The Fear

At the beginning of this, my final year, we had an introductory talk from our course tutor. He told us about what to expect and so on, and then about 'the fear'. At some stage, he said, every one of the people in my year is going to get the fear, when they realise that this is IT. Four years of hard work coming to and end. Or, the terror when you realise that - because my course is old school - nothing, yes nothing, has counted so far and everything rests on how well you perform over the next few months. 

Well, this morning I woke up with what can only be described as the fear. A feline representation of this is as follows: 

I have, as I knew I would, developed the fear too early so that it is terrifying me but not motivating me. You have to develop the fear close to (but not too close to) deadline day (April)  and exam season (May/June). However, I have it now. In January. So, all I am doing is running around panicking about how much there is to do in what now seems like very, very little time and reminding myself I don't seem to know anything at all about philosophy. By now I was supposed to be coming up with amazing reasons for why Plato's theory of the Forms is nonsense. Surprisingly, I'm not quite there. 

My attempt to remedy the fear (or at least squash it down until a more appropriate time) is going to be to make myself a timetable. I'm sure this will work, assuming I can find time to devise it. I have a lot of panicking to do.

Anyway, despite the fact this all sounds very bleak, I have actually managed to do some work over the past couple of days. I have now done 1 and 3/4 of my ethics essays for this term (again, these count for nothing! You'd think I'd work on something which had a point, but no). I have also established I will not have to be working a full-time job and writing 5,000 words a week, which is also good. And last week I did manage to write some of my dissertation. I will probably delete all of it as it's highly likely to be nonsense, but still.


However, there is still a lot to do. Including my philosophy of language pre-submissions. Which do count. This may be one of the reasons I appear not to be doing them.