It’s a lot like a broccoli plant.
October 22, 2008
Writer’s block, sure.
Art block, hell yes.
What about assessment block? I don’t know about anyone else, but I seem to be stuck in an enormous ditch of assessment. Here’s me, with dirt everywhere, in my fingernails, smears on my face, clumped in my hair. I scrabble frantically at the walls of the hole, but somehow the ditch keeps getting deeper and deeper, drowning me in assessment. Usually, I’m a proficient scrabbler, I can stay on top of the ditch, but I don’t know how…I’ve somehow lost the ability. Have I forgotten? Is it repressed under a blanket of other emotions, thoughts? Why would I slack off, this is the most important part of college. Am I afraid?
And its likely that therein lies the problem. Quite often, a ‘block’ is the direct result of some kind of fear. Fear of rejection stunts aspiring authors, as does fear of failure, humiliation, success, change, octopi. The same applies to artists, students and anyone else trying to achieve something. I think I most of the time I’m in some sort of ‘production block’, whether artistic, literary or assessment-oriented.
In this day and age, it’s really just a justification – an excuse for poor results. It’s much easier to lay the blame elsewhere than to admit failure on a personal level. The odd thing is, it’s healthy to do so – like it is healthy for your memory to forget (both apply only to a reasonable point). Remembering every detail of your life often isn’t as cool as it’s made out to be. Your head would be cluttered with all sorts of useless information, like the shape of the piece of gum on your shoe. Forgetting is also a defense mechanism, a response to trauma. Having memory of every detail would mean that it would be difficult to progress, to go anywhere. You’d be trapped in all the detail. Similarly, if you took every small failure in your life as evidence of your inadequacy, it becomes detrimental to your self-esteem (or according to Bandura, self efficacy). Bandura continues that if your self efficacy is low, it will be difficult to achieve anything – it’s a vicious cycle. That was all my fault, I’m inadequate, I’m a failure – I won’t try on this next task, I’ll only fail it. And of course, if you don’t try, you don’t succeed so its taken as evidence of inadequacy again.
On the other hand, constant justification and redistributing blame outwards means that you never have to be responsible for your own actions. Not only that, you have no reason to improve, after all, you’re perfect – it’s everyone else that needs to change.
These days it’s far too easy to pass something off as a disease, a disorder or with some kind of label. You’ve all heard them, “I’m so depressed”, “It’s her asthma”, or the favourite for Idol singers “I have the flu”. I think there are several problems with this. For one, it leads to what I mentioned earlier – justification and the removal of responsibility. Also, the disease becomes a label for which all behaviour may be seen as evidence of abnormality, take the study by Rosenhan where he sent subjects who were not mentally ill into psychiatric institutions. Half of them were diagnosed with schizophrenia. This means that, not only is it detrimental to those who really do suffer from those illnesses, it aids the social label – that a person with cancer can only be a person with cancer, and not an engineer who skiis in her free time.
Finally, by medicalising the problem, you are submitting it into the school of thought where a cure is more important than care. A cure is the modern thought-school. If you’re sad, take a pill. If you’re crazy, take a pill. There’s less focus on the eating healthy and exercising, the sleeping eight hours and getting good old fashioned sunshine. Of course, some people need drugs and I’m not undermining the importance of this. I just can’t stand it that everything must be applied to that level. For most people, there are always bad days, sad days, crazy days, mad days. What ‘care’ is all about is the good lifestyle that is permanent, and not something to take up when you’re feeling bad.
Unlike the ‘cure’ supporters, I don’t think pain is the root of all evil and horror in the world. I think pain, like most other things is necessary in moderation. Those ‘Children’s Panadol” advertisements out there, I really dislike them. It depicts a parent saying “It’s my pain too” – if it’s your pain, then you go take a pill. Don’t fill your baby with drugs! Real pain, yes, but a cough, a cold? I believe that someone’s childhood has an enormous impact on their later lives. If you remember those examples of children who were raised in plastic bubbles, the ones who never left home in case they got sick and never played sport because they might get bruised? This generation of children will be similar to that. They will have no pain threshold, and be entirely dependent on drugs. Hooray for Generation Z, the baby druggos. Of course, the drug industry loves this market because as the children grow up, they build a resistance to baby panadol – meaning the industry must develop stronger and more chemically infused pills.
I have nothing else to say, other than that I will not give drugs to my child unless it is absolutely necessary. I have wandered so far from my launch pad. Oh well, half the point of this blog was to learn me some writing structure.
I may remove this at a later date. It will make me embarrassed in some way, I know it.
G’night imaginary readers!
