Week 5: An often forgotten step in the writing process is hating yourself, your writing and wanting to scrap everything and start all over.

This past weekend, I tried to work on my paper. I think I’ve said this every week: how writing is HARD. Tell this to anyone and they can totally relate. It’s difficult and it’s so rewarding when we finish. If there even is a finish. There doesn’t have to be I guess. Except in this assignment, we turned in three assignments: the project proposal, the annotated bibliography and then the first draft aka the shitshow in paper. Over the weekend I tried to work on my paper… I didn’t get anything done. On Sunday I grew super frustrated and just turned out and watched two episodes of Days of our Lives at the end of the day. There’s just something about my writing… I mentally won’t want to do it until the night it’s due and even when I sat down to write Tuesday night, it was so hard to put down. I didn’t free write before writing the actual draft which made it feel inorganic. I always say bad things about the things I write and I haven’t even looked at it since Wednesday. IDK. One of these days I’m just going to have to sit down and really take the time to go through everything I want to say. I think I’m all over the place but I’ll always put myself down.

I think what I need to do next is go through the rest of my sources again, pick out what I want to use from them and then free write about the narrative pieces of my essay. Which stories should I include, which people should be in it. It’s pretty open. So like this weekend, I should like not sleep in until like 11am so I could maximize my time because I know it’s going to take a lot mentally to get in the right space.

SO…even if in the first paragraph I made two comments about how I put myself down and say bad things about myself… I feel pretty optimistic about my paper. I FEEL GOOD about it. There’s a lot of potential, a lot I can explore. I’m kind of putting a lot on it, how I describe it to people, saying how cleansing and healing it’s going to be for me because I’m writing about something I never thought deeply about before. But however it turns out, it’s going to feel good in the end, that’s just the way it goes, you know. I am a bit bummed that we aren’t going to present at the end of the quarter but that’s cool.

Right now I am home. I do feel connected (because I’m writing!), I am honest, I have great people around me who held and support me, I feel safe and welcome where I am. My mental health is not falling apart and I am grateful for being here today. So…I’m home. And the cool thing is, there’s varying degrees of it too. Like different rooms, different temperatures… some days I can be at home and warm and fully connected and other days I can be a bit cold but self-aware, frustrated and looking to feel better. *smiles* That’s cool.