6 weeks to hand in

So Sunday night we received an email ("we" meaning everyone in the 3rd year of the Bournemouth media school), reminding us that we only have 6 weeks left in which to write our dissertations. For me, the disseratation is the thing I have given the least thought, because everytime I start to think about it I just get very stressed and upset, and a strong desire to simply run away and dissapear takes hold of me. I have spent the last 5 years working towards assignment deadlines and I'm absolutley sick of them. For the past couple of months I've really wanted to do some creative writing, but in my own time, not for a university deadline. This makes it hard to justify why i've been so lazy with writing my major, but in a funny way, it's not because I'm lazy that I haven't been writing as much as I should it's because I'm feeling rushed to do it, and I'm overly concerned with how good it needs to be.

The big fact is, I can't handle pressure very well. But I'm not talking about pressure from other people, or from my course, I'm talking about pressure from myself. It's strange, but the best way I can describe it, is that its like i'm short circuiting my own brain. When I feel under huge pressure I become anxious and confused and suffer a strange sort of breakdown. This happens to me almost everytime I think about my disseration, and would happen with every theory assignment I have written in my three years at University. I would constantly get confused about what was expected of me and how I should be writing my essays. The marks I have receieved for my essays these past couple of years are quite eratic. I've had a couple of firsts but I've also recieved thirds - only just barely passing assignments sometimes. When I try to communicate my difficulty with discursive writing to other people I generally get the same response "why don't you look at what you were doing in the assignments where you got a first and see what you was doing differently". I've tried that. It's strange though, I'll read my good assignments and walk away with an understanding of what I've got to do, but it will only last a short while, then when I try to tackle my dissertation again i'm like "I have no fucking idea what is going on... I'm confused." I don't think anyone can help me with this because it's something in my head doing this. Some bad experience with an essay I did in the past that I can't seem to get over maybe, I'm not sure.

I was reading a chapter from a book yesterday called Optimal Experience, psychological studies of flow in consciousness. But now that I think about it, the particular chapter I chose to read was the last thing I should be reading right now.

Anyway, it's one of the books I've been looking at for my disseratation, and it's about how people are most happy in an activity that creates a state commonly reffered to as "flow". The flow consiousness occurs when you are emersed in an activity that is challenging but not beyond your abilities to achieve it. All of your energy and concentration becomes heavily invested in the exercise and all sense of time goes out the window, and the world around you blurs into the back ground. You need only examine the face of someone engrossed in a game of Tetris to see the flow state at work. However, if the task at hand becomes too challenging the flow state will be broken by feelings of stress or anxiety, and conversely if it becomes too easy boredom takes over.

The particular chapter I was reading was examining school pupils who had been given an assignment to complete. The first part looked at two pupils where "overarousal" was a problem. They were two students who knew and understood their subject matter but ran into huge problems from the word go due to anxiousness. Obviously, every student goes through feelings of anxiety when completeing an assignement but for these two students it turned their essay writing experience into a nightmare, and their mental state was clearly reflected in the assignments they turned in. The writer of this particular chapter of the book, Reed Larson, said the two pupils caused this state of panic by having expectations for their essays higher than they could meet. What they saw themselves achieving in their heads was never as good as what they put on the page, and the harder they tried the more overwhelmed they became with their work to the point where they lost control of it. When they handed it in they were so confused and anxious about it they really had no idea of what mark they would get from it.

Reading this chapter brought back memories of past essay writing experiences, and it is for this reason that I haven't even been able to get properly started on my disseration. Everytime I think about it I get hit by these same feelings of anxiety and confusion, and all I've been doing recently is reading. That's what I've been doing today. Trying to ease myself into it by just reading some books and writing down whatever comes to mind. But its always there; a creeping sensation of anxiety coming over me and wrecking havoc with my ability to concentrate and take what I'm reading in.

These feelings are only going to increase dramatically and with greater frequency over these next two months so I better start getting used to it now and get on with it.