Essays are a written representation of your tortured soul

As much as everyone would like to say they spent months on their essay, toiling away in the library, researching, drafting and reworking it to perfection, the reality is that you wrote it during one harrowing, caffeine fueled night you never want to repeat.

Until the next deadline, and yet again you’re up at 4am, knocking back cans of Redbull and using your lecture notes to wipe up your tears. They may be 4000 words of bullshit, but they are also a physical manifestation of who you are as a person. Those words are the embodiment of your inner thoughts and feelings as you work through the early morning hours of pain and confusion.

No place I’d rather be

If you’re the kind of person who has their life together, your essay will likely be organised and well researched.  It will be an eloquent amalgamation of everything you’ve been taught and all of the other reading you’ve taken the time to do.

But, for the rest of us, essays are slapdash and rushed without a spell check, written late at night when the adrenaline levels are high and your emotions are rawest. Essays are the bane of every students life. They loom over you for months, always seeming far away until before you know it, it’s 24 hours before it’s due and all you have is a 200 word plan and weeks worth of procrastination.

Dry your eyes m8

Every time you hand in an essay, you give your tutor a glimpse into your soul. Is it full of spelling errors and poor grammar? They know that it was written the night before. The spelling errors symbolise every tear you shed during the writing process. The disordered sentences represent every time you gave up and concluded “fuck it, I’ll become a stripper.” Every error you make reveals just a little more of yourself to your tutor, like a slowly unravelling puzzle of human emotion.

Essays are pain

Your essay reflects your semester as a whole. It starts off strong, full of potential and attentiveness, but as it goes on, it’s clear that you’re not paying attention anymore. The research is poor, just like your attendance, and really it’s all just a bit of a mess, just like your life. Your sentences run on for entire paragraphs, but that stream of consciousness is your only chance of getting a 2:1. You’re pouring your soul into it in the place the real, relevant content you should be writing.

Essays written late at night are the truest expression of who you are as a person. They become a Jason Pollock of concentrated raw emotions as the result of 24 hours of intense emotion and pain, crafted into bittersweet words.