A wrap – or maybe just a brief pause for breath. I passed my viva with flying colours back in May, and I still can’t quite believe it. As a kid I was told not to return to school at 16, I started and failed to complete about ten different college courses – I wanted to be a pilot but couldn’t keep myself focussed on the maths for long enough – and for most of my life I wrote off getting a decent education… yet… yet… here I am, Doctor Bogle no less! Amazing. It still doesn’t quite feel real, two months later! The viva was one of the most positive and affirming experiences I’ve ever had, my examiners – Agata Lulkowska and Kate Liston – were kind, extremely considerate towards the thesis, and pushed me in all the best ways.
And this is really the first time I’ve actually had to really sit down and write anything about it, more than two months later! What a ride! How many times in your adult life do you get three and a half years to just delve into your practice without much interruption, and spend every day indulging it, broadening it, exploring it? Not many. Perhaps once… twice, if you’re lucky? It’s been mind bendingly difficult, but probably one of the most rewarding periods in my career.
And so to the next thing. One of the most frustrating things about ADHD is that it constantly leads to a trillion ideas, but at the same time your sense of time is warped. Time is either standing still (when bored), or its racing ahead (when you’re deeply into something cool). So what will it be? I have some ideas, once I get the priority stuff rolling – like getting a teaching gig and earning a living again. I have loved my teaching, the thesis is all about inclusive practice, and I really want to do more of it soon, to complement my creative work.
I’ve spent much of the past two months intensively job searching, discovering that a career shift into academia at 50 is going to have its… challenges. One of the biggest – that is, after not being 27 anymore with a wealth of decades remaining to give to an employer – is that having been a freelance for the past decades, I have to learn how to write job applications, cover letters, and do interviews. I thought a career of creative pitches might have helped me here, but turns out it’s a different skill-set altogether, and one which – generally speaking – involves a lot of repetition, procedural detail, mastering different portals and submission methods, and it isn’t at all neurodiversity friendly.
But I’m pushing on and getting the hang of it. And yesterday I submitted my monograph proposal to a publisher I’ve been admiring for years, which was really exciting. The new career scaffolding is slowly rising out of the ground, but I’m impatient for it. ADHD tells me time is racing on.
So the new idea? I’ve been wanting to start this new project about connection and love in contemporary Britain, continuing to push the processes I developed in the thesis. I think it will start out as a text based exploration, but I’m wondering whether its eventually going to be a live project that lives online and which people can watch/read/participate in as it unfolds. Watch this space.