Content Warning: This post contains reflections on grief, loss, and emotional exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
Title: Night Shore
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
No one told me that when the shoulders finally drop, The tears begin.
That the body, loosening its long-held grip on vigilance, would release more than tension. It would release the unlived hours, the dinners declined, the calls shortened, the visits swallowed by marking, by meetings, by the endless proving that I deserved to remain.
I thought healing would feel like relief. And it does. But it also feels like mourning the woman who said yes when she meant no, who signed the third contract, and the fourth, who lay awake rehearsing indispensability because dispensable meant invisible, and invisible meant gone.
Duelo, the Spanish say. Grief. And duel. As if mourning were a kind of combat, a reckoning with all that was lost while I was too busy to notice the losing.
I grieve the braced mornings. The jaw that forgot softness. The breath held shallow like a child waiting to be corrected.
I grieve the writing set aside, the ideas that flickered and went dark for lack of time that was never mine to hold.
I grieve the woman I might have become had I trusted that I was enough without performance.
Miriam Greenspan (2003) writes that no emotion is negative, only refused. That grief, if allowed to move, becomes gratitude.
So I am letting it move.
Here by the sea where pelicans rest between dives, where nothing asks to be proven, where waves keep ancient rhythm without apology, I let the tears come for all the years I kept dry.
This is what the body knows that the mind resists: Safety is what allows grief to arrive.
The shoulders drop. The sorrow rises. The jaw softens. The unlived life asks to be mourned.
Healing, I am learning, moves in spirals from broken toward whole. It is a spiral, circling back to gather the fragments left behind when survival required speed.
El duelo que viene con el descanso. The grief that comes with rest. The mourning that waits until we finally stop.
The pelicans grieve differently than I do. They dive when hungry. They rest when full. They have never been asked to earn stillness.
I am unlearning.
Here, by the sea, salt on my face that might be spray, that might be tears, that might be both, I am unlearning the fear of rest.
Descansa, the water whispers. Rest.
And I do. And I weep. And both are holy.
Title: Hammock Between Roots
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
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
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Greenspan, M. (2003). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Shambhala Publications.
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on body shame, institutional harm, and the experience of exhaustion. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
An overachiever’s confession
A Reckoning by the Sea
It happened while I was watching the pelicans.
They dive with such certainty, folding their wings at the last possible moment, surrendering to gravity and instinct. They trust the trajectory. They dive and let instinct decide the rest. They dive, surface, swallow, and rest on the water until the next impulse moves them.
Watching them, coffee cooling in my hands, I felt something crack open inside my chest. The realization arrived without announcement, without the careful preparation I usually require before allowing myself to know brutal truths.
I am an overachiever. And I am burned out.
The words felt foreign, even as I knew them to be true. For decades, I had called it other things: dedicated, committed, hardworking, passionate. I had worn exhaustion like a badge, proof that I was earning my place in a world that seemed to demand constant demonstration of worth.
What Remained Hidden
Brené Brown (2010), in The Gifts of Imperfection, names the belief system I had been living inside without recognising its walls. Her research reveals that perfectionism operates as a self-destructive and addictive pattern, rooted in the belief that flawless appearance, behaviour, and accomplishment can somehow shield us from shame, judgement, and blame. Brown’s work demonstrates that most perfectionists were raised receiving praise primarily for achievement and performance, whether academic grades, good manners, rule-following, or people-pleasing. Somewhere in that conditioning, many of us internalised a dangerous equation: our worth equals our accomplishments and how well we accomplish them.
Reading those words by the sea, I felt the shock of recognition. That belief had been the operating system of my entire adult life. Every committee I joined. Every extra course I taught. Every student crisis I absorbed as my own responsibility. Every late night, every weekend sacrificed, every moment of rest interrupted by the nagging sense that I should be doing something more, something better, something that would finally prove I deserved to be here.
Brown’s research reveals a more complicated truth: perfectionism fundamentally concerns itself with earning approval and acceptance rather than with genuine self-improvement (Brown, 2010). The pattern follows a predictable sequence: please, perform, perfect. I had been following that formula in education for twenty-five years, believing it would eventually lead to security, to belonging, to the sense that I had finally done enough.
It never did. It never could. That is the nature of the trap.
