Beyond Selidor

As you might have noticed, I've been away from LJ/Dreamwidth for a while, and I apologise for that. However, I have the best excuse: I finished my PhD!

For six hours on Sunday night, Matthias proofread it (a terrifying experience, considering the first thing he said to me upon opening the document was 'you need to change all your en dashes to em dashes, and all your hyphens to en dashes,' causing me to wail and gnash my teeth). On Monday, I had to go into my college library to print it (college charges 3p per page, whereas the English faculty library charges 4p, which is a considerable saving when you need to print two copies of a 306-page document, plus a billion forms). This took several hours, and included a tense half-hour where the printer had a little tantrum. Then I went to get it soft-bound. I wandered into my favourite cafe in a bit of a deranged daze, and couldn't resist telling the barista that I'd finished my PhD. (This is not entirely true. I still have to have the viva, and make corrections based on that, and resubmit the hard-bound, corrected version, but the hardest part is over.)

I waited until Tuesday to hand it in, as I wanted to do so on a day that Matthias had free so that we could go out for lunch afterwards. The woman at the Board of Graduate Studies office was a very friendly, motherly South African who congratulated me in such an over-the-top manner ('you're going to be one of our future leaders!' 'Really, with a PhD on medieval Irish literature? Really?') that I started to tear up. In fact, crying seemed to be the unifying theme of the whole experience. When I was writing a thank-you email to my supervisor I started crying. I cried when I had the printed, bound documents. I cried when I told my mother I was finished. I cried when bethankyou started an 'I'm so proud of Ronni' thread on Facebook.

Because look. I feel overwhelmed with emotion. I started my PhD four years ago. It's been hundreds of books and articles - in four languages, something of which I'm very proud - pages and pages of translation from Irish, countless meetings with my supervisor, 80,000 words, hours of trimming and editing and restructuring and hope and anger and anxiety and, for the past year at least, a constant, dull, crushing fear, and it's finally over. As my mother said, the process of writing a PhD is mainly an exercise in determination and endurance. Your will to finish it must be stronger than the despairing voices in your head telling you you're incapable of writing it.

I've already thanked most of the people who helped me either in person or in the acknowledgements, but I wanted to emphasise my gratitude to another group of people, and that's all of you.

Thank you to the uploaders, to the artists and writers and bloggers and content-creators, to the people who make the stories and the people who pick them apart with discussion. Thank you to the musicians and vidders, the remixers, the cosplayers, the linkers, the rebloggers, those who read and those who comment, those who bookmark and those who leave kudos. Thank you to those who open their interesting lives to me on the screen, with pictures, with words, with eloquence and with wit. Thank you all, dear denizens of the internet. You created a community, and it is beautiful. You gave me the strength to continue.

This is for you.

Cían óm eólus-sa
críoch gusa ránag-sa.