At the beginning of the semester, I felt completely lost when thinking about my thesis. Not in the sense that I had no interests, but almost the opposite. I had too many ideas, too many directions, and none of them felt stable enough to commit to. Every time I thought I had found something, I would question it again. It felt like everything was possible, which strangely made it harder to begin.
Looking back, I realise that I expected myself to start with clarity. I thought I needed to know exactly what my thesis would be about before allowing myself to explore it. But this expectation made it difficult to move forward. Instead of helping me, it made me feel stuck.
During lectures, workshops, and conversations, I saw how open the process actually is. There is no single correct starting point. Research is not about immediately knowing, but about gradually finding direction through exposure and reflection.
What I understand now is that feeling lost was not a failure of the process, but the beginning of it. It forced me to question my assumptions and stay open. Instead of following a predefined path, I had to start paying attention to what genuinely interested me.
This uncertainty also made me more aware of the themes that kept reappearing in my thinking, such as chaos, attention, atmosphere, and meaning. At the time, these ideas felt random but over time I started seeing relationships between them.
This phase taught me that not knowing is not something to avoid, but something to work with. It creates space for ideas to develop more naturally, without forcing them too early into fixed forms.
