[I'm also going to frontload you with cuteness here in the form of a picture of an adorable bunny rabbit. Just because.]
An open letter to my thesis:
I’m sorry I don’t love you. I should. I have been working on you, in one form or another, since September. I have been writing you since late November. I have been focusing all of my spare attention, every scrap I have to give, everything that is not being taken up by procrastination or class or the petty need to eat and sleep and cook, on you for months. I have spent more time on you than I have spent on any one thing in my life. I have complained about you so much that I suspect my housemates are beginning to fantasize about gagging me. I have allowed you to drive me insane.
I have given you most of me.
I’m sorry I don’t love you, because at times I have enjoyed writing you. A thousand people have written a thousand brilliant books and I got to immerse myself in their research, however briefly. I have found shows that I never want to watch again and shows that I want to rewatch forever, and I was able to unscroll them across pages and footnotes. Inside my head there is a collage of research and dialogue and context, and sometimes it has sung to me, and when it has not I was able to commiserate with my fellow thesis writers and at least find some sort of satisfaction in solidarity.
I’m sorry I don’t love you. I feel like I should. You are the child I cannot yet part from, but only because I cannot graduate without you and I have spent months on you, spent pages on you, sighed over my advisor’s comments, spent vacations and weekends and late nights researching the words I would type onto a thousand blank screens —
And yet all I can think now, looking at you, is, “Why did I choose this?” and “Why did I write this?” and “What was I thinking?” The sentences I labored over are weak. My points are useless. I am saying nothing that has not been said before. And I am so, so, so utterly sick of my topic.
“Why didn’t I approach this from a different angle?” and “But what’s the point without more information?” and “Well, that’s not very interesting, is it?”
I am sorry I don’t love you, but I can’t. I cannot love you. You are poisonous in large doses. I snap at friends and find myself closing my eyes mid-afternoon so that I don’t have to look at you. Every line of you is a reminder that I have made a mistake I cannot fix. I should not have picked you, I think. I do not have the time to write something else.
I will finish you, not just because I cannot graduate without you but because you deserve to be finished, after months and pages and all those miserable tiny comments pointing out yet another thing I should have done better. I cannot bear to see my effort drift away, incomplete. I am adrift in the midst of a salty ocean and I will be damned if I sink before I reach shore.
But — poor thesis — it is not because of you. There is nothing contained within your pages that will enrich the world for existing. You are a dear thing, a sweet thing, and you try so very hard, and I have failed you because there is nothing worthy about you. I cannot write your introduction because there is nothing to introduce. I cannot write your conclusion because what can I conclude? What ideas are worth summarizing, what thoughts bear repeating?
If I am to be proud of you, it will be as a task that has been achieved, a monument. One hundred and twenty-five pages, and counting! Look, I may say, I have striven. I have strained. I left my world behind and trekked until the bitter end. I have pushed the boulder to the top of the mountain; just don’t read it.
I’m sorry I don’t love you. I’m sorry that I can only look at you with resignation and grim fortitude. I’m sorry that the ideas that you sung to me are lifeless and useless upon the page. We started out so hopefully, and I have failed you. But you are me, the product of my labors, everything I had left to give, and so my failure is yours, and your failure is mine, and in a week and a half I will turn you in and regret that I did not try something else, anything else. That I did not start editing earlier. That I did not start from a different section. That I did not write about different themes. And you will leave my hard drive for cooler climes, wherever the unloved theses go when their authors cannot be proud of them.
I’m sorry I don’t love you, thesis. It’s not you. It’s me.
[Original tags on this post: academia is whackademia, cute fluffy things, thesis,thesis stuff, totally self-indulgent]
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