Week 7: There’s no room in the education system for students to take care of their academics, health (whatever that means to them) and everything everything else going on in their lives. It’s like we’re expected to be scholarly robots, able to handle anything and everything – we’re reading and writing machines, consistently capable of turning everything in on time, not expected to be perfect but fulfilling every guideline, and creating creative content each week. How can I write more in these weekly blog posts than the actual current draft of my paper? How does that even work? LOL

All my blog entries have been extensions of my journal, just with more content about this program. It’s Week 7 and I’m completely exhausted and completely not okay. This week has been super tough. I didn’t even finish my second draft and right now feel like I have to change a lot of it. With my topic so close to me, so personal and tied to my identity, it’s been hard to keep focused. It’s been hard to keep going when I’m thinking about being a woman and being Pilipina and reading sources about gender and ethnic stereotypes, the “Comfort Women” of WWII, family obligations/expectations, and how US colonization essentially fucked “”everything”” up (ugh I know that can be written off as an exaggeration even though it’s really fucking not but I really don’t want to go into detail about it). It’s draining, it’s pretty traumatic for me. I read this really well written, brilliant source I want to use and a couple of times while reading it, I had to stop and just take a breather. Some of this content is preventing me from staying focused and it’s hard to separate processing this content personally and academically. And that’s what happens when you choose to write about something really personal, something I have never explored before. I guess I should have known that writing about my ethnicity was going to be difficult. But that’s why I did it.

Also I’ve been going through some other stressors like the tiredness thing and some body stuff. We don’t have class on Thursdays so we had a four day break. I took three of those days just laying around and that still doesn’t feel sufficient but I know that a lot of this has to do with what I just wrote. There’s a part of me that’s like I don’t know how I’m going to finish this paper the way I want it to and there’s another part that knows what I need in order to hone in and focus and that’s the hard part. Because like I’ve been crying over this and sometimes I just don’t want to cry anymore. But because I know what it’s like to be home, I know that crying has always brought me closer to it.

You know those times when you just want to finish something but mentally you just can’t do it when you want to and you just gotta wait for the feeling or the time to pass to actually do it… I mean, I hope that this is what it is. I don’t think I realized how tired and drained I’ve been. Starting all the way at the end of summer when things started getting difficult. It’s so easy to minimize the pain and stress you’ve been through because the passage of time can bring the illusion that we’ve gone past it. *shrugs*