As we get ready to submit our final drafts, I am feeling excited. I remember worrying about making the page limit and finding the paper installment difficult to start. But when I actually began writing I realized that I have a lot more to say, and even now with the last draft coming up, I find that I still have thoughts and ideas swirling around in my head.
One thing I did not realize was how much the research becomes a part of your daily life even when working or doing something else. Thinking was a permanent state of being for me. I was thinking about connections, themes, and sentences for the paper everywhere. In the morning when I first woke up, in the shower, walking to class, on the verge of sleep, and when I was supposed to be doing other work. Repeatedly trying to grasp onto those thoughts long enough to at least write them down.
I hope that I have done justice to this topic and the beauticians. I realize that I could not name them all, but I wanted to make their contributions known. In the beginning, I wanted to add something new to the current scholarship and I felt that I have expanded on the story beauticians and political activism in Atlanta that I had read during my research.
My mantra this semester was “It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be there”. I wrote it down everywhere and repeated when I was struggling to write. My work still isn not done. There is still so much to research in terms of the topic and while examining this subject I found other things that interested me. The process has been hard, but I feel like a true historian.
