Journeying back to academia [what is the point of this blog?]

An unbelievably short amount of time ago (given how long it feels), I made the turbulent, exhilarating, exhausting, mind-bending journey from a relatively well-paid, stimulating practitioner job that I loved back to academia in the form of a PhD. It is a good 6 years since I last studied and over a decade (yikes) since I graduated from my undergrad degree so whereas I am not entirely a stranger to academia, my current status is decidedly 'rusty'. I contemplated the term 'reluctant' but that's not accurate. To be clear, the opportunity to do a PhD has given me an overwhelming sense of privilege beyond anything I can currently process. But I guess I would describe it as a sense of not being of the academic system and still currently feeling very rooted in practice. This may change, I suppose. 

What I wish to capture in this blog is the lived experience of transitioning back to academia; some kind of answer to questions that I have asked myself constantly for the past few months, including things such as 'how do you start a PhD?' Make no mistake, if you google 'how to start a PhD', there is a lot of information out there in multivarious forms. A lot of retrospective 'things I wish I had known' and plenty of practical information on how to study. I don't wish for one moment to devalue these as they are, of course, very useful. 

But the thing that really drives me is understanding the lived experience of a situation. Checklists and manuals are incredibly useful but they rarely, I think, deal with the reality of how things feel. Especially when things don't feel very nice. Or indeed when they feel overwhelmingly joyous! See, if I was a better academic, I would know the term for valuing lived experience but alas, for now, I will live with not knowing 😉 I know full well from previous writings that if I try to capture any of this in retrospect, it won't be entirely true to the experience because it's impossible, I think, to fully re-engage with how you felt at the time. My rule when journaling is that my present self is never allowed to judge my past self for what I wrote at the time. I think I will apply the same rule here. 

Some more things about me, according to nothing other than what I perceive to be useful to know. I am an INFP (for those who like to speak Myers-Briggs - I do, very much); heavy on the N and F (borderline I and P). I am a 9 on the Enneagram (the peacemaker). This blog will be unashamedly emotional, probably awkwardly so at times. It probably won't contain anything of any practical use. It will attempt at all times to avoid rocking the boat. It may not even continue at all beyond these first few weeks but if I might be indulged in sharing my experiences, that would help me. (It's all about me, clearly 😏) I hope it may eventually become a platform for sharing useful things that i'm finding out. But that will, of course, rely on me finding useful things out!