Thesis: Feeling Trumped

This year long project has been melting my brain into mush. Like yesterday, I actually got out of my house to go to the uni admin office, the library, and the bank. Oh, it was a SUNDAY. Also wrote "Holiday Break" in big bold letters in the middle of November($@!#^@%U&^I#*) in my agenda last night... nbd.

I thought Thesis was supposed to make me smarter...

So far, it's made me into the next Joey Tribbiani.

It's no lie that this project has definitely taken a toll on my health and wellbeing... And it's only been a few months. TBH, I fully expected to find myself with my head in the oven. With my ideas being constantly challenged, subjecting yourself to constant doubt and uncertainty, and pushing your research further and further into the deep depths of the Internet, it's hard to take your head out and look at the big picture. It's easy to forget what you love about your idea. 

Today I came across the point when I just had to stop doubting myself, my capability, and chose to stop being afraid of the possibilities of failure, because it just got so goddamn exhausting fighting myself. Rather than working hard towards something I love, the creative process became a daunting time that I wanted to avoid. I wanted to make sure my baby wouldn't get hurt, I wanted to prove it right. That's when I started getting too attached to "my" idea.

I once read in Ed Catmull's book "Creativity Inc." that an idea is never 'yours'.

It's not something written in stone, it's a fluid, flexible thing in the cloud that changes and should be open to change by anyone at any appropriate time. The OCAD Advertising Thesis Project is often lonesome. You spend most of your time alone in a room, a coffee shop with headphones in, at the library. But it's always YOU and the IDEA. It's easy to let that idea become a part of you, instead of a shareable, flexible thought. I'm starting to understand why this project may be called a 'Thesis' after all. Given a year's time, I've really got a chance to ponder an idea, this thought. Toss it around, see if it fits here or there... Ask questions, and not expect any particular answers. An experiment with an unknown end result. Worried about failure? Isn't failure embedded in the nature of what a thesis is? To be fearful of it, would be to fear the process itself.

Trumping on people's dreams and ambitions with their own fears? What kind of coward does that?