Finding My Alonetude

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Keywords: alonetude, precarious labour, somatic archive, institutional harm, embodiment, healing, solitude, identity, scholarly personal narrative

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Alonetude exists between being alone, loneliness, and solitude, where presence replaces performance.

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The Weight I Carry

I am sitting in an airport terminal, somewhere between the life I have been living and the life I am trying to reach. The fluorescent lights hum above me. Strangers move past with purpose. My body is here, but my nervous system is still scanning, still bracing, still waiting for the next demand.

This is what precarity feels like from the inside. It is a labour condition, yes, and also a way of living in a body that has forgotten how to rest.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014) describes how traumatized people carry a persistent sense of bodily unsafety, with the unresolved past continuing to register as physical tension and discomfort in the present. When I read those words, I recognized myself. The gnawing is familiar. It has lived in my stomach for years. I had simply stopped noticing it because noticing felt like a luxury beyond reach.

For more than nineteen years, I have lived inside the slow violence of precarious academic labour. Slow violence, a term coined by literary scholar Rob Nixon (2011), describes harm that unfolds gradually and often invisibly, accumulating over time rather than arriving as a single dramatic event. Precarious labour is slow violence. It arrives without announcement. It settles. It accumulates. It becomes the water you swim in until you forget you are wet.

The phrase maybe next semester has followed me through contracts, calendars, and classrooms. It has accumulated as a quiet weight in my body, a residue difficult to name. Over time, that uncertainty settled into my jaw, my breath, and my nervous system. This is how survival feels when flexibility is demanded, and care remains absent.

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Title: Pretending I Am Okay

Artist Statement

I chose this image because it documents the performance of precarious labour demands. For nineteen years, I showed up. I smiled. I won teaching awards. I served on committees. I said yes when I meant no. I performed wellness because the alternative felt too risky. What would happen if they saw how tired I really was? Would they renew my contract if they knew I was struggling? This photograph is evidence of what sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2012) calls emotional labour, the work of managing one's own emotions to fulfil the requirements of a job. Emotional labour is exhausting precisely because it is invisible. It appears on no workload document. It earns no compensation. But it is real, and it accumulates in the body. This image documents that accumulation.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026

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What the Body Holds

I have come to think of my body as an archive. An archive, in the traditional sense, is a place where records are kept. It is where we store documents that matter, evidence of what has happened. My body is an archive of what institutions leave unnamed.

The term body-based comes from the Greek soma, meaning “body.” When I speak of what the body holds and remembers, I mean the way my body has recorded and stored my experiences of precarious labour. These records are held in my jaw, which clenches without my awareness. They are held in my shoulders, which rise toward my ears when I hear an email notification. They are held in my breath, which shallows in the presence of institutional authority. They are held in my sleep, which remains shallow and easily disrupted.

Van der Kolk (2014) established that the body keeps the score. What I am learning is that my body has been keeping score for nineteen years. It has recorded every contract renewal that came late. Every semester, I taught an overload to make ends meet. Every meeting where I was treated as disposable. Every time I was reminded, subtly or directly, that I occupied the margins.

These experiences passed through me without resolution, through me. They accumulated. They settled. They became part of how my nervous system operates.

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The body becomes an archive of what institutions leave unnamed.

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When the Body Forgets What Safety Feels Like

Neuroscientist Stephen Porges (2011) developed a the polyvagal theory to explain how the autonomic nervous system responds to these states. I introduced this theory in my opening post, but I want to return to it here because it helps me understand what has happened to my body.

Porges (2011) explains that the body initiates its threat-response sequences below the level of conscious awareness, meaning a person can be fully convinced they are calm while their nervous system is already mobilizing for danger. This means my body can respond to a threat even when my conscious mind insists that everything is fine. My nervous system has its own intelligence. It reads cues from the environment and responds accordingly, often before I am aware of what is happening.

For years, my nervous system has been stuck in what Porges (2011) calls the body’s alert state. This is the fight-or-flight response. It is useful in genuine emergencies. It mobilizes energy, quickens the heart, and sharpens attention. But it becomes harmful when it is chronic. When the nervous system remains in a state of alert for years, it begins to treat that state as normal. The body forgets what safety feels like.

Porges (2011) points out that social engagement and genuine connection require the prior condition of perceived safety; the nervous system holds its defensive posture until it registers that the environment can be trusted. I have felt unsafe at work for a very long time. My body has been vigilant, scanning, bracing. It has been waiting for the next threat, the next demand, the next reminder that my position was contingent.

This time by the sea is an attempt to shift my nervous system toward what Porges (2011) calls a state of genuine safety and connection. This is the state of safety and connection. It is the state from which healing becomes possible. But I cannot simply decide to feel safe. I must create the conditions that allow my nervous system to perceive safety. That is why I am here, by the sea, in a place where no one needs anything from me.

