Thesis Experience

I have just perused my last few posts and felt sad for myself. I have to admit, I’m depressed, though not clinically.  I think I have to blame it on the billion years I have spent immersed in writing my undergraduate thesis.

Because such is prerequisite to my graduation, I have started researching for this since last year but it became serious over last summer after having discussed it with my adviser, who is as completely into this venture as I am. I've been wanting to write something like this ever since my first year, where I read Jane Eyre in both leisurely and truly scholarly manner for the first time and fell more deeply in love with English as a critical practice and Charlotte Bronte as an author.

So perhaps, for the next eight months I will not be bothered. 

It hasn't been easy. It has involved more books, caffeine, and tears than are likely healthy for any single individual to experience. I think about it in my bath. I think about it in my sleep. I even have dreams about it. It haunts my every day and I feel a double-sided and harrowing guilt when I find myself procrastinating (writing this blog post, for example) when I have a lot to read in so little time.

I have been compulsively quoting every book in sight. I couldn’t be satisfied with so little resources. I have been shelving, unshelving, borrowing and returning books to the library, yet getting so little consummation from the ‘holy’ grails I’ve mercilessly cajoled and nit-picked from those books. I have become inconstant, fickle, sick and tearful – have been deranged and anti-social. Ask my “close friends” and they will testify how I’ve turned into a controlling, overly serious, and hostile bitch. I have had nights when I stay so late at night and have some sorts of hallucinations and crippling feeling of being alone and unworthy (re: past posts). I have had forgotten my biological needs such as sleeping and lunch and bath. My zen habits are seriously affected. Well, I guess, first things first.

But you know what, I think I am enjoying it – not necessarily the harrowing processes involved in it but of something higher, more innate, more sincere resolve. There is this inwardly-bound energy that keeps me exerting through all the processes of coming up with shitty first drafts. Look, if I didn’t have the balls for this, I wouldn’t have started perusing all my assigned readings in the first place. It has cemented my belief that this is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life, and it's taught me a lot of important things along the way. Because I am mostly a tissue of things that other people have said and written and how I have thought about them, I have absorbed a lot of stuff that keeps me going like Jane Eyre herself.  

You see, I am still uncertain if this study of mine will come to completion before March 2013. Everything is a garden of forking paths. This thesis, along with the other pressures of life over the last year (ranging from publication duties to my academics), has and will occasionally feel like hell. But I will keep going. ‘Cause what more can I do about it? I might as well savor it until I make it through.