Yesterday, I submitted my honours dissertation.
I still can't believe it is finished and out of my hands.
It took me a good 10 minutes to hand it over the counter to reception in the English department.
I wasn't ready to let it go, and also my phone was frozen and I had to wait for it to unfreeze to secure photographic evidence that I had finished and I actually had it all printed out and clutched in my hot little hands.
Leading up to submission, I didn't have any stress dreams.
Usually, before exams and essays I'll have the typical ''didn't show up for the exam on time'', ''got the wrong room'', and ''forgot to submit essay'' nightmares.
But this time, the worst I got was rewriting my opening sentence in my head 25 times before I finally fell asleep.
Oddly enough, the stress dreams started last night, after it was all over.
I dreamt that instead of my dissertation I had submitted 20,000 words about One Direction.
To make matters even worse, what I had written was riddled with spelling errors and made-up words.
I woke up with a start and was so relieved that I hadn't absolutely ruined my entire academic career.
The submission still has me unsettled.
I've been thinking about this project since late last year and it has morphed three times, been rewritten twice and finally compiled into the (hopefully) cohesive glob I turned in yesterday.
Until this year, I never had time to proofread any assignments and so the feeling of being finally and completely finished with something is completely foreign to me.
Part of me didn't want to hand over my work, because I couldn't accept that I had done everything I possibly could and even if I had another week to work, I probably couldn't make it any better without completely revising everything.
Yesterday I was stressed; my hands were shaking and I felt a little bit as if I was going to vomit.
It seemed to me that everything I had done had to be terrible; I had to have done something wrong.
There would be one little thing I had left out or forgotten to do.
There were a few moments last night where I was sure I had just imagined going to the English department to turn it in.
Today I feel much better.
I have remembered that I spent a really long time reading and working and researching, and I've achieved something that in my darkest moments this year I could never imagine happening.
It has also been incredibly reassuring to be surrounded by a group of people all going through the same silly university stress.
Yesterday morning was a flurry of messages about formatting and printing, and then finally, in the afternoon, photographs and congratulations.
The nicest part of the day was submitting my dissertation with the first girl I met at university.
We sat next to each other in our first English tutorial, and then yesterday we submitted the final requirement for our degrees together.
It makes me feel a little bit crazy thinking about continuing to study after this year, but it's also nice to know that if honours didn't completely psychologically destroy me, then I can probably make it through most things, including more postgraduate study.
Maybe next year, instead of crying and listening to one Coldplay song 60 times in a row while desperately trying to concentrate on one section of my dissertation, I'll be listening to one One Direction song until my ears bleed while I compare it with.
Millie Lovelock is a Dunedin student.
