By Rachael Simoes

Existential-Book-Crit-Crisis

Guess who had one of the worse book crits in last Friday’s book crit? It me. Hi. Welcome to the confessions of a piece of SCA scum.

Marc always makes a point of not feeling too bad about having one of the worst book scores at this point in the year. It’s always the dark horses that make it into CREAM and such. But alas here are my feelings rolling around in a puddle of embarrassment and dread. 

We’ve had 3 book crits so far, and my book score has yet to beat my first score. My latest book score only went up by 8 points from the previous one, but I felt like I put in a bit more than 8-points-more worth of effort. I feel confusion and frustration because I know my own potential. My ego says I’m capable of being in the upper-middle tier of book ratings right now. I know I can make great work, but it feels I almost don’t know how. It’s highly possible I’m not as good as I think I am at this point in time. If so I suppose SCA is about growing into it. At the moment it feels unrealistic to say I’ll get a 9/10 book rating come portfolio day.

As I feel when I write all of my SCABs, I’m not too sure where to go from here. Kind of just have to swallow it and move on. I don’t understand at the moment why my last book was so bad but I will. 

After it’s over I always felt I could’ve done more, but I know that usually in the moment I was working effectively as I knew how. Looking back at moments of arriving home after SCA and feeling drained after cooking and washing up and physically not being able to bring myself to do anything over than sleep I wonder if I pushed a little hard then, would my book have been better? Or would the sacrifice of sleep and, thus, mental well being hindered my performance the next day?

I had a conversation about feeling as if I didn’t care enough about my work to be able to put more effort into it for it to be better. After another strenuous 5 minutes of telling this person about why I felt this, they told me I sound like a laidback person. This is undeniably true. When my mother was giving birth to me I apparently stopped pushing and they had to tickle me out. They advised I need to find a way to get more exterior forms of motivation into my life to push me. I’ve worn out any kind of motivational speech and ‘power of now’ books. This search for motivation will be fun.

This gets into a cycle of comparing myself to others in the room. She doesn’t work on weekends, he has a degree in this thing, they’ve worked in the industry already… Or how is he good at everything and is always so positive, how does she only spend 2 minutes on coming up with copy and it’s better than mine, etc. Either way, feeling jealous or trying to make myself feel better by undermining people’s success probably will not get me a better book score.

In conclusion to this hot mess of a SCAB, I’m very confused now but I’ll most likely get where I need to be eventually. I think the key to SCA is more about survival than anything else.