Pushing the boundaries

The dates say it all. I knew I would not be doing a daily post but it is quite shocking to find that well over a month had elapsed since my last post. It was in part the Christmas factor - it creates a fair amount of work in a timetable that is already overburdened. Something had to give.

However, it reflects to a greater extent my struggles with my work. Perhaps it is inevitable that there will be lows, times when I get lost and wonder what exactly I am doing; times when looking again at my research questions and my (evolving and shifting) aims and objectives serves not to remind me where I am heading but to question why I ventured forth . While I have never (seriously) contemplated giving up, I have had what might be termed a crisis of confidence.

Anyway, after some effort to recall how to access it, I am now re-committed to my blog.
Resuming this blog may be taken as a sign that I am now restored to something approaching equilibrium. I have been working again with transcripts of the stories I have heard which has served to anchor me again in the reasons I decided to research this topic. This for me adds meaning to the term 'grounded theory'. I see it not as a pointer to a set of rules and regulations to be followed in the analysis of data and production of knowledge, but as a way of feeling more grounded, more certain of my ground. I had at one time lost my footing and been spinning into the stratosphere.

One of the things I have been struggling with was finding time and space to concentrate on my work. Things just kept crowding in. I won't say too much more about this here coz I am emailing a colleague about this, also a 'mature' (as in cheese?) PhD student. And by mature we mean 50s not early thirties. We are hoping to edit our correspondence into a journal article because we feel our experience has not received sufficient critical attention. The experience of older women in general seems (curiously? understandably?) under-researched. I know the women who have shared their stories with me have done so because there was nothing out there yet that they could connect with. My supervisor, Professor Pat Sikes, has written that stories make us feel connected. It's not that we have lived what we might read, more that we could have lived it. When I read that I cried because it was the time when my mum was nearing the end of her life and I felt quite lonely. This in turn served to reinforce my belief that emotion and cognition are not different beasts.

I fear I am now rambling which is my sign to stop.