Transformation

I can tell by the length of my "silences" on this blog how full my days have been. But today I get a respite from an inordinately busy week because I just finished both the introduction and the conclusion to the dissertation, and will send them off by Priority Mail to my advisor tomorrow.

They're going out about a week later than I would've wanted, but with getting the house ready to sell, and with a diversity summit in mid-week, and an author's visit to my class at week's end, I just couldn't do it any sooner.

Though later rather than sooner, I'm officially DONE with the Monster. Now comes the time for revising and perfecting and making it prettier (or perhaps simply stronger) than it first came out. And while I look forward to that process, it's not half (perhaps not even a third) as hard for me as the process of gathering and thinking and making connections and writing, which is now complete.

I used to grumble to my dissertation co-director that the Monster was really some humongous hoop that I was being forced to jump just for the sake of showing I could jump it, not because it had any intrinsic value in and of itself. And I resented that feeling, after so many years of both academic and professional development.

But I have to say that while I was right to see the Monster as a huge hoop (that's a hard image to conjure up), I was wrong to think that the process did not have any other inherent value. I know that I have learned more about so many things in this time of getting the dissertation done, than I did in the two years of course-work for the Ph.D. Better yet, this time around I got to analyze and interpret the material on my own terms, following my own instincts, not those of someone else, as mostly happens in a graduate school class.

In talking to the author that I brought to visit my class this past Friday to discuss his novel (which the students read), he told me at lunch that the moment comes when you (the dissertation writer) knows more about your dissertation than your committee. That's the moment you know that from graduate student you've been finally transformed into a scholar and a true professor, one who actually knows whereof she professes.

That time has definitely come for me. It's like the transformation of the ugly chrysalis into the gorgeous butterfly. Being a graduate student has been like being the gold-colored but homely pupa.

But now I'm ready to spread my deep lilac and black wings, stretch my legs and antennae, and fly, fly, fly toward the sun for as long as I have the chance to do so.