On Lacking Motivation

It's the end of January and for the last two weeks or so, I've found myself feeling a loss of words, ideas, and desire to write. I keep trying to force myself to write something, but each time I sit at the computer, I just stare at it. I end up either reading bogus articles online that don't help my anxiety or watching episodes of Monk. I've tried to disable my internet so that I can't look at junk online, but whenever I open my current chapter to try to write something, (anything really) I can't. I get overwhelmed by my data and can't figure out what to do. I'd like to blame it on other things, such as not wanting to leave my house because it's -3 degrees outside, I'm sick and don't want to change out of my yoga pants, I don't feel like packing a lunch to go to my office, and so on and so forth. The truth is this chapter is just really boring and I don't have motivation to write it. My data is difficult and I can't work on any other aspect of my dissertation until I finish this darn chapter.

I shouldn't be surprised that this current chapter is difficult to write. I spent all summer copying entries from dictionaries onto note cards to find patterns. It was the most tedious part of my life as a graduate student. The miserable summer weather kept me from being motivated to work quicker so that I could get past the boring part of data collection. Now I am writing the chapter that presents the same data and once again, the weather sucks and my task seems incredibly dull.

After speaking to one of my committee members about my trouble explaining my data, he told me to just write the facts. The nice thing about data is that even when it is confusing, there is always something to explain. I grouped my data into patterns months ago, but until a few days ago, I couldn't seem to write anything about it. So I followed my committee member's advice and just started writing the facts. I now have roughly 9 pages of languages A, B, and C show strong examples of the change from terms meaning 'bone' to 'leg'. Language D possibly shows it and language E does not. I got through describing the first major pattern in my data and have three more to explain. This chapter is going to take forever to write and I only have until Thursday to finish it. Ugh.

The last time I met with Indy, we scheduled my defense date: April 26th at 10:00am. Indy wanted it to be in the afternoon, but I said that I didn't want to spend the whole day waiting for my defense. 10:00 it is (unless the other committee members have a conflict). I have to apply for graduation before February 5th and that means needing to finalize Geraldine's title. Again, I have no motivation to think of one. I need to give a complete draft of my dissertation to Indy by the end of spring break, which means I have 2 months to write 4 chapters and make my appendix user-friendly. It's crunch time and the only thing I feel like doing is sitting on my couch so that I can stare off into space.


Motivation, where have you gone? Please come back, I need you!