Welcome back: A lot of rewinding and some more thoughts on the writing process.

I have been terrified of writing. Some of the thoughts that are feeding this fear are:

1. There is not point, you are going to fail.
2. Even if you write the contribution is going to be too small almost insignificant so I lose the incentive and motivation to write, the reward is inconsistent with the emotional and cognitive effort that I think that I need to exert.

Since the beginning, I have always at the back of my mind this idea that I need to write everyday, even if I don’t feel like it or if I don’t know what to write. Sometimes that helps, but I think it has created this underlying pressure that if I don’t do it I fail.

I know from my experience in writing so far that I need to be quite clear about what I want to write and how. So I realized today that maybe this idea suggested by other people might not be the most constructive strategy for me. I need to process more information and read more until I actually have an overarching structure of what I want to write, even if this does not necessarily correspond to a strict outline that I put down in paper.

And I think that after reading again most of the book on which my methodology is based, I have now reached this pivotal point where I can actually start writing.

I am not saying that this is going to be just writing from now on, but I realized that instead of being more attentive to a way of doing research that is closer to my way of thinking, I have been trying to impose a certain structure that has proven so far rather unproductive. I get discouraged by my own thoughts and expectations that I set based on what other people say I should do. I am not saying that they are wrong in their suggestions, I do understand more than enough the merits of writing everyday. But since this has turned out to be a very emotionally loaded process, I find it more important to balance out external suggestions with the particularities of my thinking processes.

The whiteboard for example has been quite helpful, and I should consider it a kind of writing, even more important at this point than writing full chapters

It is important to learn ways to acknowledge and circumvent resistance, rather than trying to attack it.  

I am becoming more and more aware of how my negative thoughts have been detrimental to my mood and my productivity. Not because I cannot do what I want to do, but because they are loading me with unnecessary information, cognitive and emotional responses that are making my motivation and my desire to succeed redundant and even unwanted.

I need to respect more the methods that I am more accustomed to when writing. I know they are not perfect, but I know also that if I am more attentive to my intuition, I will be able to identify what do I have to do to be more productive and what are the resistances that I am encountering. Am I not feeling so inclined to write? Then probably I need to read more. I know sometimes my fear of writing emerges, but maybe there is also a reason for that. Maybe I am not ready, I need to read more to develop an underlying structure for my argument, as I did now by reading even more closely this book. Now I am able to refine slowly my methodology and place my literature and the way I intend to use it better. How to use the metaphor? Which concepts to analyse? What is ultimately my object of study?

I think, overall, I had this idea of this perfect schedule that will allow me to maximize my productivity and more often than not this never works as I initially intended it to. I need to be more accepting of my resistances, and identify when they have any substantial reasons for being there, or whether they are just covering up certain insecurities and fears that I need to confront. In that case I need to face them, or learn how to ignore them altogether, by understanding their underlying mechanisms.

I think this is going to be the text I need to read every single day, if necessary, to motivate my thesis writing process!