To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Friday, January 24, 2020
 

Do you notice how some days or weeks you get the feeling that anything that can go wrong will go wrong? Because one thing goes wrong you feel a little down and then another thing goes wrong and you feel downer and then a third and then you don’t know if things are going downer and downer because you’re approaching them half-heartedly or if there is actually something wrong in the configuration of stars during this period that even if you are your normal self—which usually works very well—people or situations are just not responding the way they usually do. The opposite is also true. Some days or weeks things go so well that they couldn’t go any better… of course, you just enjoy the good run then rather than turn to your blog ;)

It makes one wonder about the power of the mind. If you have a positive jumpstart mind-wise you already have a much higher likelihood of success and if you have a negative jumpstart, a much lower likelihood. This I would think is the reason I don’t end up doing very well many a times on standardised tests or formal presentations. My anxiety kicks in very bad when I am put under time pressure in the former and under the public gaze in the latter. I guess the fact that I am a bit (maybe a lot?) of a perfectionist and the thought of failure seems really dire to me that the anxiety and stress exacerbates. The conditions of my mind and of these sorts of situations come together to pretty much set me up for failure.

There are other situations where the anxiety and pressure of performance actually allow me to do a better job than usual. For instance, when I have to submit a paper or an essay and I push my writing very close to the deadline. I generally tend to write much better when the deadline looms close even though I am under considerable anxiety and pressure to deliver it by the deadline. I guess it might be that I feel far more in control of the situation in this instance than in the ones I mentioned before. Though I do have something of a time constraint it’s not like a clock actually ticking over my head; I can work overnight (which I sometimes do when I have less time) or I can break the task into mini steps and plan their completion. Come to think of it, the nature of the test in most standardised tests is also generally technical or mathematical which is not exactly my area of interest whereas papers or essays are of a more creative or argumentative character which is right up my alley. That might actually make a big difference to my anxiety levels because I approach the two types of activities with a different mental attitude too. I guess I wouldn’t experience the same level of anxiety or pressure if I had to write essays or papers with a clock ticking over me!

Formal presentations on the other hand bring out my fear of public speaking to the fore. I am afraid of going blank, I am afraid of losing my train of thought, I feel too self-conscious (do I sit, do I stand, what do I do with my hands), I think of all the things that could go wrong, if I fail I would fail publicly…It’s difficult to pin point what exactly it is but all these things put me in the mood for getting it over with rather than doing it very well. A defeatist rather than an enthusiastic attitude. I have tried many a times to change my mental mood and sometimes I have been successful too but the tremendous unnecessary work I have to put in to orient my mind positively to the task makes me not look forward to the task and that means I don’t do it that often and that becomes a vicious circle…

Reminds me of the two lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost that I love—

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 7:40 pm 0 comments
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