85 hours for one paper?!!

(A door of opportunity, a Charlotte Pourquoi work) 

Okay this is another rant on learning.

Recently, I had the opportunity to write a research paper. The only problem was that I had never worked on a research paper before in an official capacity. I've always loved learning but never pursued it academically (apart from high school but that's a different story altogether). However, this opportunity proved to be perfect, in a utopian, idealistic sense.

It was all fun and games until I actually began to write the paper. At first it was layers of reading to familiarise myself with the content and then I sat down to write, only to realise that I knew nothing. Sure, an intentional ideal was scribbled down in an abstract (that took 2 hrs to formulate properly) and by God's grace it got accepted. But how does one even move from that point to a point of awareness enough to write a research paper about it? I thought I did, that is until I started to read more and knew that my thoughts by themselves weren’t evidence enough.

That's when things got tough. There were two options before me. One, to justify a paper of lesser quality due to juggling multiple responsibilities and age or two, to actually go all in, get burnt but try anyway. And obviously, I chose the latter because gaining knowledge is hard work and it's always better to put in that work sooner in order to sharpen the existing knowledge (again, making that statement now is almost liberating. However, making that statement before I did the work was Catherine just being idealistic. Glad it worked out).

Going all in is a beautiful thing where you realise that you can channel everything you have to compound upon something bigger and really make an impact. However, it is time consuming and draining and exhausting and fulfilling and provides joy at the same time. Especially in a purely academic sense, this is true because after a point of constant periods of focus, the mind cannot physically retain more information unless something else helps it expand (here I've found creativity to be my solution).

After 50 plus hours of reading I knew that I had to write something before my mind was consumed only by what I read. So there it began, as an outflow of whatever was established in addition to whatever is not. The result of stagnation became more reading and that in turn led to more writing and the process continued. The inflow and outflow soon caught fire to the point that it was a constant for 2 weeks with back and forth of just reading and writing and expounding. And then over time it grew into something beautiful. A research paper.

Did I totally get burnt out by the time I finished the paper and realised that I worked on a 15 page document for 85 hours? Yes, yes I did. Did I lose a couple of days of sleep? Also yes. But did I gain something far more valuable in the process? Also yes.

The pursuit of knowledge is fulfilling.