Kristian’s Brain (Or: How My Low Self-Esteem Got Me A 2:1)

Having low self-esteem is one of the defining qualities of being a Kristian Richmond. Whether it’s poking my chubby tub, frowning at myself in the mirror or driving myself into a state over other people’s opinions, I’m always finding ways to make myself feel down about something. And I’m far from the only person in the world – in even a 2 mile radius – to be so crushingly hard on myself. But instead of this being a blog post where I analyse my reasons for having low self-esteem, and bore you all to tears whilst doing so, I’m actually here to discuss a rather amusing prospect.

It may have just saved my degree.

In the first semester of the year I had two modules to complete instead of the typical three, as the third was essentially my dissertation which carried over into the next semester. So, these two semester A modules – Advanced Prose Fiction and Poetry Writing – they didn’t go quite as planned. I’ll be honest, I thought I crushed Poetry Writing. The creative assessment (which is what yours truly chose) consisted of writing 6 poems and then writing about them, and all through the semester I received rather positive feedback on all of them! I even wrote a poem from the perspective of Henry VIII (I was watching The Tudors at the time), utilizing Martianism to explore how he’d feel about modern-day England. But both that module and Advanced Prose Fiction came back as a 56, or a 2:2 (or a C). Far from the worst mark in the world, but I vaguely remember just scraping a 2:1 on average for the previous year, and needing this year to count. This, coupled with crippling demotivation and disinterest towards my dissertation, led me to ending semester A feeling very insecure about my future grades.

As of last week I’ve gotten all of my grades back for semester B. They were all 2:1s. Healthy 2:1s at that. Almost firsts! And that really surprised me, given that earlier in the semester I’d put up a totally-non-public-meltdown status telling people not to be surprised if I got a 2:2 and that it wasn’t for lack of trying, that they’d all overestimated me, yadda yadda. (I got a whole bunch of support <3).When I handed my coursework in I was absolutely sure that it was 2:2 material, and spent the next week or so in a bit of a sulk.

(Alright, quick pause. I want to clarify that a 2:2 is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Nor is a third. These are still difficult qualifications that you have achieved from a uni course. My panic about getting a 2:2 was mostly due to some perceived expectations and personal fears of underachievement. And if you didn’t get a grade, if you dropped out or didn’t get into uni at all? There are still a bunch of other things you can do better than someone with a specific degree. The academic system does not define your worth as a human being, so don’t let it put you down.)

Here’s what happened. Due to my lack of self-belief and low self-esteem, I eyed my work with more scrutiny than I otherwise would have. In my mind, it wasn’t even to do with putting more effort in, but rather, a last ditch attempt to throw together more academic sources than I otherwise would in order to almost trick my way into a higher grade. That’s right, even when I forced myself to write at a slightly higher level, I put myself down for it. But hey, it worked. I’ve got a 2:1 on average for this year, and if I recall my previous results correctly, this should all add up to a 2:1 in my BA Creative Writing degree (I hope). Hurrah!

This isn’t just some kind of warped brag, though. What I’m getting at here is that the self-abusing human mind is not to be trusted. Time and time again I am reminded of the frightening power of perspective, and its ability to warp reality. It can turn innocent glances into rude stares, harmless humour into snide remarks, honest work into half-baked attempts at looking busy, and friendships into superficial relationships. Every day we have to fight to maintain our rationalism and to keep the world as objectively true as we can, and it’s one of the driving forces behind my constant pursual for a state of objectivity.

(Final side-note: I haven’t really looked in to that much about objectivity or objectivism, so I have no idea if it keeps in line with my way of looking at the world the entire time or descends into some sort of utilitarian Nazi party. If the latter, let it be known – I do not attend these parties!)

 

Victory Yoghurt

The dissertation. It’s done. It’s in. For better or for worse, it is over.

So how was it?

Well now, that’s a very broad question. Firstly, I should address what my dissertation even was. I’m a Creative Writing student, so my dissertation was essentially to take everything that I’d learned and write an 8,000 word piece of fiction to hand in, alongside a 2,000 word critical commentary. At the beginning of the course, this sounded very appetizing. “We can write whatever we want!” I probably exclaimed. “Piece of cake!”

And unless I was talking about a cake made out of obsidian, then I was wrong.Whilst the prospect of writing 8,000 fictional words may sound promising when you have dozens of half-baked ideas swirling around your head, the time of actually choosing what story to write for your magnum opus becomes a little trickier. Suddenly all of those ideas are awful or previously used, and you’re left stranded in the dark with nothing but a vague “Write a good story!” to go off of.

I ended up writing a thriller piece named Rerouted, which I shan’t discuss too much here. Let’s just say that the narrative was experimental and focused on perspective, which is a key interest of mine. As a story in itself, I think it turned out alright. I’d happily return to it and tweak it a bit and include it in a collection of short stories someday. But a magnum opus it was not. In my opinion, it failed to delve as deeply into the fascinating possibility of perspective as it could, and the entire time I was writing the thing I had doubts about the actual message that the narrative would deliver by the end. It was not the intended conglomeration of writing skills and abilities I’d picked up over the previous semesters. It is merely, at best, a decent story with an interesting narrative perspective.

The critical commentary was worse though. For those of you who don’t know, a critical commentary is a creative writer’s chance to write academically about their own work, to prove that it reflects what they’ve learned in the module and that their fictional imaginings have merit as coursework by showing how it’s been influenced by the works they’ve studied. Of course, with the dissertation there were no set texts, merely a vague pointing towards the potential topics from previous modules. With this in mind, I focused on a text we’d studied last semester which had inspired my narrative style, and essentially tunnel-visioned it. By the end of my critical commentary I’d put almost no critical theory into the thing and had left little room in my argument for it, and by this point the deadline was fast approaching.

As a famous, lovable yellow bear once said, “Oh bother.”

So all of this has led to me frantically polishing and re-writing sections of my critical commentary, before handing in what will inevitably fall short of the grade I’ll desperately need if I’m to achieve a 2:1 in my university course overall. This did, you might imagine, leave me in a bit of an emotional slump, until I made a totally lighthearted Facebook post essentially daring anyone to be disappointed in me and was instead met with widespread support. Not only that, but we were gifted with frozen yoghurt upon handing in our dissertations. Frozen yoghurt! Who can stay upset when your university gives you frozen yoghurt? I might be dwelling a little too long on the frozen yoghurt. Let’s move on.

So why bother to make a public blog post to tell everyone about my marvelous underachievement? Well, personally, I believe that an honest assessment of one’s shortcomings is a healthy way to deal with such shortcomings. But if you want complete honesty, well, this dissertation has been practically my life for the past few weeks and so I have essentially nothing else to write about. In fact, I have more deadlines coming up! So that’s fine. I’d better run and start making with the fiction.

I wonder if they’ll have more frozen yoghurt on results day.

Actually, I’d better not think about results day.