How Writing Essay's Make Me Not Want to Learn

I keep looking at the clock, the hours are ticking down until I hand in yet another late assignment. I can feel my heart start to race, my palms become slick, and heat rushes to my face. It's going to be late again, and it won't even be a good essay, I've wrecked it again, and I can't even think.

It wasn't always like this, the pandemic exacerbated the stress I put on myself to do well academically. Someone who always did well in school, who thrived on the structure and absoluteness of high school and all the extracurriculars.

Band, soccer, rugby, track, interact club, photography club, basketball, cross country, the school newspaper. Not to mention keeping up with four classes each semester.

I look back and it exhausts me, how much I did. But now I look at my to-do list and am shocked at how difficult it is to complete.

Two essays, study for one midterm, maybe get to the gym. Just remembering to eat is hard enough.

What happened? How could I be so efficient in high school only for that to drop off the minute I had more time to myself.

When everything went online, and all my practices stopped, the days opened up into an endless void of free time. Time to do whatever I wanted, and somehow this translated into half-completed things, and no motivation to complete a school year, a senior year, that would go down in history as one of the most pitiable ones ever.

As I started university online, I faced a lot of the same. Stuck with motivating myself I adopted a lot of painful language to try and get myself to actually do something.

"You suck, how are you this dumb? This lazy? It's just one stupid essay, you've written stories three times as long, in half the time. Just do it. You're sitting there, it's right in front of you, whats the matter with you??"

That's the thing, I don't know. I can sit in front of my computer for hours, just staring at the screen to try and think of something, anything for this essay to write down. But nothing comes, I have no motivation, no ideas.

I look up how to start essays, articles on my topic, still nothing. My heart keeps pounding, the due date has passed, I'm going to get a low mark again. Worthless.

None of it helps, not the awful words towards myself, not the meditating or the endless google searches on how to fix myself.

People I talk to say the same thing "Yeah, I can't ever focus until the last minute either." "I hand things in late all the time, I just can't focus on it."

Maybe moving everything online, killed everyone's motivation to do well, to keep up. It did all seem pointless, I don't think I retained most of that first year of online university.

But why is it still happening? Nothing seems to work, I can never write essays anymore.

It might be something else, but all I get from it is an aversion to well, I might as well give up if I can't even finish an essay right?

But somehow I don't. I keep going, even though the anxiety seems to get worse everytime a due date rolls around.

I know in my head I shouldn't stress, but it stops the thoughts from whirling. Especially as the grade penalty is dolled out.

I no longer feel the obsessive need to get amazing grades, but the anxiety is still there if something goes uncompleted.

I love to listen to people talk about the subjects in my classes, I love absorbing things. But my mind clams up when thinking about putting my thoughts into an essay that I can't help from wanting to be perfect or not done at all.

Maybe it's because now I don't have a teacher reminding me every day in class, maybe it's because the world is under stress and I still haven't sorted through how to deal with it yet, maybe it's because of something completely else.

If I found out the answer I'll let you know.

Here's to keeping writing, even if it's painfully.