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In Between: The Space That Has No Name Yet

Transition theorist William Bridges (2019) describes a three-phase model of change. The first phase is endings, where something familiar comes to a close. The third phase is new beginnings, where something new emerges. But between these two phases lies what Bridges calls the in-between.

The in-between is disorienting. It is the space where the old identity has ended, but the new self is still in formation. Bridges (2019) describes it as a time of confusion, uncertainty, and even despair. It is also, he argues, a time of profound creativity and possibility, if we can tolerate the discomfort of holding open who we are becoming.

I am in the in-between. The identity I built over nineteen years, the contract faculty member, the award-winning educator, the person who was always available, has ended. That person existed in a relationship to an institution that no longer employs her. Without the institution, who am I?

The honest answer: I hold the question open still. I am sitting in the uncertainty, trying to resist the urge to fill it with busyness, with productivity, with another performance of competence. Bridges (2019) suggests that the in-between requires slowing down and a willingness to be in the in-between without rushing toward resolution.

This is harder than it sounds. My nervous system wants to do something. It wants to scan for threats, make plans, and solve problems. Sitting with uncertainty feels dangerous to a body trained by precarity to always be preparing for the next crisis.

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Title: Suitcase Is Packed

Artist Statement

I photographed this suitcase because it represents a boundary. Everything I am bringing fits inside. I made deliberate choices about what to carry and what to leave behind. I left behind the stacks of academic books that usually travel with me. I left behind the multiple devices that keep me tethered to institutional demands. I packed clothes, a camera, watercolours, and a notebook. I packed tools for presence rather than tools for productivity. This image connects to the concept of liminality, the threshold state described by anthropologist Victor Turner (1969). 

A packed suitcase is liminal. It belongs neither fully to the place being left nor to the place being entered. It holds the traveller's identity in suspension. I chose the colour orange without thinking about it, but now I notice that orange is the colour of warmth, of citrus, of the desert flowers I will soon see. It is also the colour of safety vests, of visibility, of being seen. Perhaps I chose it because I am tired of being invisible.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

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From Letting Go of Performance

Nineteenth-century psychologist Pierre Janet, as cited in van der Kolk (2014), observed that traumatic stress is fundamentally an inability to inhabit the present fully, a condition that traps the person in past events even when the original threat has long since ended (as cited in van der Kolk, 2014). This resonates deeply. For years, I have been present only for performance. I have been performing presence while my attention remained split, part of me always monitoring for danger, calculating risks, managing impressions.

Performance, in the sociological sense developed by Erving Goffman (1959), refers to the way we present ourselves to others in social situations. Goffman argued that social life is like a stage, where we play roles and manage the impressions we create. This is entirely human. It is simply how social interaction works. But for precarious workers, the stakes of performance are particularly high. We perform competence, enthusiasm, and wellness because our livelihoods depend on it. We cannot afford to let the mask slip.

My goal for this time by the sea is to move from performance to presence. I want to practise being with myself without an audience. I want to discover what it feels like to be free from the tether of my productivity.

This is unfamiliar territory. I have spent so many years being available to others that I have become profoundly unavailable to myself. I have lost the thread of my own wanting, my own needing, my own feeling. These are things I need to relearn.

What My Body Knows Before I Do

Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas (2017) introduced the concept of what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it. This phrase describes knowledge we hold in our bodies and our being, still waiting to be articulated in conscious thought. It is what we know without knowing that we know it.

I carry a great deal of what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it. My body holds knowledge about precarity that I have never fully articulated. It knows things about survival, about adaptation, about the cost of endurance. This knowledge has been waiting for words to catch up.

This is what Scholarly Personal Narrative does for me. It keeps me honest. By sitting with sensation and memory rather than rushing past them, by refusing to leap to conclusions, I make room for what I already know yet left unsaid.

Bollas (2017) suggests that what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it often emerges in moments of stillness, when we stop the busyness that usually keeps it submerged. This is another reason for this time by the sea. I need to be still long enough for what I know to become thinkable.

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Alonetude: The Concept Takes Root

The concept of alonetude first took root during the global stillness of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the world outside was fraught with uncertainty, I discovered something unexpected. For the first time in my career, the absence of institutional obligation felt like freedom.

This was confusing. I was isolated, like everyone else. The news was frightening. The future was uncertain. And yet, paradoxically, I felt more at peace than I had in years. The quiet felt more like peace than loneliness. The absence of commuting, of meetings, of the constant performance of institutional belonging, created space for something I had been without for a very long time.