What Burnout Looks Like From the Inside
Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter (2016), the researchers who developed the most widely used measure of occupational burnout, describe it through three interconnected dimensions. The first involves overwhelming exhaustion, the sense of being worn out, depleted, and unable to recover. The second manifests as cynicism and detachment from work, a protective numbing that separates us from caring too much. The third is a diminished sense of professional efficacy, a creeping belief that nothing we do makes a real difference.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
What struck me, reading their work, was how the third dimension creates a vicious cycle. The more burned out we become, the less effective we feel. The less effective we think, the harder we push to prove our worth. The harder we try, the more depleted we become. I had been running that cycle for years, perhaps decades, without seeing it clearly.
Bessel van der Kolk (2014), in The Body Keeps the Score, observes that people who have experienced chronic stress often feel perpetually unsafe within their own bodies. While I would hesitate to claim trauma as an identity, I recognise its residue: the years of institutional vigilance, the constant calibration to others’ needs, the way exhaustion became so familiar I forgot it was exhaustion. My shoulders, perpetually braced. My jaw was clenched through the night. My sleep, fractured by worry that arrived without specific content, just a generalised dread that something was undone, someone was disappointed, some standard had been missed.
Here, by the sea, those symptoms have begun to ease. The shoulders are learning to drop. The jaw softens. Sleep comes and stays. The body is remembering safety, one quiet morning at a time.
Exhaustion as Status Symbol
Brown (2010) names something I had never consciously examined: the cultural tendency to treat exhaustion as a status symbol and productivity as the measure of self-worth. In academic culture, in caregiving, in so many of the roles I have inhabited, exhaustion signals commitment. To admit tiredness is to demonstrate that I am working hard enough to deserve my place. To acknowledge a need for rest is to risk appearing uncommitted, unserious, insufficient.
The contract I wrote this morning, the one promising myself eight hours of sleep and mornings without performance, pushes directly against this belief. Every clause is a small rebellion against the culture that trained me to equate worth with output, value with visible effort.
Jenny Odell (2019), in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, writes about a different kind of productivity, one focused on maintaining oneself and healing rather than generating output. That concept stopped me when I first encountered it. The productivity of healing. As if rest could be framed as output. As if I needed permission, even from myself, to justify time spent recovering.
Perhaps I do need that permission. Maybe the language of productivity is the only dialect my overachiever’s mind can currently accept. If so, I will use it as a bridge until I can cross to the other side, where rest requires no justification at all.
What Solitude Makes Visible
Christopher Long and James Averill (2003), in their foundational study of positive solitude, found that being alone provides a particular kind of freedom: release from external constraints, from the performance demands of social interaction, from the need to calibrate ourselves to others’ expectations. In their research, people reported that solitude allowed them to see themselves more clearly, free from the distortions of social performance and others’ expectations. Solitude strips away the roles we perform, leaving us face-to-face with who we have become.
That confrontation can be painful. What I am seeing here by the Sea of Cortez is a woman who has spent decades outrunning her fear of inadequacy. A woman who believed, at some level too deep for conscious examination, that if she ever stopped performing, stopped achieving, stopped proving, she would discover she was nothing at all.
This is what Brown (2010) means when she describes perfectionism as a heavy shield we carry around, believing it will protect us, when in reality it prevents us from taking flight. I have been carrying that shield for so long that I forgot it was heavy. Here, I am finally setting it down.
What Comes After Recognition
The novelist Anna Quindlen once observed that the truly difficult and truly amazing work lies in giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself (as cited in Brown, 2010). That work starts here, in this place where no one knows my credentials or my accomplishments or how many hours I have logged in service to institutions that offered little security in return. Here, I am simply a woman by the sea. A woman learning to rest without guilt. A woman discovering that her worth existed before she proved anything, and will remain after she stops proving altogether.
Brown (2010) describes herself as a recovering perfectionist and an aspiring good-enoughist. That phrase makes me smile, this gentle reframing of recovery from perfectionism. I am an aspiring good-enoughist. I am learning to accept that enough is a destination, perhaps the only one worth reaching.
The pelicans are diving again. They keep no score. They make no comparisons with yesterday’s haul. They rest when they are full and dive when they are hungry, floating on the water between efforts, trusting that the sea will continue to provide.
