Process

I guess the beauty and the frustration of writing is that you can never achieve perfection. But the important thing is to try, and try again.

It's like I tell my students, while we aren't given the power to achieve perfection, we are given the ability to yearn for it. I've realized, as I now have reached the last lap of the dissertation, that I've become much better at aplicarme ese cuento so that I'm not predicando la moral in calzoncillos. As my Monster becomes more and more embodied and recognizable as a creature that makes sense together, I get more comfortable in my scholarly skin and self-doubt becomes a distant murmullo that I don't waste much time paying attention to.

That doesn't mean that I have lost all perspective (or humility) and come to believe that my project is perfect. That would not just be unrealistic but also stupid of me. It means that I come to recognize and appreciate my shortcomings along with my strengths. As I also tell my students, usually what makes us strong is also what becomes a liability, under a different guise.

Yesterday, part of my dissertation was discussed by colleagues at a faculty seminar, and it was an exciting experience. It was the first time that any section of my dissertation had been read and commented on by so many different scholars, most from outside my own discipline. Unlike a conference presentation, where people listen and then ask questions, in this case my colleagues read and commented on the essay and came prepared to discuss the piece for a little over an hour.

While I dreaded the usual criticisms about my writing: that I have an annoying tendency to repeat myself and that I need to condense parts of my sometimes wordy prose, I instead received great questions and comments that moved my thinking further and that I know will strengthen the piece to the point when I can submit it to a top journal and see if it gets published.

One of the best moments came when two of the professors in my department, two of my colleagues I admire most, praised the piece for being well written and interesting. That meant a lot to me and gave me further impulse to continue honing the project until it's as intellectually muscular as it can be.

"You're ready for your defense," one of them said as we walked away from the seminar room, and once I thought about what she meant, I realized that she was right. Not only had I been able to answer all questions about my piece but I also had shown that I commanded the scholarship and my own contribution to the field.

That's a great feeling, and it gave me further confidence that I should be quite able to handle the defense come June. For one, there will only be four professors (three from my committee) to answer to, instead of the seven from five different departments that were at the seminar yesterday.

With the defense in mind, those revisions to earlier sections are shelved for now as I continue to develop the last chapter. It's very different from its other three siblings, and definitely less theoretically creative, but I'm very excited about it. Most of all, I'm excited because it's the last one and it again signals that I've turned the corner of a writing project that I began in earnest two years ago.

All good (and bad) things come to an end. I'm doing my best to close this process off with a broche de oro. Let's drink (a cup of decaf, of course) to that!