Hallelujah!

I just had the shortest, happiest meeting I have ever had with my thesis advisor. On Friday he told me to work on coming up with "punch lines" - big ideas that I've found in my analysis of the data that I could possibly write up. I've been mired in the data itself for so long that this seemed kind of a daunting task. I avoided it all weekend, and then yesterday I churned out a few tentative sentences, and then this morning I scrapped almost all of them and produced a new list and thought it was pretty good for a few minutes, until I started thinking about it too much.

And then I realized that I could just hold on to this list of "punch lines" and revise it and worry about it forever, quite literally, and I have learned that, green as I am, sometimes the best thing for me to do if I want to actually get anything done is just to hold my breath, shut off my mind, and throw myself into the conflict. So I set an appointment for early afternoon with my thesis advisor, even though I felt far too unprepared, made substantial changes to my list in the last half hour before the meeting (I work so much better under pressure), and then brought it in, and bit my lip while he read through it and I crossed my fingers that his nodding was a good sign.

Then he looked up and said, "These are good." And then he became enthusiastic. "And I think you can address all of these with your data, don't you?"

"Oh, yes," I said, feeling relief that what I hoped were good ideas really were good ideas.

"In fact," he said, "this is starting to look like a chapter four." That's when I started to feel really excited. There are five chapters involved in a thesis (in my department, at least) - I have a good start on the first three, which will evolve out of my proposal, but the real bulk of the thesis is my fourth chapter, the analysis, and I have felt so far from being able to write my analysis for so long that the idea of starting it is almost unbelievable. Finally, after months and months and months, I have findings! I can start writing! My thesis really will get finished by the deadline! You have to understand - I have always known that my thesis would get done eventually because there really isn't any other option. But this has been hanging over my head since I first had the beginnings of my ideas a year and a half ago, and in all that time I have not once been able to clearly see how it is going to happen. And now I can.

So I have an awful lot of work ahead of me in the next month and a half, but it is no longer this big, dark, suffocating presence following me around, and that feels good.