PERSONAL

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Ugh, busy!

7 years ago843 words

I've been annoyingly busy failing to work on my dissertation recently.

I've been wanting to post a few things here, especially a post about body proportions since some people did actually send me drawings of bodies (thank you!) and I finished an assignment I was writing about that... so it's irritating that I've yet to find the time because of this dissertation.

A dissertation, if you don't know - I didn't until relatively recently - is essentially a large project that you work on throughout the final year of an undergraduate degree (the term can refer to other things too, but this is what mine is). For Psychology, this is a 4000-6000 word write-up of an experiment we've been working on throughout the year.

Irritatingly, though, we didn't get to design the experiment ourselves, and had only a vague choice about the general area we'd like to investigate. I chose the psychology of social robotics, since it sounded interesting, and, long story short, this means that I'm now working with an actual robot (∞ this thing ∞) in an experiment designed by a Postgraduate and a Master's student that seems to be about whether people make can make 'joint decisions' with robots... or something.

Since I had no say about the actual planning of the experiment and we only actually started running it last week, I haven't even been able to write anything meaningful on my dissertation for most of the year, which is irritating to me. Now that I actually can write it, or at least some of it (we don't have the experiment's results yet so I can't write at least half of it), I still don't even actually know what to write about because the experiment seems confusingly- and imperfectly-designed, both to me and the other two undergraduates I'm in a group with. They haven't started either.

It's all really frustrating, because I've done very little and spend much of my time just procrastinating out of uncertainty and apathy... I have a lot of things I want to do (updating this, for example), but end up doing nothing of any worth because the time I waste doesn't feel like time that's actually really available to me and... agh.

I just don't really care about this dissertation, or my grades anymore, or even this degree. I just keep thinking of how I'd love to just give it all up and go and live as a hermit, making things like art and music and 3D modelling and games. That, or I want to just kill myself because I know that path wouldn't be viable in the long term. But that's been a constant theme in my mind for years now anyway. Though I suppose it's worsened now that my only close friendship has been replaced with a whole lot of painful regrets that haunt me daily.

There's obvious 'advice' that could be given to me to get out of this situation, but the issue is a lack of motivation to even want to. If you want to change, to climb out of a hole you're in, then you can redirect your mind in a way that'll help you achieve that. But what if you have absolutely no desire to climb out of that hole at all? Then, the thought of, say, 'not dwelling on things' or 'getting out there' or 'just sticking with it' feels exhausting and irritating because it's like telling someone who has no interest in sport that they can become an Olympic athlete if they put their mind to it. "But that's not something I want at all", they might think, puzzled and annoyed at the suggestion. They're hardly going to go out and start training.

Anyway. I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I have to go in and do the experiment again shortly, which is why I'm writing this now - I can't concentrate on anything worthwhile if I know I have to go out later in the day - but after that I suppose I should just try to force myself to trudge through as much of this dissertation as I can...

One good thing that's come of all this is that I'm at least on friendly terms with one of the people in my dissertation group, who I have some meaningful things in common with (like general personality traits and anxiety). She's no substitute for the friend that I lost, and I'm wary about getting close to anyone because my mind is convinced that I'd only mess it up and hurt them anyway (the typical thing seems to be to be reluctant to enter new relationships after a bad breakup because "I don't want to be hurt again!", but that's a bit self-oriented, isn't it?), but it takes the edge off the loneliness at least. So that's something. I'm very aware though that the academic year will end very soon, and then that'll be that and I'll be alone again. I have mixed feelings about that.