You’re not alone in this – HE is hard!

This April, as the blossoms finally start to appear, I wanted to take a break from the usual “how-to” guides and “productivity hacks” to have a real, unfiltered conversation with you.

If you are currently staring at a blinking cursor, feeling the weight of a deadline pressing against your chest, or wondering if you actually know anything at all—I see you.

I am right there in the trenches with you. Currently, I am in the thick of writing my thesis draft chapters, and let me tell you: the struggle is monumental.

The Reality of the Draft Phase

We often see the finished, polished versions of academic work, but we rarely talk about the messy, painful process of getting there. My past month has looked nothing like a “perfectly managed” calendar. It has looked like this:

  • The Zero-Percent Days: Days where I sit at the desk for hours, and I achieve absolutely nothing because I’m so busy doing other work or just have a blank burnt out mind. Not a single word.

  • The One-Sentence Wins: Days where, after eight hours of agonising thought, I manage to produce one solitary sentence. It’s not even a good sentence!

  • The Great Deletions: Perhaps the hardest days are when I find the “flow,” write three thousand words, and then realise the next morning that they are completely irrelevant. Deleting thousands of words that you worked so hard on feels like a physical blow.

Why Higher Education is a Different Kind of Hard

For adult learners, the “Thesis Phase” isn’t just about the academic content. It’s about the mental stamina required to balance a complex project alongside life, work, and family.

HE is hard. It is objectively, exhaustively hard. There is no shame in admitting that you are struggling. There is no shame in feeling like the mountain is too high to climb. When you are deep in the “middle” of a thesis, the start is a distant memory and the end goal feels like a mirage on a very far-off horizon.

The End Goal: Keeping the Vision Clear

So, why do we keep going? Why do we subject ourselves to the “Zero-Percent Days”?

Because the end goal needs to be achieved. Not just for the piece of paper or the title, but for the version of yourself that exists on the other side of this challenge. We are proving to ourselves that we can endure the “messy middle.”

If you’ve deleted your work today, or if you’ve only written one sentence, or if you’ve done nothing but cry over a bibliography—you are still a student. You are still moving, even if it feels like you’re treading water.

A Shared Breath

Take a moment today to step away from the screen. Breathe. The thesis will be there when you get back. We are in this together, one agonizing, beautiful, difficult sentence at a time.

Keep going. The view from the top is going to be worth it.