Though the thesis is done, you can't quite write it off

When I sauntered into Pequod at 3:50 p.m. last Monday, two other English majors were frantically grabbing their bound volumes and running out the door. After some quick investigative work, I discovered that my thesis was due in 10 minutes.

I rushed to the head of the line, dumbly thanking everyone who let me skip ahead. I gave the Pequod worker my thesis and sheepishly told him it was due in 10 minutes.

"Cutting it close, eh?" he said. I shrugged, turning red with the same embarrassment I felt the last time I had to replace my driver's license. "This is the seventh time you've lost your license," the DMV employee said, shaking his head.

It is true that I'm a flake. It is true that I didn't know what day of the week my thesis was due until the Saturday before. But it is also true that I threw myself into my thesis, a novel. I often dreamt about the characters in my book, and during the day, I swam in and out of reality and the world I constructed.

When I got my bound thesis back after a 45-minute wait, the Pequod worker proudly explained to me that he had managed to fit my 300-page manuscript into a single volume. I ran to the English department office, awkwardly holding what looked like an over-stuffed phone book, and I realized that each one was almost as tall as the stack of notebooks I filled with angst-ridden poetry at age 12.

I had hoped that when I turned my thesis in, a sense of satisfaction would pull me out my dazed, milky world. No such luck. Instead I was devastated, and, in the spirit of teenage angst, all I wanted to do was cry and sleep. I decided that my deadline negligence was a Freudian result of my unconscious desire to cling to my thesis forever.

I am not known for being rational or emotionally stable when I am exhausted — more times than are worth counting I have gone to sleep feeling blanketed by misery, convinced that I was more monster than human, only to wake up nine hours later, perfectly happy. So, I wrote off my thesis anguish to the all-nighter I pulled after two weeks of not nearly enough sleep. I went to bed looking forward to waking up and wanting to celebrate.

Instead, I woke up terribly depressed, longing to keep working on my thesis. While everyone around me turned in their theses and pranced around campus smiling smugly, I transported myself back to my tortured middle school years when I was convinced that no one could possibly understand me — that I was utterly, painfully alone.

This time around, however, I realized that I was being absurd, and I tried to pretend I was happy instead of wearing black and telling all the other 12-year-olds that life is an aimless curse of nothingness. Every time someone congratulated me for turning it in, I cringed and forced a smile, hoping that for once I could refrain from wearing my heart on my sleeve. It is an embarrassing fact, but I spent the next few days crying and avoiding everyone else.

I am still climbing out of my funk, constantly asking myself why turning in my thesis — something one might argue is an accomplishment of maturity — allowed me to relive those years filled with loneliness and anguish that informed everything I wrote. I do thank my 12-year-old self, however, for writing poems so bad my thesis looks brilliant and for teaching me how to ride a wave of self-important angst. Emily Bliss, an English major from Durham, N.C., is a 'Prince' editor emeritus.