balance?

Eventually equilibrium comes. At the start of the last week I decided I would write. I resolved to set aside whatever was happening at work and focus on my writing. And just after lunchtime on Monday, I was in my happy place at UCT and I think that set the tone for how I approached the rest of the week. I soon forgot the intensity of the feelings resulting from the events that caused my wobble. The issues -  gender discrimination, feeling undermined, disregarded in my professional space - have not gone away, and neither has my anger about how it insidiously creeps in and infects the 'ways things are done' in my department and institution. If anything I have resolved to consciously keep it on my agenda, to be vigilant and to be challenging. Sometimes people need to know that they have to display an appropriate degree of sensitivity to issues of diversity and discrimination and that not everyone buys in to a Victorian value system. And so it continues and in the continuing, often with the mundane and the everyday, that the humanity returns and in this I found that my validation (the validation and affirmation I seek) can come from many places. Often times there is enough elsewhere (like with  my friends, mentors, at conferences, seminars or research presentations) to go around to support and sustain me as I engage with those less engaging and enabling environments and/ or personalities.