between the rock and the cold, cold sea

I am making soup. It is vegetable soup with the scraps leftover from a boiled ham, and will be very protein-heavy soup, because I emptied two tins of different kinds of beans into it.

I am surprisingly happy. I slept well and woke happy. There is rain between showers of sunlight, and I breakfasted upon black grapes and Greek yoghurt drizzled in maple syrup. The words in the reader's report on the submitted chapter of my thesis have not changed during the night: the criticism is still mild and constructive, and the sentence The candidate demonstrates impressive mastery of the archaeological data, writes with elegance and precision, and begins to formulate highly promising theoretical grounds from which to embark upon the kind of cultural phenomenology of healing which the thesis sets out to produce hasn't mysteriously disappeared.

I am still hugging that sentence. I want to frame it.

I am so rarely this happy. This reassured that I am not a waste of space and time, that I am doing what I am meant to do, and doing it well. It is impossible to own my own abilities without anxiety, without fear of overweening pride and self-deception - always I must qualify the sentence. Always, I disbelieve. Always, I am insufficient.

But today I am less insufficient, and can make soup and play videogames and go for a walk and be kind to myself, because today, for a short time, I am happy and full of charity and love towards the world.

I'm done.

Final corrections have been made. Dangling participles have been undangled. Split infinitives have been spliced into proper formation. My supervisor says, Well structured and, You probably don't suck (I paraphrase).

File has been saved as .pdf to stop it repaginating every time I so much as think about it. There are five illustrations, sixty-one pages, and one hundred and thirty-two footnotes. And all that remains is to get three copies printed and bound.

I am done.

It's weird. When I hand this in, I will have offically completed 65% of the work required for my degree. And assuming I get a reasonable mark for it (the amount of work I put in, I damn well hope I get a II.1), I'd have to fail my exams outright not to graduate with an honours degree.

That's strangely reassuring. Because I might still fuck things up? But I have yet to actually fail an exam to which I have shown up.

It's so weird not to have a thesis to do anymore. I think I'm going to take until Thursday to get used to this, before I start fretting about the Next Thing.