Writer’s Grief and Closing a Chapter

كاتِبة

root: ك-ت-ب / form I active participle, feminine form / definition: writing, a writer

I get emotionally attached to plans. I’ve been gathering quotes, ideas, and notes for months—only to realise there’s not enough word count (or time) to include everything in the chapter I’m writing.

So I save bullet points of brain clutter in a separate document and delude myself that I’ll one day go back and make use of them. It’s an empty hope I feed myself to allay my grief over orphaned ideas that find no page to call home.

I’m finishing up the first chapter of my PhD thesis and I hate that it’s messy. But at least it’s an accurate representation of my mind, which happens to be quite fried.

I haven’t had a day off in a while, but I have had many unproductive ones. And perhaps I should have just taken a full weekend off and came back with vigour but—too late—my deadline is the first of May and my Monday and Tuesday are consumed with other work.

So I have what remains of this evening (I can’t stay up late, I have an early start) plus all of Wednesday (and crumbs of time in between, where I can scavenge them) to polish up the chaos-of-words chapter and put together the 3000-word progress report I need to submit alongside it.

I don’t know how my words are coming across right now, but I’m not stressed.

I think the grief I mentioned at the start is a more accurate sentiment. I’m grieving over how good this chapter could have been if I was granted three-and-a-half years per chapter, rather than per PhD.

(Delusion continues to permeate.)

I’m weirdly looking forward to my May deadline, I see it as the start of summer. The resumption of freedom. More time to paint and bake and write non-academically.

Yet I realise I’m wrapping up nineteen months since I began my PhD, and I feel like I want to pause time, just a little.

Maybe that’s why I made two types of salad—one potato, one miscellaneous—this morning. To feel like I have time. (I’ve never made potato salad before this day.)

I gaze at the Aleppo soap on my shelf and wonder how to end this chapter on a high. I’m sure, like the summer sun through clouds of (writer’s) grief, it’ll come to me.

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