Feling Like a Failure

The truth is, only about 40% of people in my country finish their master’s degrees on time. That means 60% take extra time. I’m a part of the 60. That’s the majority. 6 to 4 majority. 3 to 2 majority. Two thirds majority. That’s not a failure. It’s common.

Then how come I feel so bad? It’s got to be because I don’t fail things. I don’t do things halfway. I never have. I once found out that I had to write a screenplay for the next day, something we could make a short film out of. My host dad told me I had two options: try like hell, or give up. So I spent the entire evening rewriting a short story I made once into a screenplay. We ended up not using it, because another guy in my group wrote one that was more doable, and we used that, but I was so scared of failing the assignment that I did it anyway. I spent all of Christmas break writing an assignment once, because the research required to do it in addition to the rest of my school work took all of fall semester, and it was due in January.

I don’t do things halfway. Not when it comes to school anyway, because all I’ve been told all my life is that school work is the foundation. I have to get good grades in middle school to get into the program I want for high school. I have to get good grades my first year because I want to go on exchange my second year. I had to get good grades there so that I wouldn’t get sent home. I had to get good grades my senior year to get into the study program I wanted in uni. I had to get good grades on BA level to be accepted into the MA program. I got good grades on all of my course work on MA level, and now I have to get a good grade on my master’s thesis to top it all off, so that I can get a good job that I will enjoy and be good at and deserve. But now, I’m not finishing it in May like planned. Now I’m not getting my degree until December.

But I’m gonna get it. I’m gonna figure out how to write 80 pages. I’m gonna figure out how to analyze my data. I’m gonna figure out how to finish the whole damn thing without suffering from panic attacks and depression and the occasional suicidal thought. I’m gonna do it. I’m not gonna be a failure. I’m gonna be a winner. Slightly delayed, but still a winner. I’m gonna do it.

Master Depression is Real

Good morning to you, wonderful reader!

It is Wednesday morning, nearly 11pm, and I’m sat on a couch in my parents’ living room. I was supposed to go back to the city Monday morning, but on Sunday night we heard that the wind had grown stronger and found out that we were going to have a little storm, wind-wise, and although we didn’t get any notifications about the ferries being cancelled I didn’t particularly want to go out on the water in wind that strong, and especially not after my mom told be about one ferry that had a window taken out by a big wave not long ago. So I decided to stay here a little longer. Just as well, actually, because on Sunday I ordered my new phone, which I mentioned in this entry here. It said it would arrive in 1-3 working days, so we were hoping it would arrive yesterday, but when dad came home from a work trip he said the tracking said it’s in the city and therefore he thought it’d be on the first ferry out to our town today. He’s the one who’ll get the message about it though so I just have to wait… I did get a few other things done the past couple of days as well, so my time here hasn’t just been an extension of the weekend; yesterday I had a dentist appointment (and was told everything looks great), and I went with my mom to a meeting about noise reduction/isolation of houses, because our town is right next to an air force base which is getting new F35 fighter planes which will make a lot more noise than the F16s  I grew up with.

On Monday, I felt that I did good work wise. I wrote three paragraphs on my methodology chapter, and sent it in to my supervisor (it was 6 pages long, not finished, but he’s been asking for it). Then I wrote about 600-700 words more on my literature review, which still needs about 8 more pages before it’s finished, but I’m getting there, and that one doesn’t need to be finished before the end of April when my supervisor will get my entire thesis, all chapters put together, for one final reading. So I felt good! That was until my supervisor sent back the methodology chapter with his comments yesterday.

I read the email, and then all the comments on the chapter. Then I started to cry. My 16 pages long literature review needed to be restructured (which actually means rewritten, because most of the parts had to be changed as well, not just moved around), and rewriting makes it shorter, but it needs to be about 20 pages long, so I need to write more. That should’ve taken about 2 weeks, he said, and I’m sure I could have done it if each day consisted of about 40 hours instead of 24, but it doesn’t, so I’m not finished. And now my methodology needs to be rewritten, clarified, a lot of stuff needs adding and explaining… a friend of mine told me to remember that I’d written it in a hurry so of course it wouldn’t be great, and another told me to just go into robot mode and get stuff done, and my ever-supporting boyfriend told me I always react like this, I just need to remember that I’ve always been fine in the past and I will be fine this time too, it just feels like I won’t because it’s my master’s thesis. My mom told me that it sounds like I just need to sit down and work.

