Last night I finished my Ph.D thesis.

That sentence needs a bunch of asterisks.  I haven’t shown the new draft (which I am referring to as “finished”) to my committee yet, or scheduled a defense.  Plus, I screwed up some administrative paperwork (for literally the third time, with the same paperwork) with the result that I may not receive the degree until September, no matter how soon I defend.  Etc.

When I say “last night I finished my Ph.D thesis,” I am mostly referring to a psychological phenomenon, a very important one.  I’ve been working on this thesis for a very long time, while maintaining what I now realize was a certain amount of self-deception.  It was “essentially done” around half a year ago, when I cobbled together all my research work into a single document and showed that first draft to my committee.  All that needed to be done was to “flesh out the exposition,” which seemed trivial.  Instead, of course, it dragged on for months.  And there was a final piece I really wanted to put in, a piece I could generate with my numerical code if I merely “made some trivial modifications”; of course that turned into hours, days, months of coding, testing, debugging.  I kept missing administrative deadlines, and that meant I had to delay graduation, which gave me more time to work on these “trivial finishing touches,” which I continued to plug away at, week after week, letting other parts of my life fall by the wayside, almost unaware of the dissonance.  The more time I felt I had, the more suboptimal aspects I could identify and try to fix, and often as I tugged at one of these threads it would reveal new and bigger problems.  I’d add a new explanatory section and realize that it raised its own questions which had to be answered in a second new section, and so forth; the more I wrote, the more notation I had to juggle and standardize; the more ruthlessly clear I tried to be, the more tiny details there were to be potentially wrong about.

Suddenly, 5 days or so ago, I started referring to the thesis as “the brain parasite.”  It felt like an infection or an addiction, something hijacking my free will, like cordyceps.  I realized I couldn’t trust the siren song that said “it’s almost done, it’ll be done next week, just keep plugging ahead.”  I’d been hearing that same song for half a year.  I needed, ASAP, to declare I was done, because only that could kill the parasite.  I wasn’t even being perfectionistic, exactly; I was just taking individual steps that seemed sensible, none of which ever produce the feeling of “doneness,” since there was no objectively definable endpoint.

So I arbitrarily set an endpoint – told myself that I will be “done” after a finite series of specific steps – and then sat down and made myself do each step, in order, refusing to allow any of the steps to spawn new descendent steps.  As I worked, there were places where it felt sensible and reasonable to add something new to my to-do list; I refused to do so.  I kept working, and last night I was so determined to kill the parasite that I didn’t sleep until the final step was complete, at around 4:30 AM.

I finished it.