Dissertation Defense: Five Days and Counting

Written on December 1, 2006

My dissertation defense is in five days and i have just been a zombie of late. All this work for all these years and as the moment draws nigh, I am just N-U-M-B. I try to flip through texts, review, cram etc.,. And I just get bored, then overwhelmed and then just close the texts. All I can do is think about traveling and how to go somewhere between the defense and Christmas and mark the moment.

The thing I keep trippin' on is my feelings of "shouldas and couldas and need toos" and yet I just languish in inertia. So how am I feeling these days?

---The dissertation is difficulty to personalize now because it has cost so much for so long.

---I realize how much teaching anchored and grounded me through the process now that I am not teaching.

---I'm not managing my loneliness with anything except TV and Jazzercise.

---Yet, I do feel like my body is physically altered without the weight and pressure of the dissertation weighing down on it.

---I now realize how few ties I have to the communities i've lived in during this gypsy life.

---I just have the overwhelming desire to be somewhere warm and away to cry and heal from this journey. Somehow, only warmth will aid in mapping a new course. More importantly, I must begin to map out a life for myself beyond Chicago and Champaign which includes who I want to be as a professor, a writer, and a woman.

As I think and write, I am coming to terms with the fact that:

---As the dissertation process reaches its conclusion, it is like watching my life begin to thaw out before me and beginning the process of remembering what was there before all this began.

---Such an opening allows me to move beyond the sleepwalking and existing to begin to think about what living truly is for me. Its like feeling my limbs begin to awaken from years of neglect. I am coming to feel what it means to take time, look at myself, reinhabit my body, my space, my point of view in new ways.

---10 years (yep, Master's Degree, 2 years of research, PhD post-Master's to completion), 292 pages to date, four continents, thousands of people, millions of pounds and calories, oceans of tears and countless telephone units of venom, doubt and delight/despair are just a few ways to calculate the journey.

---I'm coming to realize that the process of completion required a fever over the last eight months---the fever to complete at all costs---but now that fever is breaking.

---I just feel a bit like the caterpillar must have felt in the process of becoming a butterfly. And while others may want me to be the same, do give yourself permission to be different, renewed, enlivened on the other side.

---It is indeed amazing to work so long for the approval, greenlight, completion that the end is this overwhelmingly numb. The magnitude of it is so great that I don't think I feel it...or at least my body is not letting me feel it .