I've been contemplating writing this mail for the past two months. I haven't been able to bring myself to sit down and type my thoughts into the white block the blogger interface assigns to the task of writing/typing blog posts. In order to blog regularly you need to constantly bring to the surface your reflective thoughts and ideas. You need to want to make these thoughts 'public' or at least visible to an audience - however small you might imagine that audience to be.
Most of my contemplations have been about whether I want to continue to make these thoughts I have, which have recently been about my now post-PhD life at a university in CT, visible, public. I just have too many doubts about the utility of it all. Of using this space to do what I've been doing since 2009? I think it served a purpose while I was in the UK, while I was doing the PhD - when I used the platform as a reflective space, a way to step back from the isolation and introversion that characterises the PhD. During that time it's so helpful to find some way of trying to make sense of the complex, contradictory, conflicting, shifting feelings that accompany and infect that special journey. But what happens when that journey ends? What happens when you move on, but continue to carry all that contradictory, critical and increasingly cynical feelings about academia (and your place in it), thrown about and exposed by the PhD experience? Can you continue to pour out, albeit carefully typed-out black text on this white-blocked background, stories of confusion, negativity, uncertainly, rejection and critique? Does it make sense to be that awkward bugger who just won't / can't fit in? I'm not sure. So it feels better to just stop. Maybe for a little while, maybe forever. Maybe the blog will be resurrected during a more grounded, happier time in my professional and personal live(s) or when I need this space again so I can make visible the unsaid observations, thoughts, impressions, contemplations, insights, views and opinions without fear that these reflections only reinforce a negative narrative.
