Manuscripts

My working desk, all at once, seems unbeknownst to the activities that occupied me last night. I finally submitted the 3rd draft of my MS manuscript, which consisted of revisions from my final defense two weeks ago. Suddenly, after two successive weeks of being here and there and tending to the worries, mostly in my head, I am back to being vacant again.

Writing manuscripts usually fills me up to the point that when I finally finish it and offer it to the world for the first time, I am left with a void to fill up.

My BS manuscript in 2019, where I interviewed people living with HIV and reported insights from their experiences, was my first closest experience to writing about an issue scientifically. This year, for my MS, I am writing/studying about the portrayal of farmers in the news. Similar to how I treated my first manu, this one is my own.

It’s true that you only find the value of something upon realizing you are slowly losing hold of it.

In the case of writing manuscripts, I find their value building up every time I come back to the drafts, hundreds of times, often when my body does not want me to. It is always impossible to measure a paper’s weight while it is developing. That is why it is only later after other people read it and you defend why it merits the study, that it will dawn on me how attached I am to it. Suddenly, I want to protect the voice threaded underneath the words.

I worked for five long months for my MS manu, and to see it closer to its final form is like seeing pictures of my dog when she was a newborn and a puppy side by side. It is only during these times that its development appears starker.

Such is the very same reason why between writing the follow-up drafts and the critiques and revisions from my advisers, I feel a gap that seems impossible to fill. The blue, hazy horizon is the face value of a completed draft, but such beauty comes with hushing loneliness.

You cannot explain why such a vacant time can be beautiful yet haunting. It is the want for a cup of coffee when it is almost bedtime. You do not like a cup of milk, although you need it to help you get to sleep.

The world will soon eat up my manuscript. Maybe this is what I fear most.