can't feel you there

This paper is killing me. With every day I spend relentlessly fighting to make something of nothing, I know I am wasting my life in frustration and bitterness. I sit with draft fifty-something on my lap, my red marker finding new ways to make sense of things. And yet I just cannot seem to do things the way they want them....though clearly they both want different things. Why is it never good enough? Why is their feedback so unhelpful? I work and work and work. And the things I'm unhappy with they say are fine (only to say otherwise three drafts later) and the things I'm happy about they revise again. Back and forth between thesis and publication. THREE MONTHS I have been writing. THREE.

I started working so hard because I felt this was my only chance to get funding next year but as each month slipped away I knew that was a pipe dream. Every day I ask myself why I am even bothering. It seems so unfair. MissMovies spent a quarter (if that!) as long on her project, wrote it up in two weeks and sent it off to our top journal. And since her results are significant, she's sure to be published, while I sit here, toiling, toiling, fighting, sacrificing, for a paper that has a miniscule chance of getting published to a journal I've never even heard of.

I can't help but think again and again in a day that I hate my life. And yet I have no answer. Slack off, give up? That won't help me, even if at least I will be without because I didn't try, not because I get fucked at every turn. I hate my life. How pathetic.