I began to wonder about this. What was the difference between the isolation I was experiencing and the loneliness I had felt at other times in my life? What made this aloneness feel restorative rather than painful?

The answer, I began to realize, had to do with choice. During the pandemic, aloneness was imposed on everyone. But within that imposed condition, I was able to choose how I inhabited my solitude. I could structure my days according to my own rhythms. I could attend to my own needs without constantly deferring to institutional demands. The aloneness was imposed, but the quality of presence within it was chosen.

This is what I am calling alonetude: the active, intentional work of transforming imposed isolation into chosen presence. It is a practice, something that must be cultivated. It requires intention, attention, and care rather than arriving on its own.

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Rest as a Human Right

I want to return to the human rights framing I established in my opening post, because it matters deeply to what I am doing here.

Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) affirms the right to rest and leisure. This is a fundamental human right, no suggestion or reward for productivity, as essential to human dignity as the right to food, shelter, and freedom from torture.

And yet. For the past nineteen years, I have been unable to fully exercise this right. I have worked through summers, through illnesses, through grief. I have taught overload semesters to pay my bills. I have never had a sabbatical, paid or otherwise, until now. And even this sabbatical is unpaid. I am funding my own rest because my institution refused to prioritize it.

Nash (2004) notes the etymology of the word scholar, tracing it back to the ancient Greek skholē, a term that meant leisure and play before it ever meant study or scholarship. The original scholars were people with enough leisure to think, to wonder, to follow curiosity without the pressure of immediate utility.

I am choosing to treat the right to rest as lived practice rather than distant declaration. This time by the sea is an exercise of a fundamental human right that has been systematically denied to me by the conditions of my labour.

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Title: The Stories Rocks Tell

Artist Statement

I began collecting stones during this journey, and I photograph them because they teach me about time. A stone is patient. It takes its time. It has been shaped by forces acting over thousands or millions of years. When I hold a stone, I am holding time I cannot comprehend. 

This practice connects to what environmental psychologists Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan (1989) call the gentle pull of the natural world, the kind of gentle, effortless attention that natural objects invite. the gentle pull of the natural world is restorative. It allows directed attention to recover from the depletion caused by sustained cognitive effort. These stones are small teachers. They remind me that my urgency is one way among many to be in the world. They remind me that slowness is wisdom. They remind me that I, too, am being shaped by forces beyond my control, always becoming.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

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Moving Research into the Body

Scholarly Personal Narrative, developed by Robert Nash (2004), shifts inquiry from the library into the body. This is a profound methodological move. It says that lived experience is data. It is evidence. It is a legitimate site of knowledge production.

Nash (2004) describes scholarly personal narrative as an unapologetic insistence that the writer’s own life carries genuine scholarly meaning, that experience counts as a legitimate form of knowing alongside abstraction. This admission is both liberating and frightening. It liberates me from the pretence that I am a detached observer of phenomena held at a safe distance. It frightens me because it requires vulnerability. I cannot hide behind the passive voice or the third person. I must say I. I must own what I know and how I know it.

Nash (2004) describes the elements of effective scholarly personal narrative:

The Personal: I use my own transition, my own exhaustion, my own body as the primary site of inquiry.

The Scholarly: I anchor my experiences in established theories of transition, neurobiology, trauma, and human rights.

The Universal: My story of burnout serves as a mirror for a broader systemic crisis in academic labour.

Nash (2004) urges writers to preserve the distinctive, hard-won quality of their own voice in favour of academic convention; the particularity of that voice, he insists, is itself the most valuable thing a scholarly personal narrative can offer. I am trying to trust my voice. I am trying to believe that what I have lived is worth telling, that my experience contributes to understanding, that my story might offer something to others who recognize themselves in it.

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Daily Practices by the Sea

Title: Learning the Rhythm

Artist Statement

I stood at the shoreline watching the waves come in, one after the other, without urgency. There was no need to measure time here. The water moved as it always has, steady and unconcerned with outcome.

I found myself staying longer than planned. Beyond thinking. Just watching the repetition, the way each wave arrived fully and then released itself back into the whole.

This moment became a quiet lesson in pacing. Nothing forced. Nothing held. Motion without pressure.

I am learning that restoration has its own rhythm. It cannot be rushed. It can only be entered.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, February 2026

Van der Kolk (2014) emphasizes that neuroscience consistently points toward body-based awareness, the capacity to sense what is happening inside the body, as the necessary entry point for emotional change. Healing requires inner body awareness, the capacity to sense and interpret signals from inside the body.

My plan for the days ahead remains intentionally simple:

Writing in the morning light. Words come differently when the day is new and quiet.

Swimming in salt water. The sea holds me, and for once, I release the work of holding myself.