And here I am, blogging. This entry has passed 600 words by now, so I know I am capable of writing lots of words fast, so how come everything on my thesis is going so slow? I think I know the answer to that. I don’t want to write it. I don’t want to do the work. I just want to get the degree so I can move on with my life. I’ve been in school for 19 years, that’s 3/4 of my life, and the 6 years before that I can barely remember, apart from some glimpses here and there. They say that university, the years spent as a student, are supposed to be some of the best of your life. But they’re also the most stressful. I constantly have the feeling that I’m not quite done for the day because there’s always something that needs doing, because you’re never done, but you can’t spend all your awake hours working, either. But when I’m not working I feel guilty. And then I struggle to work because I feel so bad about myself. And then I feel like I’m stuck in this vicious circle that I can’t get out of, I cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel, everything is just black, the air is black, and it’s pushing down on me and I can’t breathe and I just want it all to end.

I never thought it was possible for me to not want to live. I’ve always been the person who looked forward to growing up, to being my own boss, in charge of myself, able to go wherever I want and do whatever I want. And at 24 I’m supposed to be able to do that. And in a way, I am. No one forced me to do this. I did this to myself. I chose to do a master’s degree because I didn’t feel adult enough to start working at 22, almost 23, when I was done with my bachelor’s degree. And I wanted to spend more time with my friends. But now I’m sat here, it’s March, spring is on its way, I have 9 weeks until I should be done with my thesis and send it to print, and everything feels so undoable. Like I’ll never be finished. Like no matter what I do, I’ll never get done, because something will always need restructuring and rewriting. There are days where I wish I could just quit, run away, but I can’t, because I have half a million of student loans to pay back because I chose to study instead of finding a job. And because of that, there are days where I just wish I could end it all…

Code-Switching // My Master’s Thesis Project // Sunday Update & Life

Hello you guys!

It is Sunday afternoon here in Norway, and as some of you may know, Sunday is my “get your shit together” day. That’s when I do laundry, change my bedding, sweep the floors, color my eyebrows (because they are practically invisible otherwise), do facials… All that stuff that I never have time to do throughout the week. And I do this on Sundays because I hardly ever make plans for Sundays, and in Norway all shops are closed on Sundays with the exception of some grocery shops, gas stations, and kiosks. Today I also did a little DIY project, which I plan to write another post on later, not quite sure when that’ll be up, but I did take pictures so it’s definitely coming!

However, I wanted to take just a little bit of time writing about what it is that I actually spend my time doing. Previously, I’ve written about the fact that I am in university and that I am writing my Master’s Thesis this semester. But I haven’t really talked about what I actually write about. The answer, as you probably saw before you started reading this, is in the headline of this post, and it is “code-switching”.

So what exactly is code-switching? It’s something I’ve had to discuss in my literature review, which I am sick and tired of writing, which obviously is why I decided to blog about it instead! The easy, simple, answer, which you will find in introduction text books as well as on Google, is some variation of this:

Anyone who is in possession of more than one language has the ability to code-switch, regardless of fluency in the languages involved. I decided to write about this because I am a Norwegian person, who speaks Norwegian, but who also speaks a lot of English, due to a number of reasons: I started learning English in school when I was 6 years old, I have lived in America, I study English at university level, and my significant other is from England. So there is a lot of English going on in my life, and it is undeniable that it affects the way in which I speak and write. Obviously, it is difficult to provide an example of the way I speak, but if you heard me speak Norwegian to my friends you would hear a lot of English words and phrases, and often when I talk to my mom on the phone I struggle to find the words in Norwegian so I end up having to say them in English. But I can provide an example of my written code-switching; this happened earlier today, before my DIY project (“DIY” is also the English here, as it is an initialism (not an acronym, as the letters in an initialism are spelled out instead of pronounced as a word) and I didn’t translate it into Norwegian), in the group chat I have with my two best friends, and you can see that I switch to English towards the end of the message:

I wonder if any of my not-Norwegian readers can understand the rest of that message… let me know, will you? Hint: If it looks similar to an English word, it is probably that word.

So that’s one example of code-switching. Another can be insertion of words mid-sentence, such as the word “whatever” which many Norwegians use as well. So I’m collecting data of written code-switching (also known as CS for simplicity) from the internet and then I’m going to analyze what kind of CS can be found and what sort of identity function it could have for the person using it. The former because it is an interesting thing to research, and the latter because language and identity have always been closely connected and I didn’t want to have just one research question.

