Remember last September? No, you don’t. Because that was a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Back when I still believed in things like ‘getting enough sleep’, ‘reasonable deadlines’, and ‘linear time’.
‘They’ say you have to roll with the punches, so now it’s late-night meal deals and serious emotional debt. Just tuck and roll baby. ‘They’ call it the final stretch. I call it the part of the movie where the hero is crawling through the desert, hallucinating conversations with their childhood pet and slowly accepting death.
Let’s take stock, shall we?
My thesis? A magnificent beast that refuses to die. I thought I was stabbing it to death, but really, I’m the one limping along, gasping for relief. At this point, my writing process resembles the infinite monkey theorem – you know, the one that says if you give a monkey a typewriter and infinite time, it’ll eventually write Shakespeare. Statistically speaking, I should have written a halfway decent conclusion by now. And yet…
My exams? Graded? No. No closure, no peace. Just the hollow echo of a professor saying, ‘we’ll try to get the results out soon.’
They call it the final stretch. I call it the part of the movie where the hero is crawling through the desert, hallucinating
My graduation status? Unconfirmed. Schrödinger meets Shakespeare: whether it’s to be or not to be, something feels both dead and alive, and it’s definitely not the cat.
And yet – and yet! – the world has the audacity to move on. The sun shines like it hasn’t read the room. People post beach photos. My inbox is full of cheery subject lines like ‘We hope to see you at the picnic!’ Oh, do you? Do you hope? Because unless my Fluid Mechanics professor is at that picnic with a diploma and a formal apology, I’m not coming.
Just smile and wave boys, just tuck and roll. Because what else can I do? Collapse into a puddle of ungraded coursework and hope someone waters me? Tempting.
No. I persevere. I edit. I refresh my grades page every 14 minutes like it’s the stock market. I whisper sweet nothings to my thesis like ‘you complete me but also I hate you.’ I write columns like this one, which might be the only coherent thing I’ve done all week. And I wait.
I promise to roll with the majority of punches, but it’s only fair if I also get an uppercut in from time to time. But in the meantime, I will keep going. Not because I’m especially resilient or inspired, but because stopping doesn’t feel like an option. The thesis needs finishing. The grades will eventually appear. The degree might even show up. And maybe, once the dust settles, I’ll feel something like pride. Or relief. Or just… rest.
CARLA ERASMUS