Well, the purpose of this particular lovebite (wow when I start tagging my posts I'm gonna tag these as lovebites) is to come up with something to submit to my EE supervisor for documentation purposes, because she likes my EE and wants it on record or something. I'll be fixing up my actual EE for tomorrow (I spent today FINISHING my CAS file) but I'm gonna give her some solid reflection today, to make sure she's happy.

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Ever heard of flow?

According to some people in the higher echelons of psychological academia somewhere (or maybe just the back alleys), "flow" is when you're really into something. When your brain is at the peak of its concentration ability and all you can focus on, all you need to focus on, is the task in front of you. According to them, it's a combination of high challenge and high skill level - when you know the road will be tough but at the same time you know you can handle it, so that the anxiety burns away and all you're left with is a glow as bright as reforged iron. You become not you, such is your laser-focus at that very point in time, but at this moment you are more you than you have ever been.

I'm not the type to experience this 'flow' easily, I know it. When it comes to academic work at least (and even in non-academic work it's probably more "control" than "flow"), I have never experienced it.

Except when it comes to English A1, and except when it comes to my EE.

One of the first things my EE mentor sent to me was an EE sample where the supervisor had written "it is abundantly clear that this extended essay was a labour of love for her". Would you believe that that sentence has haunted me to this very day? (If you know me well enough, you probably would without batting an eyelash.) As soon as I read that sentence, inside my mind I said to myself: "I want to be like that girl. I want my EE to be a labour of love. I want to spend hours working on my EE and reading my book over and over again and loving that book, and I want to gnash my teeth in the middle of the night and cry bitter tears into my keyboard all for the sake of crafting that One Perfect Essay, and after that when it's all over I'll be exhausted and shaking but I know I've done the work, I know I've given it my all, and it's all because I love what I did and I love doing."

Did I end up doing that? Actually, yes.

Was it a labour of love? I'm not exactly sure.

My EE journey was tortuous, true. There were parts where I really did gnash my teeth and cry into my keyboard. I spent no less than what, seven months?, meeting my EE mentor for fifteen minutes every week, trying to come up with books on both sides and neither of us coming up with anything. In March (or was it May?) she gave me V. by Thomas Pynchon hoping I could do an EE on it; I spent the whole holidays trying to read it and realised it was just too difficult for me, and by the time I came back I'd stained the cover and bought her a new one. The old book stares at me through the heavy door of my bookshelf and for a while it haunted her too, as we tossed about ecocriticism and Harold Pinter all the while she wondering both in front of and behind my back why I hadn't compared the epistolary whatever in V with whatever whatever I can't even remember anymore.

In August or September I came up with crazy huge ideas that would kill me within three months but filled me with some sort of resolve and my mentor with a strange patience. In October I'd come down off that high with the smoke-stains of EOYs on me and EE week looming around the corner. I thought wait, this isn't working and but I don't know what to do now. I went to Harris at Somerset 313 on a whim and picked up one of the books I'd been considering for one of the potential multi-book topics (yes, you read that right; not one, not two, MULTI), and that night (or the next) on the top bunk in my room in the middle of the night in orange bulb light, I realised, this is good enough, and considering nothing has been, this has to be it.

In a day I had my book and my topic and I get the feeling my EE mentor didn't know what to do. I remain the only mentee in her group this year (I think) that proposed his/her own book. What is this, I guess she was thinking, what are you doing, this book is too simple, don't talk about religion, don't be so arrogant, none of that being ad verbatim but not entirely covert. It was the day before EE week started and I rocked in my chair trying not to hyperventilate at this brutal lack of external affirmation. The morning after I decided to fight, to savour the crumbs of rebellion still burning like spices on my tongue, no mercy, no compromise. She decided to let me continue with it for EE week; I blazed through those three days, came up with a 1000-word draft and by the end of it I'd left her no choice but to give me the green light.

