I've just submitted final grades at the end of another semester, and after I hit submit on my Hamilton class (another post entirely because omg) I realised I'm seriously feeling a little adrift here. This semester was in many ways like every other semester--I didn't give them as much in-class writing time as I wish I could, multmodal "unpapers" alternately knocked the socks off me (I'm looking at you, "Burr Book." You go, Glen Chlo-Chlo) and bored me halfway to tears (how many PowerPoints can one woman take?)--but in many ways it was also way, way different.
This semester, I finished my dissertation and I'll be awarded my doctoral degree this weekend. I ran another cycle through the job market--rinse and repeat--and have had some interesting results, which I am not currently at liberty to share (more on that soon).
But this has been my life for eight years. It has been everything. When Robin died, when shit went to hell and back with M and my mental health....through all of it, school was my constant. More than that, my dissertation was what I had, even in the moments when I thought I had nothing else. To suddenly not have that—even because I’ve seen it through to completion and am about to move on to something bigger, whatever that turns out to be—it’s a little disorienting, it turns out.
I mean, it's not going anywhere. I've written what I hope is a hell of a project, and there are next steps to be taken for sure, but just for a minute, sitting here in my gorgeous blue ikat armchair, gazing at my kitties curled into weird shapes on the couch--seriously, dude, who sleeps like that?--I had a moment of panic, that vertigo that comes at the edges of things, when one is deciding to jump to see if they will fly.
And this time, maybe I will.
