Grad School Fodder

It's Saturday.  I shouldn't be working.  But I am.  And I will be tomorrow. I CANNOT WAIT to graduate.  With any luck, I'll be done within the month.  But probably not, the way this is going.  I want my weekends baaaaack.  It's fall, I should be drinking apple cider and playing in the leaves and watching football.   
I don't have this feeling often.  The feeling where I think I will just never be good enough.  Seriously, I spent the better part of 3 weeks pruning my data, inspecting it, learning from it, and then writing [what I thought was] the best thesis chapter in the world.  My figures were colorful and beautiful.  My words were concise and technical.

But.  It's still not good enough.  I need to write it again.  My adviser thinks my figures are sloppy and inconsistent (I disagree...it's true that my contour plot has a different range of data than my scatter plot, but guess what?  THEY ARE ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PLOTS, SHOWING ENTIRELY DIFFERENT DATA!!!), and my writing was not precise enough (my focus was wrong?  for the entire chapter?  perfect.).  So again, I write.  The same chapter over again.  This time with better plots and more precise word choice.  Not to mention the fact that I need to write an entire paper in the next 2 weeks on top of this thesis thing. 

Seriously, most of my friends who graduated wrote their entire thesis in like, a month, and their adviser skimmed it once...maybe twice.  I mean, come on.  Can I have that?  I've been fine up to this point, working longer hours than many of my grad school friends didn't really matter to me because I liked what I did and I (surprisingly) was able to keep up with expectations.  And for the most part I stayed away from work on the weekends.  I was praised for what I did because I did it well.  But I am suddenly failing.  I can't write to her expectations.  I went from feeling like the Superstar! to Grad School is Hell in a matter of a few weeks. 

Which brings me to how surprised I am that I am so hurt by this.  Should my feelings depend on what other people think of me?  About whether or not I am living up to my adviser's expectations?  No.  They most certainly shouldn't.  But I was happy when she praised me and am now upset when she criticizes my figures (they were SO BEAUTIFUL!). 

The lesson to be learned is that my worth should not be put on any one person's perception of me.  My worth comes only from Christ.  Funny, that I remember telling a friend this when he was struggling with the same thing, with the same adviser, a little less than 2 years ago.  It pushed him far enough to quit.  I can't quit now.  And I won't.  But gosh darn it, I want to do something right!  Can we fast forward to December, when I will have a new job?  Or rewind to April, when I used to be good at what I did?