So what is it that’s so fascinating about code-switching? For me, it is the fact that many people see it as language decay, or laziness on behalf of the speaker. Many are under the impression that languages such as Norwegian (and many many others) are being cast aside because English is being favored; if you walk down a street in Norway and look in shop windows you will see “SALE” instead of “SALG” when there is a sale going on; it is used a lot in advertisement, news reports… and one thing that my grandfather reacts to, is sports commentators. He says he doesn’t understand half of what some of them say because of all the foreign words. Which of course is really sad. However, for those of us who grew up learning English in school and watching subtitled TV instead of dubbed TV, for those of us who spent our teenage years on the internet, a majority of which can arguably be said to be in English, English is a part of who we are, and many of us would struggle to go through a day in life without using a single English word at all.

Linguists, however, say that CS is not a sign of languages falling apart or one language taking over, or laziness on behalf of the speaker. Bullock and Toribo (2001) states that:

Those with interests in CS behavior range from poets to neurologists, and from parents to politicians. As should be clear, much is misunderstood about CS and those who engage in it. Thus it falls to linguists and to students of linguistics to unveil the nature of CS – its structural properties, its biological underpinnings, and its social meanings – and to communicate their findings to a broader audience (Bullock & Toribo, 2001).

So that’s basically what I want to do with my thesis. Contribute to the library of research that proves that common misconceptions about CS are wrong. I understand that it can be frustrating to those who do not understand one of the languages involved, but people have to understand that languages are dynamic, they are ever-changing, they will always lose something and gain something else. When I explained this to my grandfather, he told me a story from when he was young, and sports commentators would swear a lot, because that was completely common and nobody cared, but then a swearing ban was imposed on the media (he said, I have not fact-checked this), and they were no longer allowed to. So that was lost. And now the language of commenting has gained words and expressions from other languages. Where it will go from here is impossible to stay, but one thing is sure: languages always change. This, too, shall pass (Persian proverb).

All the research done from the 1970s until now including what I am researching might be great and important for a while, but in 100 years it might not matter at all. Kind of makes me wonder why I’m doing it in the first place. But I had to do something, and there are so many interesting things to do in this world, I just had to choose one. Life goes on. I had to do something to get my degree to move on with life and get a job and a house and pets and a family and then one day I’ll lose my job because I’ve gotten too old and I’ll lose my pets too, hopefully not my family, but you never know. And then one day I will be just another body buried in the ground. But that’s true for everyone. And it doesn’t change the fact that while you are on this Earth you might as well make the most of it and try and contribute with something meaningful; Gandhi said that whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it’s very important that you do it because nobody else will (and yes, I did get that from “Remember Me”).

~ Julie

Student Life Update

Yesterday I wrote 1000 words on my thesis – 30.000 words, due on the 15th of May. It’s a rather large project. Unless I write a book, I don’t think I’ll ever write anything this big again (although I do hope I get to write a book someday). But 1000 words, that’s 1/30 of the whole thesis, which technically means I could be done in 30 days, if I write 1000 words every day! Thinking this made me feel really good yesterday.

And then today happened.

I didn’t get up as early as I planned, and I kept turning my alarm off and falling asleep. It was 7.20 by the time I managed to wake myself up, and even later before I got out of bed. Nevertheless – I made it to uni by the same time as  yesterday, even though I had to run for the second bus (I really should start to just walk instead of taking the first bus which does a major detour).

I made a plan for the first two-three hours of the day. But before I could start working I realized that I had to call the phone shop which yesterday I found out closes at 5. So I did that, and talked to two different people. Then I decided to just have a quick look at what’s on the marked, because I’ll be getting my money back and I need to buy a new phone so that I can return my friend’s old iPhone 4s to her. I haven’t decided on a phone yet.

Another student came into the office. I just call it the office because I don’t have a good English word for the Norwegian “lesesal” (which translates to reading hall, or study room, or I don’t even know). It’s a rectangular room with desks along the two long walls, we’re currently 8 people who have our separate desks in here. So I talked to her for a bit. Then a second came and we talked to her. Then I did the second person’s experiment for her thesis. Then a third student came in and we talked to her. The third and the first left, and I’ve now been talking to the second for over half an hour. And I’ve had a cup of coffee and eaten lunch.  It’s nearly 1pm and I’ve not done anything that I was supposed to yet.

And I want to leave at 5pm, because that’s the last bus that takes me almost home a lot faster than other buses. So I have four hours to get shit done. That’s almost as much time as I worked yesterday – I was here for 6 hours and had 1 hour and 45 minutes of break so IT’S DOABLE. Doesn’t mean I will… But today is the kind of day that as long as I get SOMETHING done, I’ll be happy.

I’ve been feeling a headache on the left side of my head most of the day as well. I should probably log  that… I’m keeping a headache log to show my doctor to confirm if I can get migraines…

Life is good!