Everything sailed smooth for those three days and I entered the end of year break with Monika Fludernik's Introduction to Narratology, three pages of textual references, and a head full of confidence. Then came inefficiency. I spent a month reading that book. All the while I fretted I wasn't going to finish. But I kept reading, kept getting slower. I knew I wasn't getting it, I hated the way words slipped past my eyes and them having to crawl back up the page to start over. It took me two full days to write the approximately 1000 words that explained the theory I intended to apply in my essay, all the while the slowness of it just eating me up inside.

The next part of the essay took five hours.

In the middle of the night, I decided to get up off my lazy ass and move, push through, you'll never finish otherwise, and I did. I got my notes together and propped my book up on the table and just, to put it elegantly, chionged. It was wonderful, things were getting done, I was formatting and bolding and italicising in all the right places and slowly but surely all the examples and analysis and feelings were coming together. And I didn't even hit that sweet spot, that fabled flow spot, for two hours, which was when I hit the part of the analysis I liked the most. It lasted for half an hour, tops. "This is what I write EEs for," I remember tweeting because the feeling was so extraordinary I could think of nothing more important than immortalising it on Twitter, "to write things like this, things I love and I know are good. Why can't it always be like this?"

Why indeed. The very next day I realised I'd only written half my EE and didn't know how to write the second half, and that's how I spent the rest of my holiday. I said there were times I gnashed my teeth and cried into my keyboard, didn't I? This is when. My mother told me to stop it and call my teacher for help, that I was being silly not knowing what to do. To ask for more time, to finish it later.

You know what I did instead? Whatever I didn't know how to do, I just cut out.

I was fortunate, you see, to have somehow come up with something so broad I could chop one part of and write 4000 words about the other, so that's what I did. That's why I never had trouble with word limits. I cut it off and worked with what I had, and from there I didn't have any trouble. It was like cutting an unpolished diamond. I picked it up from exactly where I'd left it all those months ago (two, to be exact), and took three drafts to make it shine.

And I felt terrible about it. My mentor was really happy with my EE, and the people who'd read my early drafts (although just a few) were all pretty certain I'd do even better as I revised more, but for myself, I just couldn't believe it. My friends and peers' drafts numbered up to nine at times, they were doing EEs on Walt Whitman and Philip Roth and spending hours at libraries and revising their drafts over and over again. I felt simple. I felt lazy. I'd literally based my entire EE off five hours of frenzied writing. I thought back to "the labour of love" and thought about how much it wasn't that.

It's only now, writing this reflection, that I remember all the labour I've gone through to reach here. It's weird, how quickly I forgot it all, the months of waiting and fretting and avoiding my mentor to avoid the blank, impassive stares on both our faces, the weeks spent on that half of the EE that was never birthed in the end. How I only think about what's been done and panic over that, not thinking about how much I've already overcome.

That's why I'm not sure it's a labour of love, see. Sometimes I read my essay and I'm amazed at the person who wrote it, at some parts. And I did labour, I did agonise, I did cry blood and bleed tears. But the thing is, the difficulty was all in the things that never actually got used. What did get used came out smooth as margarine.

And for a long time I thought that wasn't okay, that I wasn't doing an EE properly. Now, however, I think I really did, just in a way that not everyone gets to experience, though in the long run, I think everyone did. I did it by serendipity, ability and luck all at once. I hit the inspiration well. I achieved flow, or at least something close to it. It took me months and months to get to it but who's to say those months were totally redundant to what finally happened?

It's been hard, I know it's been. I’ve learnt many things. I’ve learnt about letting go, for one, specifically of telling myself "it's not about finding the perfect topic, or the deepest, most intellectually arousing research question you can think of, but something that works and that you can do well". I’ve learnt how to research, read, and understand, to a limited extent, the language of literary critics. I’ve learnt how to cite, even. Nevertheless, the thing I’m the most satisfied and the most astonished by is that I’ve learnt how to write an essay and how writing an essay feels. Now I can finally say that I'm happy with what I did, that I'm relieved, that I'm satisfied. That I love what I did and I love doing and in some ways I deserve it, and I don't regret a minute I spent on it.

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Phew, that did NOT turn out the way I wanted it to. Oh well. Time to cut and print.