Finally!

I actually like my thesis at the moment. I don't feel sick when I think about working on it, and it isn't a massive effort to force myself to sit down with my data and my laptop for a set period of time in the morning and in the afternoon. I don't feel like I'm drifting at sea, or making no progress for all the work I put into it, and I don't feel like the end is completely out of sight, not because I can finally see the end (I can't) or because I have a clear view of the path that I need to take to get there (I don't) but because I've finally been able to let go of the big picture, just for the moment, and it makes an amazing difference.

I think I must have felt (consistently) good about my thesis at some earlier point in time, but I am being completely honest in saying I really don't remember that. For the longest time my response to the question, "How's your thesis going?" (which I get several times a week from family and close friends and fellow students who know what I'm going through) has been a sort of deflated, "It's going." Occasionally I've been able to add, "actually, today's been a pretty good thesis day," but only occasionally, and for the most part I have been feeling frustrated and have been fighting an almost unbearable tendency to thinking about it, working on it, talking to my professor about it. I don't know how I would have made any progress this past semester if I hadn't (wisely) requested a regular weekly meeting time with my advisor, which meant I had that hanging over my head all week and knew that I had to have something to report when I went in and saw him every Friday morning.

And so this general feeling of oppression has been lingering at the back of my mind for so long (months, and off and on for the last year and a half) that my feelings this week are a bit surprising. I mean, it's not like I am able to bury myself in my thesis and lose track of time (I don't think I can do that for anything, even things I consistently enjoy like running, reading, watching movies, talking with friends). But I don't dread working on it, and I actually almost (almost) look forward to it.

Part of it is because I'm writing again. I like writing. It's not easy, but I feel a great deal of satisfaction in the process and I really enjoy thinking about what to say and how to say it and how to organize my thoughts. I have been writing all through the data analysis, but it has all been informal writing, pages and pages of thoughts that no one else is going to see, writing that is intended only to help me think through my ideas so that I can talk about them coherently and so that I can better understand the data and what I am seeing in it (this is all qualitative data, by the way - no number crunching whatsoever, but rather a lot of categorizing and recategorizing and looking for patterns and theorizing). Now I have been given permission - no, I have been ordered to begin to go back and rewrite my first three chapters (what originally counted as my thesis proposal and needs a great deal of reworking since my research has evolved significantly and taken off in new directions in the months since my proposal was approved). This is stuff that other people are going to see, and writing it is a very different, and much more fulfilling, process than the informal writing I've been engaged in for the last several months.

I know that this good feeling may not last. In fact, I expect that it won't. But right now I am enjoying it and trying to take advantage of it. I knew I was stressed, and frustrated with myself, and discouraged, but I didn't really realize just how much until suddenly I wasn't anymore. I knew things had to come together eventually, but I don't think I really believed it until they did.

What a great week :).