I'm trying to maintain a brave face as I tackle the working week. I have good days, when I feel like I've achieved something or I don't feel too disheartened by the mundane tasks I've done all day. The bad days, well...I have bad days.
The most striking thing about being back at work is noticing how much I've changed. It's not only that I have changed, because change is bound to happen over time. It's when I focus on the how that reveals the most significant insights. I feel as if I view my new/old surroundings from OU tinted lenses. I don't think that I'm overtly comparing practices, I'm just acutely aware of how strongly my time at the OU has come to influence and shape my sense of academia. The academic practices I now foreground have a clear OU flavour. I find myself evaluating the saying, doings, valuing around me from an OU position. I say OU but of course it has more to do with my disciplinary alignments, forged very strongly during my time at the OU and the specificities of my supervisors' ways of talking, thinking, doing and valuing. I'm shocked at how much of it I've internalised. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it just creates particular challenges as I find myself operating in a environment where my ways of being bump against the institutional and departmental ways of being. Sometimes I manage these challenges and tensions, other times they send me reeling and seriously doubting myself. I did a bit of English-style whinging yesterday to my dear friend SB about my re-immersion into working life at a UoT and she gave me some firm advice - Suck it up, buttercup - she said. I think there is something pure and unpretentious about the advice which I can only appreciate. Things will get better and who knows I might even re-acclimatize and change my wayward tendencies.
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