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Today I realized that switching my dissertation project is similar to going through a breakup. Actually, its more like leaving one person for another, younger, more successful, better looking person who is on the news all the time.
I keep conjuring this scene in my head where I look into my former dissertations’ eyes and say, “its not you its me. I still think you are beautiful and smart and interesting. We have been together for a very long time, but I need to grow as a person and you are stunting me. Maybe some day in the future we can try it again, but for now, we need to go our separate ways.”
But really, it is like going through a breakup. I read the news, see movies, hear music, look through old photos, notebooks and papers, and I think of my old project. Sometimes I sit down with my new one and wish I was still with the old one.
I feel like I broke up with my project because my elders didn’t approve of its artsy-ness. They wanted me to be with a more staid, theoretical type. And so it goes. I broke up with my project to please others, and now I miss my old one. Sometimes I just want to tell it that I am sorry for the way I treated it, that maybe if I was more grown up I would have done better for us. But really, I gave it all I could give at this point in my life.
What is even more silly, is that since I dumped my old dissertation for a younger more exciting one, I have been losing weight, rockin a push-up bra, paying extra attention to my make up and buying clothes compulsively. I mean, hell, I just got out of a seven year relationship with this project that in its absence feels like a person is missing from my life.
Does this qualify as unrequited love?
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