Somehow it’s been 6 months since my last blog post and even before that my posts were starting to become gradually less frequent. This was partly because over the last year I’ve been so busy as a self-funded student trying to balance my PhD studies with various part-time jobs and voluntary commitments. However, I also think that it’s partly because when I started this blog, I was desperate for an outlet to process and express my feelings on the subjects that I was passionate about, as I wasn’t getting this opportunity through my paid employment at that time. It was probably this practice of processing and expressing in this way that led me to be able to begin the process of working towards a PhD, as it reignited passions that had started to fall by the wayside after I left education and started working in the non-profit sector.
This process was also accelerated even further by a negative experience in the summer of 2021 that I had within the organisation I was working in at the time, only a few months after I’d started my blog (one of my earlier blog posts ‘Bodily autonomy, censorship and stigma’ discusses this incident and the aftermath in detail…). Being able to write about and make visible my experiences felt like a way of validating and making sense of them, as well as expressing solidarity with others who may be going through or have gone through similar experiences. I was so grateful for the supportive responses I received when I shared that post in particular but after I wrote it, I knew that no matter what response it received, it had been a transformational process for me that would be 100% worthwhile.
Two months after I wrote that post in August 2022, I began my PhD and since then it has been harder to find inspiration to write new posts. I think this is because since I started my PhD, that restless energy and passion that needed the blog as an outlet when there wasn’t space for it in my working life has found a place again in my work through my research and teaching practices. I used to feel inspiration to write about certain topics and wanted and needed to express all of my thoughts as soon as possible, which the blog and social media were ideal for. However, the research process requires being much less reactive and taking more time to acquire in-depth expertise on a topic before presenting your thoughts and findings, which requires a lot of mental energy. This is making it hard to find the headspace needed to write about anything else and obviously I can’t really write properly about my research yet until it’s completed. Therefore, I’ve decided now is the right time to take a break from blogging, whilst I reflect on how (or if) I’m going to incorporate the blog into my work going forward.
It also feels like the right time to take a pause because I found out recently that I was successful in gaining AHRC research council funding to complete the final 2 years of my PhD on a full-time basis. I’ve spent two and a half years trying to secure this funding and it’s been such a difficult journey since I started applying for it so I want to make sure that I’m making the most of the opportunity as much as possible. This means that there’s not likely to be much headspace and energy leftover for the blog during the next couple of years, whilst I focus my working hours on my doctoral studies and teaching/publication experience within academia. I’m hoping that maybe in the future I can come back to the blog and potentially merge it with my academic life but I don’t want to put any pressure or extra workload on myself at the moment as I’ve worked really hard to get to this point and I feel like now I need time to strip my working hours back as much as possible to have more time to focus on myself again, which has felt impossible in the last couple of years.
Thank you to anyone who has been reading any of my posts over the last few years and responding – it’s meant a lot to me and I hope that I can come back to blogging again in the future but for now I’m signing off!
Pole, PTSD and me 