This post is from my ‘Showing My Workings’ section: More frequent extra bits and pieces that don't feel complete or meaty enough to post to main newsletter.
I wrote previously about how I’d been avoiding uni for about half the semester and then ended up deciding to drop all my classes except one on census date.
I was thinking it’d be a lot easier to get to work on just one class (Group Therapy and Linear Algebra btw, shoutout lol), and also that all the ‘inner work’ stuff I’ve been/am doing would be helping to shift my thoughts/feelings and so I probably wouldn’t have too much trouble getting to work on catching up with this one class. (ugh I hate the vibe of that term ‘inner work’, but I also hate the vibe of all the other terms I can think of for this: ‘self-help’,’self-therapy’,…. Anyone have any better terms?)
But so far I still have been mostly avoiding it. Which I guess I feel a bit disappointed and discouraged by. Got an assignment due in a few days we’ll see how I go.
I guess ‘we’ll see how I go’ doesn’t sound like a very concrete or likely-to-succeed plan lol. What specifically could I try. Well here’s what I’ve tried so far since realising I was still avoiding this one class:
Conducting an internal dialogue (a bit inspired by Internal Double Crux) between the part of me that still doesn’t want to do uni stuff and the part of me that’s pushing to just get on with it. I did feel like this made some nice progress with them coming to a better understanding of each other. Seems like the part of me that still doesn’t want to do uni stuff is scared of it being really stressful and overwhelming with a ‘ground down, pressured’ feeling. And so the two parts eventually came to a point of ‘Well if we could find a way to do this work without it feeling like that, that would maybe work for both of us’, which put the focus on now working those ‘stressful overwhelmed pressured’ feelings and trying to shift those. Though the ‘avoid uni’ part was still having some trouble trusting the other part and this plan.
So then I did try to use the ‘overwhelmed stressed pressured when doing study’ feelings as a trailhead1 and do some work on that. But I seemed to have trouble getting a clear sense of the part(s) involved or something…. I guess it would be worth trying more, or trying something different for this…
There is also a part of me that feels like… pretty silly talking about this issue in this way and talking about all this ‘inner work’ I’m doing and stuff… Like “OK Jalen everyone is reading this being like ‘have you tried just having a go at like doing the study, just pushing yourself a little bit’? And feeling a bit like that myself! Or at least— trying using some kind of tools or tricks for just getting past procrastination behaviour on a more external level or something rather than trying to work through these like deep issues lol before I can do an assignment lol.