Oct 14th Dissertation Day

Today is the deadline for my dissertation. I've been studying an MSc in Psychology since 2020, it was meant to take two years, but it's actually been almost four. I began when I was in the middle of the OCD crisis that rendered me disabled, although I didn't know it would do that at the time. I thought that since covid was the trigger, once things settled down again, so would OCD. WRONG! So very very wrong! As the rest of the world began to open up again and life for most returned to something like normality, I remained severely restricted, unable to go outside without another person, unable to function normally as an adult without support for most areas of my life, from bathing to cooking to leaving the house for any reason, to just being able to sit in my living room without an ever present sense of paralysing dread. It sucked big time. But there were a couple of things that gave me hope. One was Matt and his constant support, another was learning to crochet which gave me something to do with my hands when all I wanted to do was tap or scratch them. But the absolute life-saver for me, was the MSc. The weekly list of reading, tasks and working towards assignments gave an odd sort of structure to the week, discovering that I could still engage my brain in learning, do research and pass assignments was the best thing ever at that time. I absolutely needed some help, I didn't have the brain capacity to read every day, so thanks to the Disabled Students Allowance people, I was given some assistive technology, software that read things aloud to me really helped on the days when I couldn't focus enough to read in the traditional manner, another tool meant that I could track my research and build resources lists for my assignments easily, and yet another gave me the ability to dictate notes and assignments straight into a document, and one even helped me to build mind maps for note taking. When I first got all this helpful stuff, it made me happy although I was a bit reluctant to use it. As a disabled student, the University gave me an automatic extension for every assignment, so I got a whole extra week to do things, again I was reluctant to use it. Until someone pointed out to me how stupid that was... what she actually said was 'think of the course as a sports field, you have to get from one end to the other, everyone else gets a straight flat course to run, but you have obstacles in your way, things that cost you time and make you struggle to move forward, so for you it isn't a straight flat course, it's hilly, has water obstacles and several dead ends. You will get to the end, but you will struggle in ways nobody else will. But if you use the assistive technology and take th extra time, that stuff removes the obstacles, flattens the hills, drains the water features and gives you a clear course. Assistive tech isn't giving you an advantage, it's levelling the playing field.'  I discovered that on a level playing field, I'm actually quite clever. I passed every one of my course modules with respectable grades and several of them with distinction. I learned how to decide if something is statistically significant, how to test different aspects of data and what formulas to use to write that stuff up. I learned about social interactions, ethics, relationships, human development, mental health and mental illness, educational psychology, individual differences, cyber-psychology, brain structures and functions. I have written, among other things, a project about menopause, a paper about the Stanford Prison Experiment, a training assessment and plan for the former CEO of what used to be Twitter, mental health formulations and support plans for fictitious clients, a critique of personality tests like Myers Briggs and a piece of original research on stigma and women as my dissertation. The due date for which is today - but actually it was submitted well in advance, because it was ready. While I wait for the results to come, I'm spending some time at home enjoying the fact that I will be able to put MSc after my name before the end of this year. I worked bloody hard for those letters and I thoroughly intend to use them. What's next? I hear you ask? A break from study for a little while, then I'm seriously considering a PhD... Watch this space.