Stress

Hola a todos,

Something I really need to work on: not stressing myself out. Logically I know that its not worth it to get stressed out about things; as long as you do the best you can, whatever you produce is going to be all anyone can reasonably expect. I need to somehow turn this logical statement that I can say and undertand, into the way I act.

For example: In my class in the UBA (Argentine University) I am in way over my head. I am in the class with people finishing their majors in argentina history/historiography, when I've taking only 1 college level history class before in my life and had to look up historiography on wikipedia a week into the class... But besides that, my teacher is amazing. She is completely understanding of my situation, doens't want me to be stressed over my final project, wants me to work on something interesting and something that is going to be useful to me in terms of my interests and studies. So I couldn't ask for a better situation in that regard.

So why do I get so stressed out about this project?

1) First I think its because I'm doing this in Spanish and I don't have a good idea of my potential in Spanish. I don't know how long it takes me to read and fully understand complicated historical texts, to plan out a complex historiographical paper, or write a paper. Even though I a good 3 weeks to work, I guess I'm slightly worried that it won't be enough time to get this done. But who knows.

2) I feel like I have to say it all. I realized that I do this a lot: If I have a task, I feel like I have to exhaust the topic before I can focus on the part that I am going to focus on. For example, right now I'm writing about caracteristics of a historical text and I feel like I have to understand everything the text is saying before I can start pulling out characteristics. I've learned that this is a needless step. I can find 3 or 4 characterstics of the text, without understanding every complicated economic nuance or political change and still have a good thesis and paper. Obviously it would be ideal to understand everything in the text, but for the sake of sanity its not necessary at all. Therefore, I think I need to change from strategy for approaching projects such as this. Instead of going into a project with the mentalilty that I need to read everything and undrestand everything, I should set myself more realistic goals about what I am going to analyze and how. (This actually relates alot to historiography because historians can't take into account EVERY detail about the event they are explaining, they have to "blindar" or wall off what their focus is and what there sources are).

3) The other reason I feel stressed is because I don't put enough enfasis on the thinking part of the process. I feel that in order to make progress, I need to be reading, looking up a word, or finding more sources or texts, but the reality is that sometimes what's missing is just some good old brain work. One day I spent hours reading and trying to make progress on the paper, but then I go for a run or take a shower and suddenly I realize how two things relate or a new way of looking at the concepts I'm reading about. Recently I've been comparing two texts and I can be reading and picking apart the texts trying to find differences, but with just a few minutes of looking at the ceiling and thinking, I'm able to articulate so much better that important differences between the texts. My teacher always refers to this in class by saying "I'd rather have you spend 5 hours working for this class, reading for 2, thinking for 3, than have you spend 5 hours just reading" It makes us think about how to spend our time studying and how to get the most out of it. I think sometimes I get scared of this part because it doesn' always produce results in which case there is a small fear that I might spend all this time and not have anything from it. But on the other hand, the most innovative and worthy ideas won't come out of the text that is already written. Those ideas will have to come from a pumpin brain (is that gross? I don't mean it to be).

In the end, I'm in a great position because no one knows my capabilities in Spanish, so I can't really be held to any standard. I'm just going to do my best and that's that. I hope that with the next big project I get in life I will be able to avoid feeling such stress.

Hasta luego,
Kati