I am watching them. I am learning.
Learning to Be Alone Without Loneliness
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
Brown, B. (2010). The gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you are supposed to be and embrace who you are. Hazelden.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Long, C. R., & Averill, J. R. (2003). Solitude: An exploration of benefits of being alone. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33(1), 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5914.00204
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311
Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House.
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
I acknowledge that I am in a period of completion rather than initiation. I recognise that my body, mind, and spirit require containment, rest, and clarity to finish well. I affirm that my worth is inherent, independent of productivity, praise, or perfection.
This contract exists to protect my energy, my work, and my dignity.
ARTICLE I: SLEEP AND REGULATION
I agree to:
Honour my need for 8–9 hours of sleep whenever possible
Treat sleep as essential infrastructure, as fundamental as food
Respond to irritability, fatigue, or anxiety as signals to rest rather than push
I release the belief that exhaustion is evidence of commitment.
ARTICLE II: FOCUS AND SCOPE
I agree to:
Work on only one primary intellectual task per day
Prioritise 30 Days by the Sea as my MA thesis
Engage with defence preparation lightly and strategically while feedback is pending
Refrain from creating new projects, commitments, or obligations during this period
I accept that sequencing is wisdom. It is discernment.
ARTICLE III: FEEDBACK AND REVIEW
I agree to:
Meet feedback with curiosity rather than self-judgement
Separate my identity from my work during review processes
Read feedback in stages, allowing my nervous system time to settle
Ask for clarification rather than assume criticism
I understand that feedback is part of the completion process, separate from any measure of my value.
ARTICLE IV: BOUNDARIES AND ENERGY
I agree to:
Limit exposure to negative, draining, or nagging interactions
Release responsibility for other people’s emotions or expectations
Say no, delay, or disengage without justification when needed
Protect mornings and evenings as sacred bookends of the day
I recognise that my calm is a responsibility I take seriously.
ARTICLE V: BODY AND CARE
I agree to:
Move my body in ways that feel supportive and kind
Eat and nourish myself without moral judgment
Allow rest days without guilt
Use walking, swimming, stretching, and silence as forms of care
I commit to listening to my body before correcting it.
ARTICLE VI: INNER LIFE AND COMPASSION
I agree to:
Speak to myself with honesty and gentleness
Release perfectionism tied to recognition or proving
Allow space for uncertainty without rushing to resolve it
Treat this season as a threshold, a passage rather than a proving ground
I accept that being enough is already true.
ARTICLE VII: WHEN I STRAY FROM THIS AGREEMENT
I agree that if I:
Overcommit
Push through fatigue
Spiral into self-criticism
Attempt to carry everything at once
I will respond by returning, with gentleness rather than reprimand.
Wake with the light. Open the window. Let the air in.
Fruit and yogurt for breakfast, cool and simple. Coffee by the sea. Write in my journal while the morning finds its shape.
Walk the Malecón. Watch the pelicans dive. Pet the dogs, often. Pause when something asks for attention.
Follow El Camino Real, the Mission of Our Lady of Loreto. The Royal Road stretches north, from Sonoma, California, roads that remember those who have passed before.
Walking becomes meditation. Finding space. Listening for silent whispers beside the Sea of Cortez.
Suntan on the beach. Swim in the sunshine. Dip toes into salt water. Find the tide. Ride the tide. Look for glass on the beach.
Pick a random food truck for lunch. Eat without hurry. Drink bubbly Topo Chico, cold and bright.
Read in the early afternoon. Nap in the shade, without apology.
As the evening cools, watch the sunset. Drink bubbly Topo Chico, Eat flan for dinner, because pleasure counts.
Watch the stars dance. Watch the moon rise. Notice what the dark makes possible.
Close the day gently. Nothing left to prove. Only the quiet work of staying.
Two flights. Six plus hours. The particular exhaustion of leaving everything.
Taxi window. Dust road. Mountains I have never seen turning pink in the distance.
¿Primera vez en Loreto? First time? Sí. Yes.
Estoy cansada. I am tired.
The driver nods. Sí, se ve. Yes. It shows.
Key in the lock. Door swinging open. A room that belongs to no one yet.
