Hello internet.
Does this mark a more regular return to this whole blog thing? I have finished my degree and I am now very unemployed so quite possibly. Because of the degree I chose it is highly possible that I have no career opportunities now. Every day I wake up and stare into the void and think about my options. If anyone is employing someone to move around a room as a dust particle for an hour and 45 minutes, please let me know (we honest to god spent a class doing that. I love it though.) This blog has been floating around in this weird internet space for a good two years now and for half of that time it has been very dormant. When this started I was in a different and weird stage of life and this whole thing helped. And here I once again find in a weird and floaty space so I thought, “should I post more things on here? Or should start a completely new blog?” but then I thought, no thank you! Setting up a new blog is a mission and I really don’t know what else to do so here I am. And, for whoever cares, I will be updating things and removing most of the old posts because we move on from the past etc. Maybe I will even include vulnerable posts about sensitive topics? But I don't wannaaa because sharing feelings is gross.
Will there be a structure? Maybe! Should I add some structure into my life? Definitely. Will I? Maybe! And with that sense of decisiveness and self-assurance we go into the new year.
2020 is over! Hurray! As soon as the clock struck midnight, everything in the world got better and now we can all go to crowded gatherings and lick tables again. Phew.
Let’s rEfLeCt
Among the walking between my bed, the kitchen and bathroom last year, the other thing that I did was my final year of university (finally, it has taken a while). It was a bit of a strange time to be doing a degree in theatre and, unsurprisingly, we didn’t end up doing a lot of theatre. The theatre that we did was cancelled the week before opening so it was quite an anticlimactic and disappointing way to end a degree that you have loved a whole bunch (in the way makes your heart little sore). I could now very easily sob out a very sentimental few pages about my time in university but that, like many other things, is reserved for my own personal diary.
Most of the year was dedicated to writing a thesis, gross. But also fun and yay for access to education and I am grateful. But also scary. Despite all my hopes of being on top of my work, I was not. I spent most of my time staring at my screen in a state of panicked paralysis. I did, however, learn a few things about the writing process and I am here to share my wisdom with you.
1) Realise that you desperately need to give your flat a deep clean and dedicate hours to it
2) Hear that someone else’s house needs a deep clean that will also require hours. Make sure you help them
3) Make coffee every hour, at least. Caffeine is very good for concentration and anxiety, both of which you need to fuel your fear
4) Get anxious jitters from the amount of coffee you have consumed. These anxieties can be to do with the ever encroaching deadline or about the construction that has been taking place on the floor above you for four months. The roof will probably fall in soon because there cannot possibly be one more thing that can be drilled in that tiny flat. Go for a walk to ease the jitters. Make it a long one because you never know when that luxury will be taken away again.
5) On the way back from your walk, go to Pick n Pay and walk very slowly up and down the aisles. You should probably get stain removal right now because you might need it one day. You know that it won’t be in the spice aisle but be sure to walk slowly up there too, just in case.
6) In the check-out line, ambitiously buy the “Atlas of the Civil War” edition of the National Geographic to “explore America’s greatest conflict!” (Debatable but okay). Let this magazine gather dust on your shelf for several months.
7) Start writing something for this blog you hardly touch. Write a page and then procrastinate from that too. Only pick it up the next year.
8) Pack all your notes into a bag, just straight up put them in there with no protection. Just so that you can feel something, even if that something is pure shame at your current state.
9) Go to a coffee shop, one that you will go to so often that you bankrupt yourself. Then you can add “soon to be unemployed and even more broke” to your to-do list of things to stress about.
10) Make friends with a waiter who you can talk to for most of your work sessions.
11) Avoid contacting your supervisor for two months because you cannot face it.
12) Contact your supervisor after two months to apologise about your lack of contact. Expect the worst and receive a very nice email back telling you that they want to help you.
13) Ask someone else to help you too and then softly cry when they give you constructive feedback because “why can’t this thing be done already, why isn’t the first draft perfect”.
14) Have impostor syndrome about how you got this far.
15) Question your place in academia.
16) Question your intelligence.
17) Cry as you finally produce something that you are not entirely proud of.
Then sit and wait until your marks come out. And this is the step in which I find myself.
So there you have it, a very helpful writing process.
Well, that’s it for today. I don’t really know what else to say but I just wanted to rip the plaster off and get something out there before I procrastinated any longer. So there might be typos because I'm tired and want to post this before I back out of it.
Hello internet.
Do you like bad photography and typos? Well gee, feel free to follow my Instagram account: @some_daze_
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