My Thesis Was a Well-Researched Trauma Dump

I thought I’d write interactive fiction, but instead, I ended up diving headlong into exploring past traumas and mental health.

Illustration Courtesy of okalinichenko

In September 2021, I started working on my first master’s thesis. I knew it was going to be rigorous; the process for my program required both a thesis paper and a creative project. Many students opened to put most of their effort into the project and a notably smaller percentage into the paper. Since it was an art program, this was a more than acceptable course of action.

But since I’m a writer and an artist… well, of course, I had to try and whole-ass both of those tasks. By May 2023, I wrote a 13,000 word creative non-fiction novella for my creative project, enhanced it with kinetic typography and interaction points, and also wrote a massive 106 page, 28,282 word thesis paper.

While the end result wasn’t terrible, it was pretty different from what I planned going into this progress.

I set out to create an incredible piece of interactive fiction — but life escalated suddenly.