compiling my thesis (sort of)

No one told me how hard it is to compile a thesis.

It’s like you get into grad school (hurray! 🎉) and then you do some work, and then it gets progressively harder and harder and then you quit your job to focus on school and spend so many of your waking minutes obsessing over getting it not just good, but really fucking good and then you’re in so deep that you can’t quit, you’re so close to graduating and then you and your friends commiserate and send angry emoji texts about your thesis preface and then you get drunk, thinking maybe coping like you did in your undergrad is the answer but it’s not, you’re so hungover the next day and that makes it harder, all the work you have to do still on your thesis so you pound latte after latte and when those aren’t enough, you buy chocolate covered espresso beans and you tell yourself you’ll stay up late, all night working like you also did in your undergrad but you can’t do that shit anymore, you’re 35 with two kids and by 11 p.m. your eyelids have drooped so low you can’t tell if you’re awake or asleep and then you say you’ll get up early like you used to do when you worked at a coffee shop but fuck that, you need your sleep so you cram it all into the daylight hours while your oldest son is at school and you try like hell not to let yourself get distracted but there are dishes and laundry and the internet and literally anything else sounds better right now but stop it, just do it, you’re almost there. You almost have a graduate degree, don’t fuck it up, you’ve got this, you’re a badass, almost an MFA holder and then one day, if it all works out, you can become a professor and have books out in bookstores, actually for sale with bar codes so just finish this god damn thesis you whiny little bitch. Just do it already.