~ Julie

A Friday Spent in my Bathrobe

Today is one of those days where I feel like all I’ve done is procrastinate and eat. And procrastinate by eating… I am terrible when it comes to giving myself credit for the things I’ve actually done, because I keep feeling bad about all the things I haven’t done.

• I’ve eaten breakfast.
• I’ve put up one painting and moved another so that the three paintings on my wall are equally spaced out.
• I’ve done two loads of laundry; whites, and a high-temperature one for towels and “unmentionables”.
• I’ve eaten lunch.
• I’ve folded the laundry and put all the items where they belong.
• I’ve walked to the pharmacy and the grocery store and back.
• I’ve eaten dinner.
• I started thinking about packing for the trip to England that I leave for on Sunday.
• I’ve paid two bills.

I guess I feel bad because I haven’t done too much academic work. I’m supposed to be writing my master’s thesis, for crying out loud! I have done something…

• At one point I had about 20 tabs open when searching for something (a friend had to send me the document in the end).
• I’ve rearranged some things in my literature review document.
• I’ve read some parts of a thesis my supervisor told me to read
• I’ve written about four lines of text, plus another three that need to go in the introduction, not the literature review.

My supervisor thinks finishing the literature review (after receiving feedback on my first draft last week) should take no more than two weeks. Which means I should be done by the time I get back from England and be ready to write the methodology chapter then. I’ve figured out that I need to write down exactly everything that I need to be and be as specific as possible and then break it down into when I plan to do it, otherwise I’m not gonna get anything done.

So I guess I’ve done some things today. I’ve not done literally nothing although that’s the feeling I’m left with a lot of the time. I haven’t done nothing, I just haven’t done enough… Does anyone have any tips on combating that feeling, that I haven’t done enough, and the general anxiety that comes with the feeling? TIA.

~ Julie

It gets better, I promise!

It’s not yet noon and I’m already exhausted. What a great way to start a blog entry, right? Definitely inspires the readers to go on! Bear with me though.

I had a doctor’s appointment today, had to run around to four different pharmacies, and ended up going back home instead of to uni. Now I’m sat, cross-legged in bed, with my laptop not quite balancing unless I keep my hands down, tears are drying on my cheeks. But they’re good tears.

Yesterday I posted the same entry in two different groups on facebook, asking for help managing time and balancing thesis work with taking care of myself (the latter seems to never be prioritized). I didn’t expect much, but I’ve got an enormous amount of response. Some more helpful than others, naturally, but the fact that someone actually sat down and wrote two, three, four paragraphs in response to my post, it’s quite overwhelming. I definitely got a few good tips and tricks that I will try out, starting today, after lunch, which I will eat after posting this entry.

I also wrote a really long ramble in a group chat to my two best friends not long ago. The amount of good words, hearts, and virtual hugs… I almost feel like I don’t deserve it. But when it comes to mental health – I have a history of being a bit destructive. And now it’s affecting my physical health, and possibly my future, so I need to turn things around.

I am, however, the queen of procrastination, so I think before I can do anything, I will have a nap!

~Julie

6.15

I need to find a way to actually get out of bed when my alarm goes off. Actually, I need to find a way to not check my phone and scroll through everything that’s happened on twitter and facebook since I fell asleep. I know the first thing everyone would suggest – to put my alarm away from my bed so that I have to get up to turn it off. I’ve tried that before. Doesn’t go so well. I usually end up going back and sit on my bed anyway. I suppose I could try putting my phone away, since I have a separate alarm clock, but most nights I fall asleep on the phone to my boyfriend and I can’t do that when my phone is somewhere else, so I really don’t know what to do. I’ve even sat and watched youtube videos on how to get up early without finding anything useful.

Writing a master’s thesis is all-consuming. It’s the first thing I think about in the morning. The last thing I think about at night. Sometimes my stomach clenches and I can’t breathe for worrying about this damn paper. And it’s not even like I’m that far behind. My supervisor said he didn’t expect me to start writing until this semester, and I started writing on the 9th of January, the first day of the semester, and I’ve spent 8 days actually writing, which if you think about it means I’ve had normal weekends and one day off writing a week, and I spent most of last week having migraines, and I’ve been to a workshop twice, and at least one day I was working but not writing. I feel like I’m making excuses. But I have nothing to make excuses for.

This morning I was thinking  about this all-consumingness of writing a thesis while attempting to curl my hair or something (the result is debatable, my hair doesn’t take curls very well). How do people do it? How do they live normal lives, with friends and boyfriends and girlfriends, shopping, going to the gym, traveling, enjoying life, laughing… How do they do it, without being sucked into the black hole that is thesis writing, without succumbing to fear, depression, panic… How? I really need to know.