slogging through

I normally work on stuff that not many people have worked over. Generally, I've felt this is both exciting to me but also a professional duty to bring lesser known authors into the conversation of texts that we work on and bring them to the attention of people who might teach them. Today though I'm wondering if it's because I'm just not very good at teasing out new angles of work that has already been pondered and thoroughly analyzed. For the first time in my diss, I'm working on a text where the point I have to make is pretty minimal and where there is a ton of secondary lit to wade through. Having waded through it, I feel like I'm digging a little tiny hole in a sandy beach--impermanent, unimpactful, uninteresting.

Because I'm not sure what I want to say, whether it's worth saying or has already been said, it makes it very very hard to get up in the morning and write.