It would have taken one simple email from a source close to my advisor to give up that whole thesis-business. ‘Oh, come on, let’s just forget about the whole’ and I would have done so. Not happily probably, but I would have, that I’m sure about now.

But I never gave up. Because it just would have looked so bad on my CV and wouldn’t be right towards the people that had helped me. And it wouldn’t have felt right either. And there was another reason, but I had forgotten about that.

And then, just when I had slowly started to work on it again –which, to be honest, didn’t mean much more than trying to remember what I had known once– I got this email from my advisor. Who didn’t tell me to give up. And who didn’t tell me off for not contacting him earlier either. Instead, he told me he had been thinking about the stuff some more and whether I would like to have a look too.

Which I did. And I understood it quite well, despite not having seen some of it for over a year. Things fell into their place. I suddenly found myself thinking about it a lot, counting the hours during work until I could work on it again. (This after years of doing the thesis where I was always counting the hours until I could do something else.) I got the feeling I might even solve a long unsolved problem.

Oh, I remember that other reason for not giving up. It was that I can actually enjoy maths sometimes.

An mp3 of Small Factory’s I’m Not Giving Up will follow suit.