What if this was enough?

Alright mates,

I write this against the clock as I am due to head out the door in about an hour. So, with a bit of a flame to my feet, I am going to just do the thing and write this post - and I apologise in advance for any errors that this stream of consciousness may invoke.

Did you know?

Alongside my continued counselling practice, I’m four subjects away from completing a Psychology undergrad.

This has been A Process.

Before I enrolled, I had not been a student for the best part of fifteen years.

I had not been a particularly good student then.

I am a better student now (a very low bar, but one I am happy to clear), but one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced since returning to study is….just doing the work. I don’t mean procrastination (although there has been a lot of that), I mean just doing the work and……

that being enough.

I have expended a lot of energy on a fairly unrealistic expectation that every piece of work across a three year degree HAD to be aiming for 100%. That if it wasn’t at that level, I was somehow wasting my time or being almost disrespectful to people who have helped fund my studies (myself included). It has not been helped by the fact that I have done my entire degree online, so am at the mercy of chat groups with fellow students to maintain a degree of social contact. Turns out people like to tell other people when they are getting top marks or are five weeks ahead of everyone else’s study. Funny that.

Things got to a point where I found this unrealistic level of expectation on myself fairly crippling, and this resulted in me not doing my work until the very last possible minute (yes, a fairly new concept for students young and old). I brought this to therapy a lot, and went through the same story a lot, when I was given the simple question of:

‘Why don’t you just submit a piece of work and see how it feels to sit with that?’

*Lightbulb*

Another therapy revelation - what if I just did something AND THAT WAS ENOUGH?

What if we all just did our own stuff, and that was enough?

I’m not going to get into a huge diatribe about this, because again time is of the essence - but the notion of quiet quitting - doing your work and not going further, being some sort of mIlLeNiAl iSsuE is just complete and utter bollocks. It’s just…doing your job?

Since embracing just doing my work, things have become a fair bit easier. That does not mean that the old monster doesn’t rear it’s head - just ask my wife who has had to deal with me complaining about a five minute presentation that was worth a whole 10% of one of my grades this weekend. But in the end, I did it, it was enough, and the main thing?

It was done.

Much like this blog for this week.

Onwards,

Richard

Thank you for reading. I appreciate everyone who does. You can find out more about my private practice at richardbrowne.com.au.

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