Abrahm Thrasher: The Power of Procrastination
As a mass communications student I was no stranger to large projects, and I knew how demanding they can be. I knew that doing grant work alongside my regular schoolwork would, politely, completely ruin my schedule for the next however long it took to get it done. I knew going into it that grant work is a mountain that only gets bigger the deeper into it you go. However, I also knew that my focus was something I was passionate about: it was something I cared about for years before I ever wrote the literature review.
My research was (and is) into Translation Bias, which describes the phenomenon in translation where the translator’s personal prejudices and biases about society are projected on and fundamentally changes parts of the work they’re translating. This project started when I did a paper on The Epic of Gilgamesh my freshman year and spiraled out of control ever since. It then turned into a twelve minute conference presentation that expanded on the ideas in the paper. Then three years later, my junior year, I applied to The SC Board of Humanities for their undergraduate grant program and received nine hundred dollars to read sixteen versions of The Epic of Gilgamesh and write a paper on them. My work involved history, linguistics, queer theory, and sociology, but it’s an odd thing to put on a CV.
I spent, accounting for the time where I did nothing with it, roughly nine months with this project. It’s the longest I have ever spent to complete anything I have been given money for, starting in January and ending in November. The longer I spent with it the more work it became, until three weeks before the conference where it would be presented I was knee deep in historical studies on the South African San People. This is a problem I have when working on large projects: I leave my scope. I have never known how to pace myself, how to stop myself from running with an idea until it grows beyond what I’m capable of. I became my own worst enemy by adding tasks that didn’t need doing, tracking down texts I never used once I had them, and worst of all wading into academic discourse far beyond what I needed to understand for the sake of making my point. The upside is that I learned quite a bit about game reserve land management.
Making this phenomenon worse was the fact that I had to leave my field in order to fully explain what I was trying to show. I had to explore Mesopotamian and Akkadian history to prove that there was a concept of queerness and women’s agency in that time period. I had to learn art history to explain the reliefs I used as examples of their public consciousness. I had to learn how academics communicated through papers, the intricate language of editorials and rebuttal papers and competing research that I had never experienced first hand before. Partway through this process I had to chip away at one of the pillars of my project because I had found scholarship that debated whether certain phenomena even existed in the first place. I found a great deal of literature that I disagreed with. The more I learned, the more I felt like I did not know what I was talking about, the more worried and anxious I got about the final product and how I sounded to other people.
The biggest problem with my grant work, however, were the expectations I had set up for myself. Once again I had spent nine months and some change with this idea, perfecting it and adding to it until it became the twenty minute presentation I gave on November 14th. From the moment I received the grant check in the mail I felt the expectation to make this something that was worth it. That expectation to make this project “worth it” hung over my head for the entire time I worked on it. Around month three it had really crawled into my brain and made a home there, and grew into a hotbed of anxiety. The expectations outgrew the project and became so bad that I began taking long “breaks,” first for burnout and then because I became terrified of touching it. The work got done in exhausting bursts rather than on a steady and healthy schedule. I had never had to pace myself or schedule my efforts for a project that took this long and I didn’t learn how until the month of November.
This was also my first off-campus conference experience--off-campus as in the event was hosted off campus while I sat in a classroom in the Learning Center and, in the most distilled moment of COVID-19 life I had experienced this fall, watched the host struggle to get his audio to work. It was during the application to this conference and the grant as a whole that I learned how to take criticism without having a mental breakdown. My thirteen page literature review went through an email chain where it was whittled down, expanded, redlined, and picked to shreds before it was ready. My one page abstract for SAMLA 2020 went through the exact same treatment. I learned that criticism against my academic performance or writing was not criticism against my intelligence or my ability. It was not an indictment against the validity of my ideas. It was the first time in my life that I could internalize that.
Internalizing that helped when the perfectionist anxiety set in. The longer I spend on projects, and I believe this is a common thing, the harder it is for me to let it go. The more time it spends in my sole possession the more I feel that it has to be absolutely perfect before I release it. By the time the two week deadline hit it had become a gargantuan task to condense everything I wanted to say into the package I thought it deserved. Those two weeks were filled with terror as it dawned on me that this idea, my work would finally have to see the light of day. I needed it to be absolutely perfect. Until I was told that conferences were basically auditions for your final product. I had never been to a conference before, but performances I am more than comfortable with. After almost a year of thinking of this project as separate from everything else I was doing the thing that finally helped me finish it was tying it back into my own life at the end.
Abrahm Thrasher is a Senior mass communications major at Lander University. His focus is broadcast and his academic studies center on queer theory. He hopes to have a career in radio when he graduates in fall, 2020.