Not procrastinating

Well, I've done it. I've actually done it.

The "it" here is, obviously, working on my Thesis. I'm now the happy recipient of 4 interviews with my participants! To be more specific, I have 2 interviews with 4 people each. Let's call it about... maybe 7-8 hours of data? In my book, not a bad start at all. Certainly something to start writing the rest of my Thesis with. Le sigh...

It feels pretty darn good to get that part of the work out of the way. The funny thing that happened while I was listening to the heart-warming and heart-wrenching stories these people told me was, Whoa... I could really do this. Like, I could listen to these kinds of stories all my life. They are not only intellectually stimulating (because, we all know how much my brain gets off to narratives of madness) but also emotionally and spiritually satisfying, too. The stories people tell are so alive. I listened as they took shape, changed, and morphed again into something rich and something to make sense of. You see, we understand ourselves by the stories we tell. Think about telling someone about who you are... You tell a story. Stories organize our existences. They make sense of senseless situations. They imbibe meaning into experiences so that we have a sense of who we are, where we've been, and what forms our identities.

In short, these interviews and these stories have opened me up to a new world of understanding. I'm re-invigorated to do this paper, not just because it's interesting material, but because I want to share these stories with others. They are impactful. They question the way our mental health system works. They reveal the travesties that occur from child sexual, verbal, physical, and emotional abuse. It challenges the way we typically think about treating people that suffer from severe psychological problems. It's stuff that people need to know.

So, my lapse of procrastination has turned out to be quite a treat. A success. But, stay tuned, because as soon as break ends, I'm sure I'll be back to my old tricks... making the bed 10 times over to pass the time, organizing the spice rack alphabetically. The usual. Perhaps less than often than I typically do, because I've got stories to tell.