Sixteen.

Sixteen days to go.

In 384 hours I will probably be an hour or two away from waking up, driving to uni, and letting go of my thesis. It’s a terrifying prospect, and explains why I am awake still at 4:24 in the morning… not that that’s terribly unusual these days. The “nights” (hah – nights are for study!) I go to bed when the sun is already up are far outnumbering those in darkness.

I’m ready for it emotionally. I can’t wait to let the damn thing go. It has been my constant companion for far too long, and the relationship that I have with my thesis is difficult. If we were dating, we’d definitely have our Facebook relationship status set to It’s Complicated. Of course, “we” aren’t dating because there is no “we”; my thesis is a 300 page document that lives in my computer, in my head, and all over my living room floor. (Seriously, it’s quite distressing how much paper I have gone through editing this thing. Editing on the screen is just too difficult at this stage. I am definitely going to have to plant a few trees, or an entire forest, to make up for this one.)

It’s so much more than an inanimate object, though. One of the peculiar things about researching identity, and particularly narrative identity, is that I find a lot of parallels between my research and my own life. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what this project has meant to me. Over the past five years and ten months, it has been something I so looked forward to, then something that intimidated the hell out of me, then something I loved, then something that caused me an incredible amount of emotional anguish for a very long time, then something I left, then something I returned to with fresh eyes and unexpected enthusiasm. That was in July last year. At the time, I thought I didn’t have that much to do in order to finish.

L-O-effing-L.

I had all the things to do. I had written a lot before I took a year’s hiatus in 2011/2012, and most of it turned out to be unusable in its original state. It’s perfectly normal, I know, and indeed expected, that a PhD student’s work will undergo considerable change from first draft to final product. It has to; why bother doing a PhD if you go into it with a perfect grasp of what you hope to achieve? Many of the concepts and theories that have become the foundation of my thesis didn’t even exist in my work pre-2011. It took taking a year off, and allowing myself the opportunity to climb out of my own head, to realise what’s important to me, what I’m passionate about.

Predictably, this has made for an incredible amount of work over the past 16 months. I have essentially written my entire thesis, and researched probably 60% of it, in that time. At the same time I’ve worked anywhere between one and three jobs, because working 70 hours a week on a thesis doesn’t actually pay the bills. (It did once upon a time, but my scholarship is loooong gone.) My mind boggles a little when I hear about people completing their dissertation within the allotted three year period. How? How do you do it? I don’t want to be presumptuous and claim that only those without jobs can do such a thing. I know there are people who are more efficient workers than I am, and others that went into doing a PhD with a more structured plan.

My research evolved organically. I read my thesis proposal recently – not my candidacy application, but the proposal I wrote when I first applied to study a PhD at Curtin – and, wow. It’s quite funny, actually, as my research took a massive detour from its origin for a very long time before returning to a somewhat similar area, although with a completely different focus. I was going to research online visual representations of bodies, initially (an extension of my Honours research); I’ve ended up studying embodiment as the essential condition for identity manifestation, but in the context of locative media, urbanity & place, and narrative constructions of self. I’m happy with this; I would’ve tired of my original topic, and over the past couple of years I’ve discovered a love for geography, mobility, and locative media. By letting my research do its thing and evolve naturally over time, I’ve managed to discover an element of my identity that I had no idea existed. Life copies art copies life.

So. Sixteen days to go. Sixteen days to let go. It’s not going to be easy; I could keep working on this forever, but I don’t want to. I can’t. I’m a chronic perfectionist; I could work on it forever and still never be happy with it. In sixteen days, I let go.