potential
2003-11-30
The humidity lingers in the air tonight, robbing me of energy and strength. Sleep beckons, but I do not yield to its calls. Instead, I choose to write here. I commit words to paper right now because I need to feel it; I need the tactile sensation of the pen between my tired fingers. I need to know something real in this world of cardboard.
As my brother so gleefully leaves the fold of high school this year, I too walk towards an impending graduation. Yet while Michael closes a door behind him with emphatic relief, looking happily towards pastures of green, I am waylaid – as always - by the marauding bands of uncertainty and fear. I will be graduating from my Health Sciences degree this December. Donning the robes of academia, I will shake hands with someone outrageously official, collect the impersonal piece of paper that somehow signifies my efforts over the past three years, and walk away with the paralysing fear that I have no idea where I am travelling, emotionally as well as vocationally.
Next year, I am supposed to find a way to write a thesis. By all accounts, this should be the defining challenge of my university tenure. In fact, it will be the defining challenge of my life heretofore. Yet, I remain paralysed in the face of it. There is barely a flicker of ambition to be felt. All I feel is hopelessly outmatched and overwhelmed. I cannot find an original ‘angle’. I cannot narrow down my topic. I cannot do anything that a ‘real’ writer should when approaching this task. Where has my passion fled? Why has this year led me ever further down the path of apathy and procrastination? Why can I not conjure up that undying flame of ambition that once fueled my every project?
Never before has my commitment to writing and my drive towards academic achievement been called upon to such a degree. Yet the irony is that at the pinnacle of my academic ‘career’, I cannot seem to find the inner strength I once possessed. It disappoints me beyond reckoning, and frustrates every fibre of my being. To be this close to embarking on my first ‘true’ work of writing, and yet to lack the focus and ambition it requires, is tearing me apart.
I am putting myself ‘on the line’ for this project. To take up honours next year, I have had to defer my law degree. I have put myself in a freefall position, where I must either leave university sooner than I had planned, or remain for at least twelve months longer than expected. In other words, I will either be thrown prematurely into the workforce, or languish at university until I am twenty-five. Neither outcome inspires happiness.
Law has never been an easy or enjoyable degree, and many times I have rued the day I took it up. But by the same token, law is a degree that promises a strong and secure career path. It carries the same kind of prestige that going to a private high school would have had, if I hadn’t been a public school student. Public health honours does not offer the same level of comfort and prestige. Why would I choose it over law, you may ask? The reason I chose to sacrifice a year of my life and possibly the remainder of my law degree was because I believed I had a passion for public health that should be given the chance to reach its potential. Yet sitting here today, confronting the doubt in my words, I am seriously beginning to wonder whether that passion is enough justification. In fact, I even wonder whether that passion still holds sufficient strength to withstand my doubts.
It almost seems as though writing a thesis is something completely alien and daunting to me, and yet it should not be. I have been writing stories, anecdotes, essays and poetry since I first learnt how. Always have I been a writer, in one form or another. A thesis is simply an opportunity to put all of that practice, passion and experience into a larger and more ‘mature’ format. Really, all this project symbolises is the progression of my ‘skills’ from those of a schoolgirl to those of a grown woman. It should not be something so overwhelming that I do not feel capable of meeting the challenge.
What I need is that most precious of resources: confidence. I have long aspired to become an ‘author’. Dreams of bound and published books bearing my name still teasingly flaunt across my mind at times, promising a future of ‘completion’ I have yet to achieve. There have also been many occasions when I have doubted that I could ever be what those dreams suggest. In truth, if I continue to neglect my writing as I currently do; if I continue to lack the commitment needed to sit down at my computer and devote as much of my free time as possible to the task of writing, I will fulfill those doubts. I will never become an author if I continue to be afraid of it. I will never become an author if I continue to hold the ambivalent attitude that at once dreams of becoming what I desire, but at the same time fears the process involved in walking that ‘path’.
