Day 20: Get real. Share something you’re struggling with right now (#BEDM).

Honestly?  I don’t have a lot of worries. I don’t struggle often.

Occasionally stuff happens and I sort it out, by one means or another, and then I move on to whatever’s next, but generally I lead a very stable, untroubled life.

But there is this one thing...

I have, for the last 3 years, been undertaking my masters degree. It has, in the main, not been a struggle. It’s not that demanding really. You have to turn up, you have to write essays and assignments every couple of months, but it’s designed for practising teachers, so time-wise, it’s really not been that big a deal.

Of course, doing anything like that on top of working full time in a damn nuisance at times. It’s kind of hard to get motivated having been teaching all day.  But generally it’s not vexed me too much.

Then this year I have had to write my dissertation.

After school. In the evenings. Or at weekends.

And fucking check me out- I’ve been a MACHINE! I have burned through it at amazing speed. And the quality has not, it appears, suffered as a result.

Why then, do I include this as my nod to struggling?

Ay, gentle reader, there’s the rub. The reason I have worked at such a ferocious pace on this undertaking is not because I am motivated, inspired and captivated by my study. It is not because I am conducting important, valuable and stimulating research. It is not because I am enthusiastic about improving myself, expanding my mind and advancing our understanding of educational theory.

It is because I. DO. NOT. WANT. IT. IN. MY. LIFE. ANY. MORE.

I cannot wait for the day that I don’t have to think about. That there isn’t this little voice in the back of my head whispering ‘you should really be working.’ Because whilst it doesn’t tax me particularly, and the rate of work necessary isn’t especially strenuous, I simply cannot live with THE GUILT.

Sometimes I go for weeks without doing any work at all on it. You might extrapolate from this that it therefore doesn’t concern me. But it’s ALWAYS THERE. The guilt. It’s still there waiting to be done.

Consequently, I have pushed it through at quite astonishing speed. My dissertation supervisor congratulates me on my enthusiasm. Little does she know that I am not enthusiastic. I am not motivated. I am motivated only by the prospect of NEVER HAVING TO SEE HER STUPID FACE AGAIN.

And you know what?

Today I finished it.

It’s sort of been finished for a while now. But today I opened up my ridiculously massive 12MB Word document and did the final sorting out. Margins, contents page numbering, formatting – Essentially, making it look pretty.

And you know? It was a bit of a struggle. Every time you make a tiny adjustment, stupid bloody Word shunts everything around, and all your chapters move down a bit. Then all your page numbering is wrong, and all your graphs and figures are suddenly on different pages. It was actually quite stressful. Right at the bitter end, you just want to do it, save it, close it and forget about the fucking thing, but it wasn’t that straight forward.

But now it’s done.

Now I don’t have to worry about The Guilt any more...