Separation Anxiety is defined as ‘anxiety provoked in a
young child by separation or threat of separation from its mother or main carer’.
Writing as someone who has just submitted the second draft of their creative
thesis to their supervisor – still 18,000 words shy of the length it should be,
might I add – I feel like I’m currently in a steady position to widen that
definition – or at the very least, add an alternative meaning to it, perhaps.
Separation Anxiety (2):
The feeling experienced by tortured creative types on
distributing their work to a group of people who aren’t morally obligated to
care about their feelings, and will therefore give them (brutally) honest
feedback on their submission.
When you look at it that way, I think the anxiety I’m
feeling right now is legitimate. Entirely useless and fairly debilitating when
it comes to establishing a proper work regime for the remaining chunk of my
thesis, which I still haven’t written. But legitimate, nevertheless.
For the past few weeks my mantra has been, ‘I just want rid
of it for a bit now. I can’t stand to look at it anymore.’ I was elated by the
prospect of having the book off my plate for a while, sinking gleefully back
into research and flinging around some opinions like I knew what I was talking
about – which I sometimes do, depending on which research paper I’m thinking of
writing that day (yes, it really is that changeable). But now the time has come
and, like an anxious mother leaving the house without the baby for the first
time, I am plagued by a series of feelings and questions that I should – should – be pushing to the back of my
mind in an orderly fashion. So nervous am I, in fact, that I’ve started to
second guess what my supervisor will find wrong with the book!
I think the plot is thinner in this one, and the pace,
which lagged in the first draft, is now too fast-moving – hence the major drop
in the word count and oh yes, let’s not forget that problematic word count. Despite
not viewing these as real-life issues with the book ahead of emailing it in –
and therefore doing nothing to fix them – they are now top on my list of
expected critiques, to the point that I may email my lecturer shortly:
Dear –,
I was wrong. This isn’t the second draft. Please disregard
previous email. DO NOT read document that was attached. I’ll be in touch.
Best –
One of your stress-ball students.
I am over-shooting this slightly, I know.
They are the issues I expect to hear back on from my
supervisor, but I’ve also not ruled out the possibility that I’m totally wrong
about them – maybe the pace is much better this way, and with a shorter book
comes a more condensed plot and so maybe that’s fine too. The word count is,
for me, an ongoing issue, but the underlying idea behind sending this second
draft out to not only my supervisor but also to readers outside of a university
setting is that they can read it and tell me what’s missing – because I know
that something is and, given that this is the second draft of the book, I know
that it’s perfectly acceptable for something to be missing at this stage. That’s
my logical hat that I’m wearing there. But, while straddling the line between
writer and academic, not quite knowing whether I am actually either of those
things, I reserve the right to wear my illogical hat on occasion – because I
wear that one particularly well.
Separation Anxiety (3):
The feeling of anxiety experienced in post-graduate
university students on realising that a) time is no longer in close proximity
and is, in no uncertain terms, slipping away from them and b) their ideas for
their research paper are slowly slipping away from them also, causing both the
student and the research paper to become two entirely separate entities that no
longer live harmoniously together, and show no signs of doing so for some time.
But I’ll bank that for a future blog post.
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