When I was growing up, I was always playing catch up with my studies. You could put it down to me studying subjects I was not good at. That may be so, but I was so tense that I doomed myself to fail through anxiety.
And then suddenly when I was 29 and studying, I had a different sensation which was that I was the captain of the ship – captain of the starship Enterprise – and it was simply a matter of stepping backwards out of the frame and surveying the work and then proceeding at my pace. This wasn’t believing that I could control everything but it was understanding that unless I took command then I would continue to be what I have been in all my studies until then -.a person hanging on by their fingertips believing that they were going to fail.
That change of attitude started a physical change in the way I sat when I studied. It changed my physical distance from the table and the written material I was looking at. So no more hunched shoulders. I could feel how I was seated on the chair, confident like the captain of the ship. I was in charge – and all the internal feelings changed.
I think the layout of the library in which I was studying had something to do with it because it had, as my mother used to say, Tender Trap stairs, a reference to the film of that name. It had just three or so steps up that started about halfway down the room – two or three steps upwards and I was in the upper part so I was kind of on the bridge of this starship Enterprise. I think that helped to trip me into the beginning of understanding of how to approach things.
For anyone in a similar position of feeling they are hanging by their fingernails, I wish you all the luck in the world to become the conductor of your efforts rather than the poor student playing catchup.