Monday. March 1st. I awake, and groaning, roll out of bed. I give the mirror a sarcastic look. It’s mocking me. Sweeping past my languid eyes to wave at my piles of work, and snickering. I turn away, open my computer. Look at the list. Thesis. Reading for my classes. Shift at the Motley. Start this project, finish that. At the bottom, pretending to be forgotten but actually omnipresent, my hardest challenge. Future plans.

Flashback. It’s January. The semester is new, fresh, shiny. The homework is introductory, midterms are far off, and the dining hall food still holds novelty for me. I look at my list. Thesis. Hard, long, but exciting and not extremely urgent. Classes. I like my readings, I like embarking on these new subjects. Work. A welcome break from academics. Choir. Super fun.

I add a line. Future plans, blog posts. I’m optimistic. I don’t know what I’m doing, and that’s exciting. There are limitless possibilities to explore, and I’m excited about looking at all of them. I surf through the Gateway portal, looking at all the positions I could apply for. There are so many! In so many locations! I start to add them to my favorites. Then I can go back, decide which to apply for. I see myself as over-achieving, churning out the words in my excitement.

Flash forward. Late February. I haven’t written a blog post in weeks. I’ve made great strides in other tasks, but I feel overwhelmed. The work doesn’t seem that excessive, but it feels like there are fewer hours in each day. I never seem to have enough time. Deep down, I know this is part of becoming an adult, and it’s not something that’s going to go away anytime soon. But how can I do it? How can I get done what I need to get done?

My senior friends seem to be have similar problems. Instead of smaller assignments that can be chopped into smaller parts, we have these longer projects that need to be taken in large chunks. Like thesis. I really don’t get anything done if I only have one hour. I need at least a three or four hour chunk to make progress. It’s similar with the job search, which I think is why I’m not as far along as I would like to be. I need to finish thesis to graduate. I’d like to find a job by then, but there’s no set deadline, so it feels a lot less urgent.

The variety of choices doesn’t help; each position has a different deadline. It makes it very easy to minimize the importance of each, in favor of thesis and classwork and sleep. But I really can’t do that any more. I need to make progress here.

I think for me, at this point, it’s an issue of buckling down and getting to work. The enthusiasm from the start of the semester isn’t gone, but it’s muted. It’s easy to wait until I feel like working on this. It’s even easier to forget that action comes before motivation, not the other way around. So here’s to a new morning, a new month, a new start on all the action. To jumping into the grudge work without the fiery passion for it, and keeping it going.