I lost a post I wrote this morning. It was called: This is becoming obsessive! I found myself up at 5 in the morning, eager to do one more post. You must know, I love to sleep, a lot. This sudden urge to put in words my anxieties and conundrums was scary. Obviously, I succumbed.

I don’t have a diary, not since a very pink one with a symbolic lock, many years ago. I vaguely remember the pleasure of writing my hopes and worries, for my eyes only. The motivation has changed, but the pleasure remains. With every sentence, I imagine I exhale the smog in my brain and inhale fresh air,  in a prairie, a Spring morning. As a bonus, my job and my paper feel lighter. So please bear with me (and make sure your work was actually saved!).

To continue the story, last year started well. Somebody suggested I sign up to present at a conference. He was right. A deadline makes wonders for a procrastinator like me. I spent days and nights developing a narrative about a  trend I was observing. Exploring a new idea is not easy. For one, you risk being naive. Your argument may just not be good or it has been explored before and you are just catching up. Writing a theoretical framework or statistical exercises felt like squaring a circle. I finally had to give up. To avoid the same mistake, I decided to explore a traditional debate instead.

A saying I love is “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results”. Murphy’s law is another one…

After a break to clean my wounds, so to speak, I jumped into a topic my favorite authors had developed. Soon after insecurity stroke. What could I really add to what they had explored? How could I fairly paraphrase their beautiful sentences? I delved into the empirical analysis instead. I produced graphs and more graphs, tables and few ill-fitting statistical tests. I presented them to my advisor who thought were interesting and asked for the theoretical framework…