on getting older, getting wiser

First things first: I’m going to start with my thank-you this time, rather than end on it.

A few of you sent me some lovely messages after my last update, and I’m very grateful. As I’ve noted previously, I’ve tended to treat this newsletter as a very one-sided confessional — a mechanism of control over my loud, self-conscious urge to shut this whole thing down. Your reminders that I am in fact my own worst critic, and that there are people who have found value in my writings, have been so very welcome.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve sat down, since January, and attempted to write something for you. Each time I’ve started but promptly stopped, not because I’ve had nothing to say, but in fact too much. I’ve wanted to tell you about what I’ve been up to — about how being a student again has been profoundly lonely; how the university’s ethics approval processes have soaked into my nightly dreams; how naïve I was to think that a year’s leave from my nine-to-five would be liberating,

How the prospect of soon having to do the research that I’ve spent two years proposing to do is sinking in, and with it, self-doubt / self-despair / self-deprivation, well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions,

I’ve wanted to tell you about how my research is evolving; how I first developed my questions when I was angry and sad about white feminism, but am now wondering how to ask those same questions with a greater dose of humility and a Black feminist ethic of love; how I am attempting to stitch together a methodology that is loyal to my politics, and yet in the process seem to be unraveling myself,

How the ongoing genocide in Palestine — the complicity of my and other governments, my university, with Isr*li settler violence — is teaching / challenging / demanding more of me as a scholar / activist / practitioner / leader (?) than doctoral research and board roles and my public service career ever have, and whilst I am not unsure I am doing this right or enough, I must refuse to stay quiet

How deeply and unequivocally I have regretted my decision to taper off antidepressants last year, and how, despite the instinct within me to contest the medical industrial complex’s pathologisation of inevitably human responses to societal disaster, it turns out that suppressing a near-constant urge to cry without a pharmaceutic crutch is exhausting;

How a psychiatrist’s diagnostic conclusion was that I am currently in a ‘profound existential state’, and that simply identifying four things that make up who I really am will likely cure me of my distress; how, in my retellings of these (frankly, chaotic) appointments to my friends, for their amusement, I haven’t had the courage to admit that the man was both a decidedly unprofessional mental health professional and yet, not wrong

How I am officially twenty-six today, yet have never felt as incapable, adrift, disoriented, uncertain as I do right now — how my birthday coincides with the first week of the university semester, for my seventh time as a student but first as academic staff — how I’m not ready to stand up and admit that I am honestly not quite sure I understand what sociology is anymore — how I will have to look first-year undergraduates in the eye and reassure them that they are doing okay, it is okay to have questions, it is okay to learn, even though it is I who perhaps need their reassurance, none of us knowing what we’re doing, fake it until you make it