It’s been a couple years, but this still gets me.

The Dissertation Mandala: everything is complicated.

Just deleted an 800 word post, because it didn’t say what I meant it to say.

The story of this mandala, in short, is that I had a friend for 17 years, a close friend, a woman I considered one of my best friends. Although there was a parabolic pattern to her love for me, I always loved her. However, we fought with increasing tendency, until she eventually told me, in no uncertain terms, never to contact her again.

Of course, there’s more to the story than that, but the story of this mandala is that, maybe six months or a year after she broke my heart, she emailed to say that she still never wanted to talk to me again, but she did want to hire me to edit her Ph.d. thesis, and for various reasons, only one of which was money, I accepted.

It was a hard edit. The dissertation was hundreds of pages long, and its quality didn’t come close to her previous work that I had read throughout our friendship. It took a couple weeks to make a single pass on the manuscript. She seemed satisfied with what I’d done and paid me; I haven’t heard from her since, although I miss her often.

This mandala depicts the layers of emotion and complexity I felt while reading her work.