Boy, do I have it big time. Yes, I’m only doing two classes and a thesis, but my senioritis is present all the same. It’s not that I don’t want to do work, it’s that I literally can’t bring myself to do it sometimes.
Let me paint the picture. I’m in my room, laptop open, ready to take on my assignments. And then, a creeping thought seeps into my brain, telling me to check Instagram. Or my email. Or iMessage. Yes, I should see if people are texting me, because it would be rude of me to not answer their messages in a timely manner, right? Or maybe I should apply for jobs, because my life after graduation is surely more important than the measly paper I have to write, the reading I have to complete or the workshop submission I have to analyze, etc…
On top of that, I already have a baseline anxiety about pretty much everything, ranging from whether my milk in the fridge is spoiled to whether I’m going to get a job after graduation to questioning whether or not my best friends actually like me or if I’ve been living a lie for the past decade, to what kind of coffee I should drink in the morning. Essentially, I imagine the worst-case scenario about everything. On top of that, the world is on fire, we live in an oligarchy, planes are crashing everywhere, there are several wars happening all the time and I’m somehow supposed to do homework and be a good student.
And, on top of that, I notice that most other students around me seem to have it together. For instance, why did so many students land job offers in the fall while I was over here scrambling to find some kind of stable opportunity in April. Why should I, an English major, even try to find a job with a measly salary compared to the monumental salary that business and STEM majors will make? No disrespect to the English department, though. It is the best department at the school and that’s an irrefutable fact.
All this to say that I’m an expert at coming up with reasons to not do my work, making even the simple task of reading words on a page seem arduous. So, what do I do?
This isn’t one of those articles where I ask the rhetorical question and then follow it up with a practical answer. I’m genuinely wondering what to do. It seems like as the weather gets warmer, the sun stays out longer, the less I want to stay inside, glued to my computer screen, crouched like a goblin with horrible posture.
I fear that I have now breached too far into the realm of negativity. To end on something positive, I think it’s good to remember that I’ve already gone through a senior year. In high school, I asked myself similar questions and had similar anxieties– will I end up in a good college? Will I succeed in college? Well, I ended up at Bucknell and I don’t know if I’ve succeeded in college. Turns out, that’s not the worst case scenario, so why should it end up differently this time?
