Ending the year on a positive note!

I think this is what most of use hope for...that we can end the year in a positive, forward looking frame of mind. I'm grateful this is how I'm able to end the 2011 academic year. This is especially strange because on Sunday I couldn't have predicted it would turn out like this. It just happened really as a result of some rather accidental bumping into people and informal conversations about Christmas cards, the Christmas holidays, Sweden and Christmas carols. The past 3-6 months have been a trying time for me on all fronts and I've been hammered psychologically by constant self-doubt, confusion over how to take my research forward and what felt like divergent expectations. About 8 weeks ago I decided I would impose a positive spin on all things PhD related. This helped me think differently about how I wanted to communicate my immediate feelings about completing the PhD - it did not, however, help resolve the self-doubt that was (is?) constantly floating around me and seemed to be fanned by my formal supervision experiences. Yes, supervision as a concept, process, entity governing and informing the PhD has been an almost constant source of frustration and disdain for me, and this often had very little to do with my own supervision experiences. But finally the scales have tipped and I'm starting to think differently about supervision too. Not that I have forgotten or chosen to ignore all the issues of power and inequality that sustain this primary way in which the PhD process is managed and taught in most places across the globe...I have just come to realise that it is a process I need and want. That I need and want the input my supervisors make; their direction, guidance and insights are an invaluable part of my successful progress - I couldn't do it without them, I don't want to do it without them and if I doubted it before a series of events over the past week have made it clear to me that they have as much of a vested interest in me as I have in myself. We are all batting for the same team - Team Lynn. I also know that I have to trust them as I go into my final months in the run up to submission - and this trust must be built on sincerity not on the power and status they have. At the moment I have a sincere trust in them. So the year has ended well for me...I'm tired (physically and mentally), exhausted, pressured, confused, worried, insecure, sometimes slightly panicked, but I'm looking forward positively...2012 will happen and I will get out on the other side, that I completely know!