Bag on the floor. Zipped shut. The quiet discipline of leaving it unpacked.
Salt air. Open window. The sea I came to meet.
Sixty years old. Alone. The radical act of arriving for myself.
No one waiting. No one expecting. No one asking what took so long.
Shoulders dropping. The body knowing before the mind admits.
Threshold. Umbral. The space between who I was and who I am becoming.
Light fading. Sea darkening. The first night of thirty beginning.
Mañana será otro día. Tomorrow will be another day.
But tonight just this arriving.
He llegado. I have arrived.
For now that is enough.
Title: Weathered Open
Artist Statement
I almost walked past it.
It lay half-set in the sand, unannounced, the colour of something that had spent years under sun and water. What drew me back was the opening. Small. Quiet. A hollow worn clean through the stone as if time itself had needed passage.
I picked it up and felt its weight.
Solid everywhere except for that one opening. The hole held no weakness in it. If anything, it revealed its endurance. Pressure had shaped it instead. It had shaped it. Wind, salt, movement, persistence. Forces working slowly enough that transformation appeared gentle even when the forces were fierce.
Standing there, I thought about what it means to be marked without being broken.
How life wears through us in places. How absence forms where certainty once lived. How openings appear beyond damage, as evidence of having stayed long enough for change to move through.
I placed it back where I found it.
Some objects feel less like discoveries and more like acknowledgements. A quiet recognition of what survives shaping. Of what remains strong even with light moving through it.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
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
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
I had carried it outside before the day fully formed, before voices rose from the pathways below, before the shoreline began its quiet negotiations with footsteps and movement. The mug sat heavy in my hands, ceramic warmed by what it held, painted with colours that felt brighter than the hour itself. Loreto written across it, as place, briefly touching my palms, without declaration. I realised I was holding geography in a way maps never allow. Heat. Weight. Stillness.
What struck me was the pause.
I let it sit first. I let the steam lift, let the horizon remain slightly out of focus beyond the wooden railing. There was comfort in the blur, in allowing the world to stay softened while I woke into it slowly. No urgency to begin the day. No performance required. Just breath, warmth, and the steady presence of water beyond sight but within reach. It felt like a continuation of something I had been learning here, that mornings can be received rather than seized. They can be received.
I thought about how many cups of coffee I have held in my life.
Behind counters. At kitchen tables. In classrooms before students arrived. Each one marking a threshold between effort and endurance, between showing up and staying anyway. This cup felt different. It had everything to do with how I was sitting with it. Unhurried. Unguarded. Simply present to the small ritual of warmth against my hands, aware that sometimes the most profound forms of steadiness arrive quietly, asking nothing more than that we hold them long enough to feel their heat.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Arrival rarely looks the way we imagine it will.
There is the physical act of stepping into a room, setting a bag down, and closing a door behind you. And then there is the quieter arrival that unfolds beneath the surface, the one that takes longer, the one the body negotiates in its own time. I landed in Loreto yesterday, somewhere between waking and dreaming, my sense of time dissolved by two flights and several hours of transit. The body arrives first. The breath follows. The mind lingers behind, still scanning, still carrying the vigilance of the life I have temporarily left.
Estoy cansada. I am tired. The phrase surfaced unbidden as the taxi wound through the quiet streets of this small town on the Sea of Cortez. I said it aloud, testing how Spanish felt in my mouth after so many years. The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror and nodded. Sí, se ve, he said gently. Yes, it shows.
Presence of self, rather than absence of others.
Cruzando / Crossing
I came here alone. That sentence still feels radical, even as I write it. At 60, after twenty-five years navigating the relentless demands of academic life, I booked a solo retreat to a place where I know no one, where no one expects anything of me, where the only schedule is the one I choose to keep. The decision carried both relief and a strange tenderness, as if I were doing something slightly forbidden.
Arnold van Gennep (1909/1960), the anthropologist who coined the term liminality, described thresholds as spaces of transition, neither fully one thing nor another. The word itself comes from the Latin limen, meaning “boundary” or “doorstep”. To stand on a threshold is to occupy the space between what was and what might be, to hover in the doorway before stepping through. That is where I find myself tonight: on the threshold between the life I have been living and something I cannot yet name.
