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I lost a lot of time on my dissertation this year, and it absolutely set me back in my progress. It terrifies me. I think I can still finish "on time," (i.e., before too much time has passed for me to finish). I know that if I were in danger of not finishing in that window, my advisor would warn me, and I'm reasonably confident that if I were in danger of not finishing on time, the university would take the pandemic into consideration, but it still terrifies me. I just couldn't bring myself to write during the pandemic because it felt so monumental and I really didn't know how long it was going to go on. I managed to complete one chapter draft during the pandemic; I really should have completed two. I was barely still managing to meet my obligations with my remote job. And at one point, the power company was doing some work and caused such an enormous power surge that it fried my desktop's hard drive, even plugged into a surge protector (several other less important appliances never worked again after that, too). Nothing from the power company, no acknowledgement of what happened, let alone an apology or some sort of compensation. So, while I couldn't set foot on campus to use a real computer due to the pandemic, I was trying to do my job and write my dissertation on the crappiest, tiniest old laptop that I'd been meaning to discard. I was just extremely lucky that none of my writing or archival research was only saved to that computer. I was supposed to teach a summer course last semester, which was cancelled. I was supposed to present my research at a conference, which was postponed and then cancelled. I'm an Irish dancer, a hobby I keep up because I enjoy it and it keeps me in shape. We abruptly lost St. Patrick's Day 2020. We had one performance, on March 8th, and everything after that was cancelled. I never in a million years would have guessed that we wouldn't have St. Patrick's Day 2021, either. It feels horrible to be upset about any of this when I have not lost my income and no one I am close to has been sick. And unlike most PhD students, I wasn't teaching or taking courses, so I never once had to deal with Zoom classes (except dance classes). I am lonely being single and living alone, but at least I am not responsible for a child's needs (especially educational) during this pandemic. I'm simultaneously totally broken from being all alone for nine months and feel like the biggest piece of shit for not having anything really bad happen to me or anyone I love.
January 8, 2021