
The last time that I was talking to my professor about the writing process, she shared wisdom from a book called, “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” by Anne Lamot. When Anne was having trouble writing one of her books, she looked up at a one inch picture frame she had and realized that she merely had to write one inch of text to make some progress. Often, when she told herself this, she ended up writing much more, so it was really a mechanism to help her get started and overcome all those negative thoughts blocking the creativity from flowing. When I first heard this story, I didn’t love it because the idea of only writing an inch does not seem like progress at all to me when I have many, many, many inches of unwritten story ahead of me. However, I have recently found myself opening my google doc, taking a deep breath, and saying in my head, “Just write one inch and you can close this.” It is so hard to be kind to yourself when you are not making any progress (or at least it seems like it), so maybe this will help me forgive myself and be positive in the coming weeks.
On a side note, I have developed what I theorize to be stress induced hiccups and they’re super weird and stressing me out more which is fortifying the continuation of having stress hiccups, so that’s a minor issue in my life too.
Yesterday at work, there was a Halloween bakesale, and a guy that I work with said, “I’m about to roll up in the bake sale like Harry Potter on the train to hogwarts like, ‘I’LL TAKE THE WHOLE LOT.’” I laughed so hard I cried. I realize that finding time for humor is vital to the writing process, now, too. So to others who are out there struggling right now with their research, don’t lose yourself in the writing.
There are no songs of now because I haven’t had time to listen to music in the last couple days, but maybe that’s because the song of now is really the Harry Potter movies or something.
Goals for today:
Ace my Econometrics Midterm
Stay Awake
Write Somewhere Between one and Million Pages for my Thesis
I’ll check back in later.
Best,
Allie