Victor Turner (1969), building on van Gennep’s work, described liminal spaces as places where ordinary structures dissolve, where the usual rules loosen their grip. He called this betwixt and between, a phrase that captures the particular disorientation of transition. I feel that disorientation now, sitting on a terrace overlooking water I have never seen before, in a country where I speak the language imperfectly, in a solitude I have chosen but am only beginning to inhabit.
El umbral es el lugar donde todo puede cambiar.
The threshold is the point at which everything can change.
Después de Años de Disrupción / After Years of Disruption
Title: Where Sound Holds Time
I arrived before the bells moved.
The tower rose out of the morning sky with a kind of quiet authority that asked nothing and yet remained undeniable. Stone layered upon stone, holding heat from centuries of sun, holding prayer, grief, celebration, confession, all sedimented into the structure itself. I stood at its base looking upward, aware of my own smallness against its vertical reach. Contextualised rather than diminished. Placed within a timeline far longer than my own.
What struck me most was the anticipation of sound.
The bells hung still, suspended in that brief space before motion. I found myself listening for something still ahead, aware that when they did ring, the vibration would move through air, through wall, through body. There is something about churches that organises silence differently. Even emptiness feels structured. Held. As though quiet itself has been practiced here long before anyone enters.
I stayed outside first.
I stayed at the threshold, aware that entry is never only architectural. It is emotional. Spiritual. Historical. To cross from sunlight into that interior dimness would be to step into accumulated presence. So I remained outside a while longer, letting the bells remain still, letting the stone hold its stories without requiring mine to be added. Some places ask for reverence through participation. Others offer it simply through standing close enough to feel time moving slowly around you.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Presence of self, rather than absence of others.
This arrival carries history. After the pandemic, many people learned how to be alone in ways they never intended. Isolation arrived suddenly, unevenly, and without consent. Homes became offices. Screens replaced faces. Silence grew louder, then exhausting. Loneliness took many forms, some quiet, some crowded, some invisible even to those experiencing them.
Coming into solitude by choice feels different. And yet the body remembers. It holds traces of vigilance, of separation, of longing for connection that went unmet during those long months. Bessel van der Kolk (2014), in his landmark work on trauma, reminds us that the body keeps the score, storing experience in tissue and nervous system long after the mind has moved on. My body carried the pandemic here, tucked into my luggage alongside my journal and my watercolours. Arrival asks me to acknowledge that history rather than rush past it.
Tricia Hersey (2022), founder of The Nap Ministry, writes that rest is resistance, a refusal to participate in systems that reduce human worth to productivity. For those of us who survived the pandemic by working harder, by performing wellness while quietly falling apart, rest can feel transgressive. Choosing solitude after years of forced isolation requires a different kind of courage: the willingness to be alone on purpose, to trust that this time the aloneness will heal rather than harm.
La Primera Noche / The First Evening
At first, habit took over. I considered unpacking everything immediately. I thought about schedules, routes, and productivity. My mind offered a list of things I could accomplish before bed: organise the kitchen, plan tomorrow’s meals, and respond to the emails still waiting on my phone. This reflex runs deep, an inherited habit shaped by a world that rewards motion and punishes stillness.
So I sat.
I let the room remain unfinished. I left the bag zipped. I noticed how my shoulders softened when there was nowhere else to be. Outside, light shifted almost imperceptibly, the desert mountains turning pink and then purple as the sun dropped toward the sea. Inside, something settled.
The Kaplans (1989), environmental psychologists who developed attention restoration theory, describe specific environments as offering soft fascination, a gentle hold on attention that allows the mind to rest while remaining engaged. Natural settings, they argue, restore depleted cognitive resources by providing stimulation that requires effort to ignore but minimal effort to attend to. The sea outside my window offers exactly this: something to watch without watching, something to hear without listening, something to receive without reaching.
I opened the windows and let the evening in. Salt air. The distant sound of waves. A dog barking somewhere in town. These sounds asked nothing of me. They existed, and I lived alongside them, and for the first time in longer than I can remember, that felt like enough.
El Acto Radical / The Radical Act
Title: Night Fire, Inner Quiet
Artist Statement
I found this place after most people had gone in.
