I submitted my Ph.D thesis!

… like it’s hard?

My Master’s degree began in March 2020. I had had a terrible week and my first class was about the Theory of Imaginary. I did not feel ready at all, as the first pages of Gilbert Durand barely made their way into my brain. He argued that the human unconscious produces symbols to organise the meaning of the existence of humanity. The syllabus had names such as Gaston Bachelard (whose work I truly appreciate right now), Michel Maffesoli, and Jean Baudrillard. Everything seemed so overwhelming to me. Seeing Ph.D students talking about the repertory of images that define individual and/or collective subjectivity did not sound familiar. It was alien-like rhetoric. How did these people know so much about cultural or psychological narrative statements? How did they know it was a product of an imaginarium, a disposition of imaginary elements that could lead us to think about grief, death, Nature, and so on? I went home crying. Look, mother, I think I might give up, I remember saying, I am not smart enough for this.

That’s when I started going to my therapist. One week later, COVID-19 made me strangely calmer. I started taking the classes from home, completely locked in, and that made me understand the mechanisms that make a good researcher. I am not being a particularly good researcher right now; extremely laidback, uncurious, one may say, but probably I am just tired. I do need a break. After a four-year-work, it is impossible not to think you should have done some things differently. ‘Oh, so you must be an expert in Anglo-Brazilian Literature’. Allegedly, yes. But I still have to read my papers over and over again, papers which I have written myself, and study my own words. That’s what I will do right now, in order to not freak out prior to my viva.

Lately, I am seeing many content creators in academia. They share their twelve-hour study sesh and I couldn’t help feeling guilty over not being able to get my head in the game. They make it sound so hard, man. Everyone who has read my thesis has told me it looks brilliant. Still, I don’t post anything about it. I don’t particularly think I did a good job, but I did what I could. I dedicate myself to having something with my name on it which will make me proud, but I don’t even know if I’ll ever proudly say that I have achieved something spectacular. It seems easier than they make it sound, these content creators. Oh, you have to do this and that and then this and that. My mind must have dissociated from the last three years, where I actually wrote the biggest part of my work. I don’t remember myself freaking out about it.

I hate saying this online, but there it goes: my therapist said I have a privileged brain. Also, not sure if I believe her, but in these moments I feel either everyone’s lying to me, or yes, everything is kinda “... like it’s hard?”. If I’d gone to Harvard, probably we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It is a stretch. Overall, though, what I am trying to say is that I am not a perfectionist, but I still get upset when the outcome is not a publishable instant classic. Maybe that is perfectionism after all, only wearing a different outfit. I do not obsess over colour-coded notes–my handwriting is shit. I miss meetings due to my crippling ADHD, I write in cafés and don’t post on social media, I forget references until the last minute, and I convince myself I have ruined everything at least once a month. My perfectionism only arrives at the very end, when I expect whatever I have made to justify every sacrifice retrospectively. If four years disappeared into this document, then surely it should alter the course of literary criticism forever. Anything less feels strangely underwhelming.

Of course, that is an impossible standard. A thesis is not supposed to be the best thing you will ever write. It is supposed to prove that you can think independently, sustain an argument and contribute something new to a conversation. I really hope I got there. I don’t know!!!!!!!!!!! Academia has a remarkable ability to convince you that every finish line is merely the waiting room for another examination.

Looking back, what impresses me is not the thesis itself but the person who kept returning to it. She had some terrible times along the way and still managed to sit in front of a laptop and deliver what most people don’t count as work. That is the real achievement. Research is less about brilliance than endurance. Somewhere we collectively decided that intelligence must look exhausting. If you are not constantly breaking down, pulling all-nighters and documenting your burnout online, then maybe you did not earn your place. I do not think that is true. Sometimes things become manageable because you quietly spent years learning how to do them. I reckon this also goes back to that piece I have written on how to dress up in academia. I did all of this alternating between After the Hunt and Legally Blonde. Perhaps my biggest pride.

So yes, I submitted my Ph.D. thesis!!!!!! It took four years, thousands of pages of reading, countless drafts and more self-doubt than I care to admit. But when people ask me how I did it, the answer feels disappointingly ordinary. I read books. I wrote sentences. I deleted most of them. I repeated the process until there was a thesis. The hardest part was never the writing itself, but believing I was the sort of person who could write it in the first place. Wish me luck (I don’t have the slightest idea of what to do with this degree, but that’s a topic for another conversation) :))))