Finished

Finally—it’s done. The thesis is “complete.” Look at that image: that is exactly what my desk looks like. Those stacks, they are piles of edited drafts. I have killed my fair share of trees in the past few weeks.

Unfortunately, I can’t say I feel all that relieved about being finished. Not that I’m worried about the grade; I am sure my grade will turn out fine. I could be worried that my departmental readers (the official grade-assigners) won’t ever receive their copies of my thesis, since the English office secretary seemed to have no idea that she was supposed to be receiving these copies, in spite of explicit instructions sent to all English Thesis writers by the head of the department. (“Submit two copies to Morey 404 on April 21st,” the e-mail said I even confirmed the instructor with the department head herself.). However, I made sure that each of my readers received an electronic copy of my paper, “just in case,” so that all of my bases would covered. So that’s not why I am unsettled. No, I’m feeling unsettled because, now that I’m finished with this all-consuming project, the big question is “What’s next?”

The obvious answer is “New York City.” It’s “your Time internship, dummy.” But these endeavors aren’t going to produce anything tangible. This past semester of hard work, this semester of writing, produced something I can hold in my hand: 75 pages of black ink on white paper. Seventy-five pages of my story. Seventy-five pages that I can share with someone else, that I can point to and say “look here, this is what I’ve been doing with all of my time and energy, do you like it?”

”So keep writing, Allison,” you say. “Obviously being done with a thesis project or even with school doesn’t mean you have to stop writing.” Sure I could keep writing. I’ve always been allowed to “keep writing.” The option is always there. The problem is, without deadlines, without someone expecting me to produce the writing, I fall flat. I say to myself, “That’s a good idea. I should write it down…later.”

It’s not that I no longer want to write. My reasons for writing don’t change: I want to entertain people! I want to affect others, to make them love reading! But without a teacher assigning a grade—without that rubric poking out of my notebook—I just…don’t write.

So the question is not whether I should keep writing. The question is: what do I use as my motivation now?