The courtyard held that particular kind of night silence that is never empty, only softened. Chairs pushed back. Glass tables catching reflections of low light. The ocean somewhere beyond the dark, present but unseen. And in the centre, the fire already burning, as if it had been waiting for someone willing to sit without conversation.
I stood at the edge first, feeling the heat reach outward in small waves. Fire reorganises space differently than daylight does. It draws the body inward. Invites stillness without demanding it. I noticed how the flames moved, steadily consuming what had already been offered. There was something reassuring in that rhythm. Transformation happening without spectacle.
Eventually, I sat.
To accompany the burning. To watch what happens when wood becomes ember, when form gives way to glow. I thought about how many versions of myself had been shaped in similar fires, slow, unseen processes of change that only reveal themselves in hindsight. The courtyard remained quiet. The flames continued their patient work. And for a while, I let the night hold me there, lit just enough to feel present, but held within it.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Arriving alone carries a particular tenderness. There is no one to absorb the moment for you, no one to narrate the experience to, no one whose presence dilutes the intensity of meeting yourself in an unfamiliar place. You stand at the threshold, and you stand there alone, and whatever comes next is yours to receive without mediation.
For women, especially women at midlife, this can feel revolutionary. Carol Gilligan (1982), in her foundational work on women’s psychological development, described how women often define themselves through relationships, through care for others, through responsiveness to needs that are rarely their own. To step away from those relationships, even temporarily, can feel like abandonment, like selfishness, like a betrayal of everything we were taught to value.
I think about my mother in Lethbridge, 80 years old, navigating widowhood in the house that still holds her husband’s absence. I think about the colleagues who will cover my responsibilities while I am away. I think about all the ways I have been trained to feel guilty for taking up space, claiming time, and prioritising my own restoration. And then I think about what Audre Lorde (1988) wrote, that caring for myself is an act of political warfare, a refusal to participate in my own depletion.
Tonight, I am practising that refusal. I am letting the bag stay zipped. I am letting the emails wait. I am allowing myself to be tired without apologising for it, without performing recovery before recovery has had a chance to begin.
Descansar es un acto de valentía.
To rest is an act of courage.
Title: Between Palms and Water
Artist Statement
I sat down without planning to stay long.
The chair faced the water, but my body settled first into the pause rather than the view. Two palms stood directly in front of me, their trunks close enough to feel companionable, their fronds catching the last light of the day. Beyond them, the Sea of Cortez moved in its steady, untroubled rhythm. Undramatic. Unclaiming. Just continuing.
What I noticed most was the layering of distance.
My feet resting in the foreground, grounded and still. Sand stretching outward in soft, wind-marked patterns. Trees spaced across the shoreline like quiet sentinels. And then the horizon line, holding everything without urgency. I felt held within those layers, neither separate from the landscape nor fully absorbed by it. Present, but gently so.
There is a particular quality to sitting alone at the edge of day.
The body softens. Breath lengthens. Thought loosens its grip. Nothing is being asked. Nothing needs to be solved. In that moment, I was beyond researching, teaching, producing, or proving. I was simply occupying space, allowing the environment to meet me without expectation.
I stayed longer than I thought I would.
Long enough for the light to shift. Long enough to feel that familiar return to myself that happens when stillness is given time rather than rushed through. The palms remained. The water continued. And I sat there, suspended briefly between land and horizon, aware that presence sometimes arrives quietly, asking only that I remain.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Lo que enseña el agotamiento / What exhaustion teaches
Jet lag is a strange teacher. It strips away the usual defences, the ability to perform wellness even when wellness is absent. Christina Maslach (Maslach & Leiter, 2016), who pioneered research on burnout, defines the syndrome as a combination of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment resulting from chronic workplace stress. I recognise myself in that definition more than I would like to admit. I have been running on empty for longer than I knew, and the running itself became invisible, just the way things were, just what the job required.
Tonight, stopped at last, I can feel how tired I actually am. It lives in my bones, in the heaviness of my limbs, in the way my eyes want to close even as my mind keeps scanning for the next thing to do. Stephen Porges (2011), the neuroscientist who developed polyvagal theory, explains that our autonomic nervous system evaluates safety and danger through a process he calls neuroception. The assessment below consciousnessshapes our physiological state. My neuroception has been calibrated for threat for so long that even here, in this quiet room by the sea, my body remains on alert, still scanning for turbulence that is no longer present.
