I’ve decided to approach this week’s blog a little bit differently than usual, and I hope that’s okay. I couldn’t think of anything else to write.
As you can predict from the featured image, I want to address academic burnout. It is week 8 of the winter quarter, and my motivation is at its worst. Every day, I watch sadly as my roommates and friends struggle to complete their mountains of assignments that keep piling up. Dirty dishes remain in the sink and laundry remains unwashed. I want to tell them that it’s okay and that if they try hard enough they can get their work done and get a high GPA for the quarter; there is no need to drown their sorrows in cheap liquor. But how can I convince them when I can barely convince myself?
I am a writer for SCU’s Her Campus magazine, and I wrote about stoicism in my most recent article. I wrote about how bullet journaling can help you forget negative emotions and encourage you to look toward the future. Honestly, I’ve been really struggling to maintain the stoic attitude that I encouraged in that article. Every day, it seems harder to get out of bed and do the work that I once looked forward to. I know that fatigue can have a largely negative effect on emotions, and I understand that I am not a failure.
“We all have these experiences, we stew over things, lose our temper, lose sleep over things… All this fretting is not going to solve anything,” said Shankar Vedantam in his podcast, Minimizing Pain, Maximizing Joy. As much as I wish I could maximize my joy right now, it is difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Following my class registration, I at least have classes to look forward to now. I love art, so I’m excited about the basic painting class that I’m going to take with my roommate.
I know that life can be bland and hard at times; it has felt like that all the time lately. But I also know that there is so much to look forward to. As long as I let myself lose sleep over a few simple words, I will always be affected by negativity. The sooner I let things go and move on, the sooner I’ll be happy. I’m willing to do that.