I am feelingly slightly moved.
I had taken a few days off from the world of work for total emersion in my PhD and have basically done a 48 hour cram job, breaking only to eat, and watch Pans’ Labyrinth last night with girls ( FYI very good if you like that sort of thing).
“The little printer that could” has huffed and puffed out a 24 page document today, which is the fruits of the last 12 weeks worth of work on the thesis. As I have been working full time, this has been done during the evenings all through the bitter, dark nights, and occasionally at stupid o’clock in the morning when I have woken up dry mouthed with anxiety about lack of progress. Also the odd weekend when I have sacrificed being a fabulous person about town, and renounced some great social event full of beautiful people, to read Foucault and the like. Yup, it’s been emotional.
I have produced a fist draft of my interview analysis, which is 12,000 words. *Sob * none of which, I suspect will make it into the final document, but will probably end up as a type of appendix. It has been an arduous task alright, but necessary in order to inform and make rigorous the actual discussion of ‘discourse’. I must say it was great holding the document in my hand, knowing that mentally, I have passed a bit of a milestone. I have spent the last 3 months carefully reading through and thinking about all my participants’ interviews, and dealing with what they actually said rather than what I wanted or hoped they might say.
Finishing a PhD is tough. I described it to someone the other day as a type of sickness or a heavy bag that you carry on your shoulder everywhere you go. I know it sounds doom and drama, but that’s what it is like sometimes. But far from feeling troubled today, I feel quite the contrary. I feel as if I am ready to bring it home. Personal circumstances and being v.v. poor (which is the plight of the PhD student I know) have made it very problematical, and what with the world of work and the contradictions that entails, I have felt the thesis slipping little by little away from me at the end of 2007. But now I’ve gone all Noel Gallagher “Wonderwall” about it. The word on the street is that the fire in my heart is out. Not me, noooooo. My sense of deep emotional attachment to the thesis is still very much mother and child. I am incredibly protective, and for some reason at the moment it feels as if my back is against the wall and it’s fight or flight.