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HEY CUTE NERDS

5th Week Free: campaign for a reading week at Oxford

Testimonial: History of Art student Tilda Agace

I often feel that being at Oxford is sort of like being a permanently slightly hungover, vey exhausted, floating brain that produces an essay periodically. We’re kicked out in the holidays as soon as we stop working and then return in a few weeks to an exam. We have to stuff all our sadness and exhaustion into a tidy 5th week and then continue working through it anyway. Having a week at Oxford where I’m not working, or feeling like I should be working would allow me to feel like this place is actually my home, that I have a life here, and that I’m more than a barely functioning, misfiring brain.

The idea of ‘5th week blues’ passes off as normal the way this university seems to systematically trigger long term and serious mental health problems. It’s not normal for us all to be so permanently burnt out and exhausted and sad. It’s not ok that I sometimes only leave my desk to get food when my visions starts blurring and I feel faint, it’s not ok that I lie in bed too anxious breathe let alone to email my tutor to ask for an extension until 20 minutes before my tutorial. This isn’t something that should be implicitly normalised as part of The Oxford Experience. All of my school friends at other universities are fine, and my school friends at Oxbridge are struggling.

And, yes, not everyone copes as badly as me, and mine are not ‘blues’ but serious mental health problems. But a reading week, although not a panacea, would make recovery more possible. Having no time to breathe and rest makes existing in this university with a disability or mental illness extremely hard. Recovery takes time and work and energy, and without a break I don’t have any spare. It also sometimes needs meds that tend to make things worse for a period of time, so there is no chance to start as there is no week that doesn’t seem crucial.

Fortunately, my tutors have been good in giving me extra time to complete my essays. But they can’t let me off the guilt of feeling like I’m falling behind and failing and that I don’t deserve to be here or have fun or a break. If I get an extension I feel like I should be working every hour of  it to get the essay done as quickly as possible, which inevitably I still don’t have the energy for so I sit flicking between tabs and blank word documents, still not writing me essay and feeling worse and worse about it and myself. Anyway, to write a decent essay I need to be able to think creatively and that takes reading beyond set texts. It takes reading poetry and fiction and watching films and finding new ways of thinking that I just don’t have time for in term at the moment.

5th Week Free: campaign for a reading week at Oxford

Testimonial: Modern Languages student Eleanor McIntyre

I never suspected before I came to Oxford the connotations that ‘fifth week’ could have. The malaise of fifth week has extended into something which pretty much everyone knows as ‘fifth week blues’, such a common problem that we get ‘fifth week cookies’ (or Freddos) from our college welfare reps every term. Fifth week is spoken about with this hushed reverence, like we’re talking about Lord Voldemort when actually we’re just talking about a week.

It’s only a week. I know fifth week is only a week – of course I do. But fifth week happens after noughth week, first week, second week, third week and fourth week. And when it’s over, we’ve still got three or four weeks left. When I get to fifth week I don’t remember what it’s like to not be working, and I’ve still got the same amount of time left to go before I can stop.

That’s the core of the issue: it just never seems to stop. Fifth week Trinity of last year; three weeks before my Preliminary Examinations. Total number of papers (3 hours) for Modern Languages: 8. Anxiety levels: so bad I couldn’t even leave college most days.

One evening during fifth week, I tried to force myself to walk into town to buy food. It takes me around fifteen minutes to walk to the supermarket in town. I’d been walking for five minutes before I became so anxious that I had to sit down, right there in the middle of the pavement, to try and collect myself. I sat there for an hour, unable to move.

I would, and still do, attempt the same piece of work three times for fear of it not being perfect. I would, and still do, receive marked essays and translations returned to me by my tutors directing me towards secondary reading and possible solutions that I could not possibly have had time to find - and could never find the time to search for after that, having already moved on to the next piece of work. And the next. And the next. In Trinity of my first year, I just couldn’t see an end to it. I almost didn’t come back to Oxford for second year.

I know no one is expecting perfection. That’s something I wish I could have realised in first year. I want time, though, to do the best I can do. I want a reading week to actually do that extra reading, or to read my lecture notes, to reread my tutorial essays - or just to have a life, to leave my room without that constant guilt which comes with knowing I could have ‘pushed myself harder’. I never want to go back to being the me on that pavement three weeks before the start of exams.

5th week free: campaign for a reading week at Oxford

Testimonial: 3rd year English Student, Lucy Delaney 

I have spent the best part of my three years at Oxford clinging onto my degree by my fingernails. I had a successful first term, but thereafter felt myself churning out two essays a week without even taking the time to stop and breathe. I found myself not ‘being’ or ‘managing’ or even thinking but simply ‘coping’.

On a number of occasions there were three essays due within the space of a week. Every marked essay returned to me criticised my lack of in-depth thought, lack of original ideas and my sweeping generalisations. But what else could I have achieved with only a couple of days work allowed per essay? Moreover, there was no time to catch up if I fell behind early on in term, and the holidays were spent attempting to get through the endless reading lists for the next term’s work, so there was no time to improve past work.

One of my tutors was ruthless and unforgiving, the other sympathetic – but even with the patience and understanding of my sympathetic tutor, I still felt constant guilt that I couldn’t just ‘start again’ and magically improve. If I was granted an extension of a couple of days, it would overlap into the time needed to work on my next assignment and I would still sometimes fail to hand it in on time, and occasionally I found myself feeling unable to submit work at all or attend some tutorials due to my guilt and fear, which then caused a vicious cycle of guilt and not-working out of guilt for not-working. I desperately needed a few days or a week without the pressure of encroaching deadlines to be able to think clearly and without the nauseating feeling of guilt and failure.

The impact upon my mental health was appalling. In my second year I developed anxiety and depression and lapsed back into my eating disorder. I could barely get out of bed some days for fear of the growing mountains of work. There was just no space to be able to clear my head and even making appointments with welfare or counselling took up too much time and I often ended up missing them, which, again, led to further guilt.

When it came to finals revision, I was faced with huge amounts of mediocre notes, which forced me to re-do almost everything I’d ever done in the space of a couple of months. I barely slept during the week of my final exams. It would have been far more effective to have had fewer essays of higher quality to revise from. A break in fifth week would therefore not jeopardise the course and risk skimping out on material – it would enable students to consolidate existing work or get rested in order to tackle the second half of the term’s work with renewed vigour. Instead, I found myself utterly burnt out by 5th or 6th week, and could barely stay awake throughout 8th.

WomCam, LGBTQ Campaign and CRAE Present: Lady Phyll Opoku talk

Lady Phyll Opoku (@msladyphyll) is a co-founder, trustee and executive director of UK Black Pride. She is also Head of Campaigns at the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). A self-described "outspoken, assertive, feminist LGBT Activist", she will be speaking as part of UNITY week in Oxford.

Next Monday we have two great events on!!

First of all it's the Elections for WomCam Comittee/Consent Workshop Workshop 

https://www.facebook.com/events/1477515552469852/

Then it's WomJam: A Vindication of the Right to BOOGIE at Babylove