Walking without a destination. Movement without purpose. Presence without productivity.

Painting without expectation. Colour and water on paper. No outcome required.

Sitting long enough to feel sensation return. This is perhaps the hardest practice of all.

These are ordinary activities that create conditions, beyond any elaborate intervention, for awareness. They are the practical application of what I am calling the discipline of arrival, which is the practice of landing fully in a moment without any next thing pressing against the edge of the current thing.

Porges (2011) emphasizes that the body’s ability to find calm is biological and experiential, shaping how individuals engage with the world, relationships, and perceived risk. If I want to experience the world differently, I must shift my physiological state. This cannot be accomplished through willpower alone. It requires environmental conditions that communicate safety to my nervous system. It requires time. It requires patience with a body that has forgotten what rest feels like.

Title: White Ford Bronco

Artist Statement

I passed this white Ford Bronco while walking, sun already high, palm shadows stretching across the road. It was parked without urgency, dust settled into its surface, gear strapped to the roof as if ready but in no rush to move.

I stopped because it felt familiar. The stance drew me rather than the vehicle itself. Prepared, yet resting. Capable of motion, yet still.

This moment reflected something I am learning to practise. Readiness can hold stillness. One can be equipped for the road while allowing pause.

I am beginning to understand that rest is part of the journey rather than its opposite.


Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, February 2026

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Stepping onto the Third Shore

I think of this month as a movement toward what I am calling the Third Shore. If one shore is loneliness (the pain of unwanted isolation) and another shore is solitude (the peace of chosen aloneness), then the third shore is alonetude: the space where imposed isolation is transformed through attention and care into something generative.

The third shore is a threshold. It is a liminal space. It is a quality of presence to be practised: a quality, never a destination.

I arrive by the sea to listen. To write. To breathe. To remember what a body feels like when it receives permission to rest.

Van der Kolk (2014) argues that the capacity to act in one’s own interest, genuine agency, depends on inner body awareness, the ability to sense and interpret the body’s internal signals. Inner body awareness, as I explained earlier, is the capacity to sense the body’s internal state.

I am here to recover my inner body awareness. I am here to relearn the signals my body has been sending that I have spent years ignoring. I am here to discover what I need, what I want, and who I am beyond performance for an institution that no longer employs me.

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Title: Sea of Cortez

Artist Statement

The sea is why I came here. I needed to be near water. I needed the sound of waves, the smell of salt, the horizon line that reminds me how small my concerns are against the scale of geological time. Environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich (1983) demonstrated that visual exposure to water and natural environments reduces stress and supports psychological restoration. This is physiology, beyond metaphor. My nervous system responds to this landscape in ways my conscious mind cannot fully control. I photograph the sea because it is my co-researcher in this inquiry. It holds space for me. It asks nothing. It continues its ancient rhythms regardless of whether I am watching. There is comfort in that indifference. There is freedom in being witnessed by something that holds me beyond performance.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026

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An Invitation to Continue

Title: Holding the Same

Artist Statement

Two pelicans moved slowly across the marina, bodies low, unhurried, carried more than directed by the tide. Boats rested behind them, tethered, waiting for other hands, other departures.

I lingered here longer than expected. What held my attention was their rhythm rather than the birds themselves. Separate, yet aligned. Moving through the same water without the need to converge.

This moment offered a gentle teaching. Solitude allows proximity without requiring isolation. It allows proximity without pressure. Presence without performance.

There is room to share space while still remaining wholly one’s own.

Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, February 2026

This is the second entry in a thirty-day inquiry. I hold what comes next as still open. I know only that I am here, that my body is beginning to register the absence of institutional demand, and that something is shifting in ways I cannot yet name.

If you are reading this and you recognize yourself in these words, I want you to know: you are held in a community of exhaustion. It is structural. It is systemic, lodged in conditions beyond your personal failing.

And if you are lucky enough to have security, to have rest, to have a body that rests rather than constantly bracing for the next threat, I hope this offers a window into what precarious labour actually feels like from the inside. I hope it helps you understand why your contingent colleagues seem tired, why they hesitate to say no, and why they perform well even when they are struggling.

The sea is calling. I am going to answer.

Estoy llegando. Estoy aprendiendo a descansar.

I am arriving. I am learning to rest.

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Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.

References

Bollas, C. (2017). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it. Routledge.

Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes (40th anniversary ed.). Balance.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.

Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com

Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.

Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.

Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Publishing.

Ulrich, R. S. (1983). Aesthetic and affective response to natural environment. In I. Altman & J. F. Wohlwill (Eds.), Human behaviour and environment: Advances in theory and research (Vol. 6, pp. 85–125). Plenum Press.

United Nations. (1948). Universal declaration of human rights. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.