The Spill the Beans prompt for this week is an interesting one.
Have you ever experienced over caffeination?
Yes, I have experienced over coffeination before and it is not something I am proud of.
My final year in college would be the year I felt like I was walking on eggshells, it felt like whatever I did was going to determine if I was going to be successful in life and it was a year where I panicked and dealt with anxiety the most. Someone reading this might ask but why? I will explain.
When a person is about to complete a cycle of life they tend to face some type of identity crisis, the end of a cycle is treated with so much importance as it determines how you are going to hop on the next cycle of life.
I felt the same anxiety when I was in high school, the need to ace all my exams so I could get admitted into college and the need to make my family proud. Having gone through that phase in high school and going through it in my final year in college felt like a continuous pattern and a pattern I was worried about.
The only difference between how I handled my anxiety in high school was that I knew for a fact that I wouldn't be so terrible with my grades not to make it to college but in my final year there was no assurance of getting everything right as a lecturer can singlehandly determine your fate.
This was the kind of situation I was in with my then-project supervisor. The grade from one’s project had the power to boost one's CGPA and also had the power to reduce or make you repeat an entire semester. So everyone prayed to have good supervisors, I prayed as well but it felt like I had the worst of the lot.
The rift between me and my supervisor started when he asked me to change my topic and I refused, it was a topic that I had long wanted to work on from my freshman years, besides weren't project topics chosen by the students themselves and to be guided by their teachers?
I couldn't grasp why he didn't want me to go ahead with the topic.
As a result of my refusal to change the topic, my project supervisor became so mean to me, that to meet him was a disaster and to call him on the phone was like World War 3. He kept canceling my project, he could pick up my work and cancel almost everything in it without telling me what the problem was or showing me what to do.
I noticed his relationship with my other teammates was not the same. They could literally call him and have long conversations with him and also crack jokes. Their meetings with him were so smooth that you would think they were buddies.
I kept asking myself what I did wrong to my supervisor for him to be so mean to me, a colleague of mine later asked if I had given the man wine or money. At first, I was stunned. "Was that supposed to be part of the project work?" I had asked her and she burst into laughter and in her words "Dey play", meaning continue playing around and don't face reality.
I was going through some financial crises at that period and giving this lecturer money was not part of the plan.
I was so stressed that I stayed up late at night for days trying to redo the chapters of my project that were canceled and in those moments, coffee was my go-to drink as it did a good job in keeping me alert and awake to work on my project.
Redoing my project over and over again meant, reading new materials, and books and surfing the net for fresh ideas and information, this was serious work and coffee was the only thing that could help me do the work and yours truly abused it.
As the day of my project defense drew nearer I knew I was screwed as I had so much to do with little time available. After breaking down in one of my meetings with my supervisor he became a bit humane to me, even though he shouted occasionally he wasn't going gaga as before.
A day before my project defense I didn't sleep at all as I had a lot to study because I knew the panel I was to present in front of were well-learned and could scrutinize you to a point that if you weren't confident enough you could flop. I kept drinking and drinking my coffee until I almost lost it. I had so much caffeine in my system that I was having a banging headache, and I felt nauseous and dizzy. For someone who had stayed all night to prepare for her big day only to fall sick the next day was traumatizing.
For our project defense, we had to defend in batches, I couldn't defend that day because I didn't feel too good, so I requested I defend the following day when I was completely fine and to my greatest surprise the panel accepted and I defended the next day. I didn't need anyone to scold me about my excessive intake of caffeine as I learnt my lesson that day😃
All images are mine except otherwise stated.