#maybe someday he will be ✨Per✨ the shrimp buddy again

[nerdnag]

The time has come for me to finish my philosophy bachelor's.

...Lots of ramble below. I mostly just need to get my thoughts out, but there is a plan by the end!

For those of you who were around in May, you may recall that I struggled a lot to get a sort-of-presentable draft ready for my supervisor, hoping to be able to hand the thing in before the end of the semester, and was then completely slammed down into the dirt by said supervisor when he returned the draft a few days later with... pretty strong words about it. Few of which were positive. I couldn't bring myself to read the comments he'd left in the actual document at the time, because the email was enough to bring me to tears.

Yeah.

I mean, he wasn't wrong, it was just a bit shocking to have him go from "hey, how's it going for you, the thesis treating you well? oh and here's a link to a fun video i found on the internet" one day to almost-kinda-petty critique the next. And also, I am wholly unused to disappointing teachers, supervisors, mentors or superiors of any kind. That may sound strange considering my ADHD, which should in theory have gotten me in lots of situations like that, but my entire life, I've usually managed to make use of three things that have helped immensely to get things done well and on time: 1) special interests/obsessions/hyperfocus, 2) perfectionism and performance anxiety, and 3) high IQ. Number one has helped with motivation and creative flow; number 2 has helped motivate me through shame; and number 3 has helped me "bullshit" my way through assignments/relatively easily create a coherent and acceptable final product without doing all of the actual work I should have done (...and also making the actual work I do put in a pretty good quality).

But for some reason, these tactics didn't quite work out this time. I could come up with many different ideas about why this was, but one really important part of it was probably the fact that I've been heavily overloaded with work at my job and still haven't fully recovered from the immense stress I was under from March 2022-June 2023. I might not be able to recover from that period of my life without doing some pretty extreme changes in how I live my life, and although I've been working on trying to make some of those changes over the course of the first half of this year, it hasn't been impactful enough yet.

And so in the middle of this, of trying to recover from a backlog of both work and stress, while still being under quite a lot of stress at work (although not even remotely compared to how it was a year ago), I was also trying to write a bachelor's thesis in my spare time.

Oh, and did I mention I also took on a volunteer position in my spare time from April onwards that has demanded quite a lot of time?

(Jfc why do I do this to myself. ...Because it's fun and I am bad at saying no. That's why.)

Anyway, enough rambling about what's happened and the reasons for it - long story short, I realised I wouldn't be able to finish the thesis in time, and so I told my supervisor I'd hand it in by the end of the summer instead. And wouldn't you know it, the end of summer is closing in. :)

So with the help of my partner, I managed to finally open the document containing my supervisor's comments, and rather than lose myself in complete and utter anxiety and horror over the words, we could sort of laugh over how unnecessarily harsh he was being. (I guess my supervisor actually was a bit disappointed, since he'd seen before that I was more capable than that. I don't blame him.) I also realised that it wasn't quite as bad as I had imagined, and that my life isn't actually over and done for. So yeah. (He even had a couple of positive comments for me, actually.)

Then we made a plan for how to tackle this thing. I'm going away on the 22nd of July, so the goal right now is to have a finished draft to send to my supervisor on the 21st. Then he can read it, give comments, tell me whether he gives his approval or not, and after I've made any necessary adjustments, I can hand in an opposition version by the middle of August. Since I am currently on vacation, and I do need to actually try to wind down from work as well, I've settled on working on my thesis for 3 hours each day, starting tomorrow (the 13th), and my deadline each day is noon. If I realise after this Sunday that I need more time, I'll increase it to 4 hours every day.

It should work. I know what I need to do, and my supervisor's comments are clear. I enjoy writing and doing research and I will finish this in a way that I'm proud and happy about.

So there. That's my promise to myself. I'll climb out of this hole, fill it in with new dirt, and then start building the collapsed tower of blocks up again.