working on a thesis

The last four months have been entirely new and wholly old and worn out: I sleep next to my girlfriend and listen to her soft breath blend with our kitten’s loud purr. I am always moving, from side to back to side, from the kitchen to the stairs to the floor, I can’t bear staying still. I watch chaos win over my autonomy. I listen to the glass frost over with moisture and fog. I confuse the light outside with the moon, I start to pray to an LED lightbulb.

My prayers are all the same: for nothing to change, for everything to change. I stare at a body that is supposed to be mine in the mirror and I watch these Frankentein limbs change again and again in front of me. It has been four years since I have felt change quite like this, where it is looming over me, threatening every corner of my life. Truly this semester has felt like the coming of a heartbreak and it is all I can think about, all my friends and I can talk about. 

My face fills with little red spots along my cheeks and chin, I live as if I am constantly about to ovulate, and I cry on the floor often. I am for the first time since I was 15 not on birth control and I am going through puberty all over again except this time at 22 when nobody else is—but that is another essay. 

My mind is never quiet anymore; I spend all of my mother’s money on vitamins and homeopathic medicine that will allow me to fall asleep at night. I try everything inhuman to feel human again: I spend more money just to talk to a woman in her small cold office about how I cry during sex. 

Sex: I crave any and all attention, even when it is not what I want. I desire fame and success. I imagine it is inescapable and lifts my body from underneath, floating me above danger and anger and resentment. I ask my mother if she thinks I am being unfair to the people I love and when she says yes, I crave the fame more and imagine myself on a large stage receiving applause just for showing up. 

This is all to say, I have been burnt out and I am in my last year of college. I spent my first couple weeks of winter break in absolute opposition to all reading and writing. Words in print of any kind seemed to reach off of their page, menu, or screen and wrap their fingers around my neck—careful not to choke or press down, only threaten to. 

Yesterday I get on a plane and finish Elena Ferrante’s debut novel Troubling Love in one sitting. I remember why I am attracted to words. I remember my thesis at all. Working on a creative thesis has been everything less than what I imagined it to be. Often I think about my thesis and feel dread for something that will not be my best work when more than anything I would like it to be so.

When I wrote up a proposal for my thesis in August, I set out to construct a project on: “what makes up the self and the body; particularly the relationships, the quotidian routines, the performances, and the perceptions of others”. I had little to no expectation of what it would look like, except that, as my thesis advisor often likes to remind me I said in our first meeting, “I only want it to be beautiful”. 

To me, the beauty of this project lies in its intimacy and its long run-on sentences. I have been heavily influenced by Hilton Als White Girls, particularly the first essay in this collection, “Tristes Tropiques” which is brilliant, heartbreaking, and grounded in history and the queer collective memory of New York in the 80s. 

When I first began writing in October, I stayed as close as I could to themes of performance. I thought about race, class, gender, and sexuality. I wrote about my own performance and three-ness,1 I read Beauvoir and Sartre who discuss this kind of performance at length in their memoirs,2 and I watched quite literal performance pieces from Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovic to guide me through the meanings of the word.3

But as I continued writing, all over the pages were love and intimacy: my relationship with Emily, with my mother, with people present and past, with my own body and my own flux between the rejection and fascination of love and intimacy. I keep coming back to people. I keep coming back to what it might mean to know someone, to spend time with someone, to hurt someone.

What describes the work I have done so far? maybe it is this:4 intimate, overwhelmingly, often uncomfortably or voyeuristically so; sensory; orange and yellow; warm, not only in place or sensation but also in emotion; hunger, explicitly in the belly for food but also sexually and more subtly in the gluttonous mind; family, generational, collective memory within the family; doubles and doubling, where one person ends and the other begins, or more commonly, the lack of that line; in-betweens, hybridity, rhizomes, in transit, there is a going and a coming, a running and a finding. Some of these are themes of my work, others are just images I see.

I’m not sure if this has been particularly interesting at all, especially since you can not read my work yet. But this is a bit of a brain dump and some things I have been thinking about the past four months. I included some pages of my notebook too. A class on Proust and self narration more generally also aided in many of these notebook scrapings.