This generally does happen to me when I’m in school… this feeling of tunnel vision. It becomes very hard for me to escape thought of school. It’s an omnipresent concern, looming just above anything I might say or do. Sometimes the feeling lasts only a few days or a week; other times (like, I suspect, this time) it can be months. Hell, let’s be realistic, I may not get rid of this tunnel vision until my dissertation is approved!
The basic problem is this: I am engaged in a constant battle with myself. At every conceivable waking moment, I am faced with a palpable choice: Do I do the “right thing” and stick my nose into a book? Or do I take a few moments of sanity for myself, away from papers and books, and do the things I love?
I haven’t yet found my balance … in part because I still feel like classes have only just begun, even though I’m now bracing myself for a scary-ass midterm next week, as well as worrying about those two papers I mentioned yesterday.
I haven’t yet found my balance, too, because things are so unpredictable and unknown. This is a journey far more complicated than I thought it was going to be, that much is true; while I’m not at all intimidated by my peers — I think most of us are pretty equally intelligent, albeit in very different ways from one another — I’m exceedingly intimidated by my professors and the topics we’re discussing. I can get a relatively strong grip on the basic statistics stuff, which is what I most feared going in. Where I’m struggling are the extremely high-level data analyses that seem to be critical components of everything I read.
I don’t feel like I *cannot* “get” it, I just feel like I’m NOT getting it.
And, I feel like I keep putting other stuff off … there’s packing, and getting ready for the yard sale, and then there’s taking 60 bloody minutes out to eat lunch or dinner with someone else. I begged for an extension on dinner plans last night … and felt rotten because of it.
I swear, in my lifetime of going to school, working, and generally keeping an insane schedule, I’ve never felt this way. I know others have struggled with this while taking just one undergraduate class, and I’ve always felt sympathy for them. Now, I just feel like I cannot focus on anything except for picking what to read next, figuring out what’s due next, or brainstorming keywords to look for articles that will turn on a magic lightbulb for my two term papers.
Surprisingly, the physical manifestations of stress that generally appear about now haven’t yet made their debut… so I don’t know if I’m in denial, if I’ve learned to cope, or if — because the truly scary deadlines are still a while from now — it just hasn’t truly hit.
I’m hoping for the coping theory.