These are very disjointed musings. A kind of Virginia Woolf essay ;)
It’s sobering to look back at the things I wrote 10, 13 years ago and see that I am still mulling over the same issue--what do I want to accomplish in this final quarter and a bit stage of my life--if I live to be 100. And WHY do I feel it's a "struggle" to think about, to action projects and supposed goals and why do I (Richard too for that matter) get stressed about it?
Looking back to ten years ago I was settling into our first house (a rental) here in Sierra Vista. I was busy learning about the community, the folk at church, helping Laurie out because the kiddos were still young--M was 7, Porter 6, Jameson 4 and Quinn was 9 months. I subbed in the schools. I was very busy indeed. It was why I had wanted to move here; my own goal had been to be closer to Laurie and Richard acquiesced because there was a job there. As I look at it, parts of my life today are still like that although I have let go of other parts.
And Richard ten years ago? Well, he had a job here, was working full-time so he was as okay as he ever is. He is always mostly okay when he has something to occupy his mind all day long.
Looking back thirteen years (those are the two journal entries that popped up on journal-for-today) we were in Santa Fe. I read in the journal entry that we didn’t feel quite “settled." I don’t know the reason, perhaps R’s contract was coming to an end or insecure, that happened a lot. And for me, well, I was just drifting along, my mother-in-law had just left after a stressful month’s stay with us, I really didn’t know where I was going or if, indeed, I had to “go” anywhere. And, story of my life since she was born, I missed being close to Laurie. Why couldn’t I just “be," be content with life as it was? I had a few friends in Santa Fe, I had a hiking group I went out with once a week, was in great shape, I usually drove to see Laurie every two months, etc., etc.... Life was fine except that R and I kept having those discussions “Is this all there is and is it enough?” And that's still true today.
It comes back to that feeling of grand “passion” again. Of waking up every morning excited to start on something, work on something. I didn’t have anything like that in Santa Fe, life was just “nice.” And so both R and I felt some kind of drive to look for something else and, coupled with my wanting to be closer to Laurie (which IS a passion for me) and R getting offered a job at Fort Huachuca here in Sierra Vista, we moved here 10 years ago.
Fast forward 9 years to last year: During COVID I thought my passion would be working on my cousin’s biography, the one in Finland. She was keen, she’s lived such an interesting life. She sent me package after package of her papers, she answered my questions. My other passion, of course, is inputting genealogy information for dead Irish folk but that's such a weird one that I won't go there. I've described it in one of my other posts a year ago anyway.
Back to 15 years ago, at Simon Fraser: My experience thus far with writing my cousin’s biography is kind of like my abandoned doctorate at Simon Fraser--I had a great idea for a dissertation, I lined up a couple of advisors (wish they had been mentors) and then I started feeling--what was I feeling? Was it overwhelmed? Did the idea of academic writing--everything footnoted, any thought substantiated, at least two pages of outside sources--just become too much? Yeah, that was a lot of it. Was I missing Laurie and my two (at the time) grandchildren? I was in Vancouver, she was in Sierra Vista, so very far away. Yeah, that was a lot of it. Even R had decided to take a job in Las Vegas as his Canadian residency wasn’t coming through and he’d been twiddling his thumbs for 6 months. Ironically, it came the week he started a job in Las Vegas.
So, there I was in Vancouver with my family almost a thousand miles away. And why was I there? For most of my adult life I had longed for a family, for love. I had never had any kind of drive/passion that didn’t involve being wanted and needed emotionally. I worked to support myself financially, not because it was my passion. Work took up the days and, when I got bored or felt stifled or--yeah I admit it, got fired--I looked for any job that would pay my bills. If the job was interesting, that was a bonus. I don’t like being bored at work, was never good at just filling a seat.
But back to the decision to leave Vancouver and, as a result, to abandon the dissertation. I honestly thought, when I left Vancouver, that I would still finish the doctorate. I thought that living in Vegas and having all that “free time” I would be able to devote myself to the research and writing. Didn’t happen. Left to my own devices, with no mentor, I floundered. I felt overwhelmed again and there was no one to guide me back on track. I tried to find a mentor at UNLV but couldn’t find any professor in the Faculty of Education who was interested.
Was needing a mentor unusual? Do people really have mentors? Well, actually no, it wasn’t unusual and yes, people with a passion usually do have some kind of mentor. When I was at Simon Fraser, I came across some articles by a professor at the University of Exeter in England who was writing about the importance of having a mentor for women who were transitioning from entry-level clerical work to senior positions. That was what my dissertation was about: why there was such a huge gap, financially and emotionally, in universities between clerical staff, who usually had no passion about their work or for learning, and people in senior/academic positions who DID have passion for learning and what could help bridge that gap. Of course that could be extrapolated from universities to other kinds of work, but it was in universities that I had had much of my own experience. And this woman in Exeter had been writing about just that.
A lot of it is fuzzy now, I abandoned it 14 years ago, after I had been in Las Vegas for several months. But as I am thinking along these lines, I remember going to a weekend at Exeter and being so excited listening to the presentations about the power of mentoring. I really felt . . . Passion. I went back to Simon Fraser walking on clouds, with all kinds of ideas. And then, the things I wrote about above intervened. The loneliness without the family. The struggles to find someone who could keep me excited, keep me on track. There wasn’t anyone in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser who wanted to take me under their wing. My research topic was off-the-wall to them although they were willing to let me try. I passed my courses, my comprehensive exams. But when it came to the dissertation, I was going to be on my own. And the professor in Exeter said that she didn’t have the time to mentor someone all the way in Canada and anyway, she was retiring.
Interesting footnote: between the time I wrote this at 6 a.m. this morning and noon, I went for one of my Mitzi walks, listening to "David and Goliath" by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell is a Canadian journalist who has written several books about what research does and doesn't show. R and I both read "Outliers" and liked his writing style. So, when I had my Audible credit, I chose "David and Goliath" as my December walking companion. In one of the chapters, Malcolm describes something similar to what I had written about above: in an environment where someone feels out of their league, even if they are excited about the subject, that person can very easily give up on their passion because they feel inadequate. And without someone there to give them perspective--to reassure them that they are NOT out of their league and that they are quite capable, they will give up on their dream.
Hmmm.... So, even though I think that getting an EdD wasn't exactly my dream of a lifetime (my dream of a lifetime had been, in the 1960s, to be an award-winning actress or dancer) the way that I gave up on it had a lot to do with feeling out of my league and not having support to keep at it.
I know some readers might say, "but wait, there are exceptions." Of course there are and they will have THEIR books written about THEM [smile]. I'm just writing about me, I'm not trying to prescribe for anyone else.
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