Saturday, February 9, 2008
It's hard to believe that with only three weeks of the semester under my belt, I am feeling as stressed as I am. This does not bode well for the weeks to come when midterms, papers and finals take what precious little free time I have now.
But, the stress I feel seems to have less to do with the quantity of work I need to do and more with a frustrating inability to do it. Wednesday night, I budgeted an hour of time to finish my preaching assignment. I had done my biblical exegesis, consulted the commentaries, drawn some conclusions and all I had left was to add footnotes and 'state the claim' of my sermon. This little, one-sentence thesis statement should not have taken me three hours and many, many tears to complete. But it did.
I woke up at 5am the next morning with intense muscle cramps in my legs. I managed to get another hour or so of sleep before attending my 8am class and heading to preaching at 9:30, only to find out, we have two assignments due next week, one of which includes actually preaching the sermon I should be writing at this very moment. I left preaching feeling anxious and before I knew it, my legs were cramping up again, my hands were shaking and as I sat on a couch at school trying to study, I found myself completely unable to focus. I wanted to run away-hide in a cave for a few days and blow off everything that would be required of me in the next week.
Now, this is problematic on several levels. First, it is ridiculous for my anxiety levels to manifest themselves in physical ways. I have juggled much more than my workload now in the past without any severe symptoms of abnormal anxiety. Secondly, I felt unsure of what to do to make it better. Should I push through it, steadily marking off my to-do list in hopes that the anxiety decreases as I accomplish more? Or should I forget trying to be productive, and take some time off, neglecting my to-dos for the sake of my health? I think I did a little of both. I went for a walk, I had myself a good cry (about what, who knows?) and then I did a ton of homework.
But the deeper issue remains: what the heck was that about? Are my insecurities about academic performance getting so severe that I can't write a simple focus statement without a mental breakdown? Or is it something about preaching--a very public determination of my abilities--that has me scared? Of course, the irony of all this is that the more anxious I am, the less I am likely to do a good job at anything. The more I can feel aloof and ambivalent about an assignment or class, the better I end up doing on assignments. But where does this pressure to be the best come from? I struggled writing a theme for my sermon because I knew that all the stuff I was coming up with was just not creative enough, not compelling enough, not impressive enough. Mind you, this first sermon isn't even graded!
I feel like I'm broken. I can rationalize away at all the potential reasons for this recurring paralysis; I can rationally say that it really doesn't matter what my sermon is about as long as I write and preach it well! But at the end of the day, whatever I think rationally doesn't transfer to wherever it needs to go to take root. I do know that 1) I don't have time for this and 2) I am ready to move on. But how?