Many things stand as mental obstacles, obscuring and frustrating not only my efforts, but more importantly, my confidence. I am often haunted by the idea that I am too ‘old’ now to make much progress. At nearly twenty-one years of age, I should have at least written a number of short stories and entered them into writing competitions. I should have at least produced a significant piece of finished work. I should have at least achieved something more than an Internet journal. All I have are unfinished works, unpublished and neglected poetry, and short stories I wrote in high school. All I have are sketches for novels and failed projects spanning the last five years of my life.
Another thing that constantly gnaws at my resolve is the fact that I am not studying anything at university that even remotely relates to the skill and process of writing. I have not taken up a Bachelor of Arts; I do not take creative writing courses; I do not study English. Health Sciences and Law seem to run in a completely different tangent. I do not even devote nearly enough of my spare time to the task of writing. Always, it is sublimated to the ever-present demands of study and work. Often, I am so exhausted by everything else that in my spare time, all I feel like doing is playing video games or hiring a DVD. How, then, could I even believe I have the skills, credentials and commitment to become a writer?
What these obstacles amount to is a constant, corrosive doubt. Inside, I have a persistent, stubborn dream to become a writer, yet on the outside, I have not made any significant moves in that direction. I dream big, but in real life, I remain mediocre and unknown. I want my words to affect people, to stir imaginations and raise questions, and yet, have I ever really achieved this in a significant way? What I have is a constant disparity between what I hope for, and what I have actually achieved. I stubbornly persist in my hopes, and I continue to work on my ideas and my projects. But as I grow older, I also grow more aware of the possibility that my persistence just isn’t overcoming my paralysis. None of it seems to be enough.
Perhaps I now have an exit from this quicksand. Perhaps, in taking up honours, I have been granted the one-off opportunity to truly prove myself as a writer for the first time. Maybe, just maybe, this is my chance to overcome the obstacles and gain the measure of confidence I need to become the substance of my dreams. In some bizarre way, it seems the universe agrees. I have been surrounded recently by reminders of what I am about to begin for myself, almost to the point where it has gotten me believing in ‘signs’. In fact, a good part of my job at work in the library lately has been sitting myself in front of a scanner and making digital copies of the abstracts of thousands upon thousands of theses held at the library. The things are everywhere at the moment, brought down from the dusty shelves of special collections for a big project aimed at making it easier for students to access theses. The library has even given me extra hours just for this task. Everywhere, there are reminders of what I have chosen to create next year: on trolleys, on shelves, on scanners and photocopiers. Those ‘reminders’ have also come from other sources.
It was not until recently that I truly considered the task of writing a thesis as the task of an author. A couple of months ago, I struck up a conversation with a fellow student in my law tutorial. I mentioned that I was taking up honours next year, and he remarked that he would love to write a thesis because it would be great to have a ‘published piece of work at the end of it that was all yours’. His words gave me a perspective I had not really considered before, although looking back, it should have been blindingly obvious. Writing a thesis will be exactly like writing a book. Because it is a public health thesis with a qualitative, sociological focus, I will also have some license in being creative and articulate in the way it is written. My supervisor is a cultural anthropologist by trade, and I can be sure that she will guide me well in developing a thesis which is more than a dry, scientific expedition.
Why then, with such opportunity and support at hand, do I remain transfixed in my quagmire of doubt? As always, it amounts to fear. I have found it difficult to choose a topic because I have been afraid that it would not be acceptable. I have neglected to spend time in narrowing down my topic because I do not believe I can find an original angle. I want to write about the refugee situation in Australia, but I am afraid that it has been too widely covered for little, insignificant me to contribute anything valuable to the discourse. In fact, these fears have been self-fulfilling, for in my reluctance, I have neglected to delve deep into the literature in order to gauge what has been covered, and what has not. In my fear, I have written myself off before I have even begun.
Ultimately, this fear of mine has got to end. It has been the most widely destructive element in my life. And now, it carries the potential to destroy any chance of giving my aspirations a fair go. Through fear, I have quashed my potential too many times. Now, I have two choices: remain afraid and never see my dreams made flesh, or venture stalwartly forth with a clear and open mind, ready to seize that which I have hoped for.
What a shame it would be to take the former path simply because I was too much of a coward to see what I could contribute to the world.
