A Lot of Stress and the End of a Cold Winter

The end of March and all of April was a challenging time for me. I had two major assignments to complete as well as my thesis proposal, all due within about 3 weeks of each other. For about 5 weeks I woke up, ate breakfast, and then read what seemed like an endless list of journal articles and wrote paragraph after paragraph. Most days I would stop around 8 or 9 pm then manage a mind numbing activity like watching the telly before falling asleep and doing it all over again the following day. I started to dream about my assignments and felt guilty in my sleep because I was not writing. I found that one paper made me question everything I thought I knew about the world and my place within it, which resulted in my first and very profound existential dilemma! It was by far the most awful writing experience. It is a horrible feeling when you can’t string two thoughts together in a coherent manner and the more you look at a piece of writing in an attempt to improve it the less confident you become. My confidence in my writing ability definitely took a hit and I am not sure it has fully recovered. Needless to say, I could not have been happier or more relieved to finally hand it all in. Every ounce of creativity and will to write was put towards my assignments! I miss writing for fun.

It was only about 3 weeks ago, that mass hibernation ceased and the general zombie like appearance of Edinburgh residents began to dissipate. The sun made a few appearances, the rain ceased and days became longer. I finally started to feel like I could recover from mental battery and exhaustion, physical lethargy and a general spiritual recession. Simply said, the Scottish winter was long, dark and cold and I would take a Calgary winter over this any day!