M.A.

I should not beat myself up if my essays don't pass with distinction. I should write the way I want to write and say what I want to say. It won't do to academically prostitute myself for the sake of a grade. And I hate poncey essays.

Who I am will not diminish if I don't do exceptionally well in this course. I have to continually remind myself that the people marking my essays are fallible and subject to their own biases and moods and day to day crises. I have to remind myself that I don't really want to be a professional academic, that I DO plan to do more practical work in children's literature so it doesn't really matter how subtle or incisive my literary analyses are. It doesn't matter how deftly I expose the ideologies within a text or map the power dynamic in a book's narrative structure. Yak. Yak. Yak.

Breathe deeply.