Remember that episode in Spongebob Squarepants when Spongebob fails out of boating school for like the millionth time, and Mrs. Puff gives him that extra credit assignment to finally pass him? And he has to write that 10 word sentence on what he's learned in boating school, but all he can get out is "What I learned in boating school is..." and nothing else?
Well, I have to admit, I've never related as much to this Spongebob quote as I do in this exact moment. I mean, think about it. I've got almost three years of college under my belt, and I've been writing for The Odyssey (as an engineer might I add) for the past year and a half. And I'm gonna be honest with you, I've run out of good ideas many-a-times in the past year, just as I'm sure several (hundred) of my fellow colleagues have too. We've all been there. We get brain fart. We hit a writers block. We become (just a little) unmotivated.
It's nothing to be ashamed of. And quite frankly, I don't know why we just don't own up to it. It's human nature. No one can write an article worthy of 10k shares each and every week - and if you can, well... kudos to you, then. But I sure as heck can barely write an article worthy of 500 shares a week, and strangely, I'm okay with that. Yeah, I'd love to be able to whip out articles on the fly each week and be confident that it'll get thousands of readers, but let's be real: engineers really aren't all that great at writing.
But I enjoy writing. It's my escape from solving equations every waking hour of every freaking day. And I'll admit that a lot of my articles have been written very last minute (like this one). And most of the time, they're not that great (probably like this one, too). But if you don't have something meaningful to write about, writing becomes very difficult. You run out of things to talk about very quickly, and you never have any kind of information to support the topic you're writing about.
And then you start procrastinating even more. You go scroll through your newsfeed a couple of hundred times. You binge watch several episodes on whatever TV show is "trending" at the time. And you spend multiple hours staring at your blank computer screen with the same seven words staring right back at you. Your midnight article deadline starts approaching way too quickly, and you just BS some random 500 word essay that ends up looking a lot like this:
And by the time you submit your article 4 seconds before the deadline, you're really feeling like Spongebob - frazzled, overwhelmed, and less confident about the words you spat out under pressure. But believe me when I say that it's okay. We're only human. We can't be creative/productive every week for an infinite number of weeks ahead of us - especially between school, work, and extracurricular activities. We become exhausted and drained. But those creative juices always find their way back to us, so don't fret. We'll eventually get past this "what I learned in boating school is" phase.
