My absence

It's been awhile since I updated this journal and it is perhaps time to do so.

I wrote draft 1 of chapter 1 in November 2017.

Now, it's April 2018. I am at draft 6 of chapter 1.

May 2017 - I had a completely different topic.

It hasn't pan out the way I had hoped, but I am taking this in my stride.

Because doing my PhD and working part-time cannot feed me, I am also taking up some odd writing jobs on the sideline. And this act of doing work for multiple people, besides myself, has changed the way I view my own PhD work.

Now, I see my PhD work as another job among others. This has tremendously re-position the PhD's location in my heart and life. It's no longer about my identity, no longer about doing a work that represents me, that is pretty perfect, and very good, but also not something I can any-o-how do (I would never do this for a client), but it's realistically something I have to do to the best of my abilities with the limited resources I have to do it. It cannot afford to be perfect, I cannot afford it.

I don't have the time or the money.

I have to do it, the way I do any other work.

This also means perhaps I have reached a milestone in my academic career. This detachment that has developed... I've never seen it before. Perhaps it is also my way of coping, when a journey has turned out longer, more undulating, more meandering than I thought it would.