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It has been difficult to write anything personal this year, because everything feels so open-ended, but I’m gradually learning to embrace ambiguity and interdependence more and more. This has been a difficult year for nearly everyone, which is comforting in its own way. Thinking about what other people are going through rarely works as consolidation when going through some personal pain, but I do think that being able to share the experiences of uncertainty, fear, economic instability etc. helps to be more grounded in a feeling of compassion, even if everyone experiences them differently/to a different degree. There is still some common ground to build on.

After spending a couple of months without being able to connect with others offline, participating in the Rhodes Must Fall protest back in June was a much-needed reminder of the lived experience of solidarity. I was on crutches at the time, due to a persistent stress fracture resulting from too many fast miles on relatively brittle bones, and it was physically quite exhausting to walk down to the city centre and then support myself on the crutches for several hours, but I gained a lot more than I gave.

Before that, there was a long and quiet spring. Me and Max broke up in the end of March, just before lockdown started. It was my first relationship, and it lasted for almost half a decade. I had never been through a breakup before, and what’s there to say, of course it was painful.

A few minutes before I met Max at the bus stop and we broke up, I received an email informing me I had been offered a place in the DPhil programme I had applied to here in Oxford. I had been holding a broken umbrella that had bitten into my hand and left it all slick with blood. I remember being grateful for the distractions. After that, I threw myself into work and finished my dissertation draft by the end of April.

I ended up rejecting my DPhil offer. I was waitlisted for full ESRC funding but didn’t get it in the end. I could still have applied for Finnish funding, but over the summer, I became increasingly disillusioned with academia. I don’t want to be stuck in a bubble, and I really need a change of scenery.

My DPhil project would have been a comparative study of local-level participation in environmental governance in East Asia, mainly looking at successful and unsuccessful protests against coal plants and waste incinerators in China and Japan. Right now, I want to exit the structure of academia and find other ways to work on important issues. There are countless possibilities. 

As is the case with many frustrating experiences these days, I assume I’m not alone in this at all (which also makes it easier to write about it), but I am currently feeling pretty negative about the impact that academia has had on me. I’ve been concerned about this for a long time, and it has really been amplified by the lack of positive social relationships over the last few months. I know I can’t just blame the structure and culture of academia for the dispirited state of mind I find myself in. Undeniably, there are other important factors at play, such as the pandemic and my break-up. It might be that I would be perfectly happy staying on as a research student, had the external circumstances not changed so much, and it might have been easier to get the funding, too.

Nevertheless, I think I ended up focusing too much on an externally imposed framework and losing sight of the things that matter to me personally, maybe even losing myself in some way, although that sounds too dramatic. I think I’ve internalised academic pressure in a toxic way, and it would be unhealthy for me to stay in this environment. I want to take the constructive things I’ve learned over the last five years and apply them to my other work, and leave behind the constricting things. It’s still entirely possible that I’ll change my mind again and want to do a PhD somewhere a few years later. In a different political/economic situation, that might also feel like a more worthwhile pursuit again (might also be that few things change for the better and everything just crumbles to dust soon enough).

I really want to build better boundaries between work, other projects and time off. Of course, working on social and political issues means you can’t completely separate yourself from your work, nor should you - that’s my experience, anyway, and I don’t have any problem with that. At the same time, it’s important to be able to take time for yourself. Even if that seems slightly paradoxical, I am hoping that transitioning from being a student to being in the workforce will take some pressure off me.

Everything is still uncertain, but that’s okay.