thesis approved. now what

I’m not quite sure how I pulled it off in the end: I can't remember how much time I wasted on Sunday and Monday, but I put in like 10 hours of work on Tuesday, 12 hours on Wednesday on only 5 hours of sleep, followed by 20 more hours of continuous work on Thursday on even less sleep, plus another 5 on Friday…That's around 60 hours of intense work in one week (at least half of which involved writing, the most painful sort of work for me). Must have been a miracle…

Though it now looks like I am going to be graduating after all (there were moments when I truly doubted I would make it to this point), I’m not left with a sense of accomplishment, but rather with a feeling of being liberated. I accepted the numerous words of congratulation I received today with a thank you, but being congratulated seemed somewhat incongruous. I feel more like a survivor than anything else. Especially since I’ve been disillusioned of the notion that personal accomplishment in the way of a degree is all that worthy. But perhaps surviving these last couple years, which I noted in my acknowledgements section as “the most personally and academically challenging years of my life,” is deserving of congratulations. Though I can't accept most of the credit. I filled nearly two full pages of acknowledgements at the start of my thesis, thanking 39 people individually plus 7 groups of people (e.g., the NSF, my professors at Hopkins, etc.), though as I mentioned to a friend a couple weeks ago, it’s a good thing I wrote my acknowledgement section a month ago, because if I attempted to write it last week, I’d hardly be thanking all those people, but blaming them for helping me get into this mess…