It will take more than one evening to convince my nervous system that it is safe. But this evening is where that convincing begins.
Antes de Dormir / Before Sleep
The night has deepened. The sea is audible but invisible now, just the rhythm of waves and the occasional cry of a night bird. In Kamloops, it is late. In Lethbridge, my mother is probably already asleep, her scriptures on the nightstand, her prayers said, the space beside her filled with faith and memory. I am connected to her across the distance, connected to everyone I love, even as I sit here alone.
This is what I am beginning to understand: solitude is a relational state, shaped by the connections we carry with us even when those we love are far away. Netta Weinstein and colleagues (2021) found, in their narrative study of solitude across the lifespan, that our sense of connection to others profoundly shapes the experience of being alone. Solitude becomes restorative when it is chosen, when it is bounded, when it exists within a larger web of relationships rather than as exile from connection.
I chose this. I bound it with return tickets and phone calls home, and the knowledge that thirty days will end. I carry my people with me, held in my heart rather than in my hand. And from that holding, I can begin to rest.
Mañana será otro día. Tomorrow will be another day. For now, I am letting this one be enough. I am letting exhaustion teach me what it knows: that I have been carrying too much, that the carrying has cost me, that setting the weight down, even for a moment, is the first step toward remembering what it feels like to be whole.
He llegado.
I have arrived.
Por ahora, eso es todo lo que necesito hacer.
For now, that is all I need to do.
Title: Elegance in Impermanence
Artist Statement
She was already standing there when I walked by.
Umbrella lifted. Dress falling neatly to the ground. There was something composed about her posture, as if she had paused rather than been placed. I noticed the pink first. Soft. Careful. Almost celebratory against the stone behind her.
What stayed with me was the contrast.
Bone and colour. Stillness and personality. The small details, the hat, the purse, the way she seemed dressed for presence rather than disappearance. Honest, rather than morbid. A quiet reminder that identity and expression persist past the finite edges of a life.
I stood there longer than I expected.
Simply noticing. The humour, the dignity, the gentleness within the figure. A simple moment of being reminded that impermanence and beauty can exist in the same space.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
References
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Harvard University Press.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Lorde, A. (1988). A burst of light: Essays. Firebrand Books.
Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Publishing.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909)
Weinstein, N., Nguyen, T.-V., & Hansen, H. (2021). What time alone offers: Narratives of solitude from adolescence to older adulthood. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 714518. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.714518
I am still walking. I am still staying anyway.
Translation Note
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.
Content Warning: This post contains reflections on trauma, childhood experiences, and the body’s memory of harm. Please care for yourself as you read, and feel free to step away if you need to.
A Vignette on Staying Anyway
Title: Portable Colour
Artist Statement
It travels with me.
As permission, beyond equipment. The palette sits quietly on the table, its circular wells holding pigments that feel less like supplies and more like emotional registers. Reds that hold heat. Blues that steady breath. Yellows that carry small, stubborn forms of optimism. I open it when the moment calls. Its presence alone is enough to remind me that expression remains available when language recedes.
What strikes me most is its containment.
Each colour held in its own boundary, yet arranged in relationship to the others. No hierarchy. No single tone dominating the field. It mirrors something I am relearning within myself, that emotions can coexist without needing resolution. That intensity and calm, grief and curiosity, fatigue and wonder can sit side by side without cancelling one another out.
In the context of this journey, the palette becomes less about making images and more about making space. A small, portable landscape of possibility. Evidence that creativity thrives even without perfect conditions. Only willingness. Only presence.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
I have learned to stay anyway.
Before Dawn (1995)
The doughnut shop opened at five. I arrived at four-thirty to start the coffee, to arrange the trays, to tie on the apron that smelled of yeast and sugar and the particular exhaustion of people who work before the sun rises. I was twenty-five years old. I had three children at home. I had textbooks in my bag.
Between customers, I would pull out whatever I was reading that week. Introduction to Political Science. Organizational Behaviour. The pages grew soft from handling, spotted with fingerprints I carried from my shift into my afternoon class, and my afternoon class began. I had no idea then that I was living a paradox: surrounded by people all morning, profoundly alone in what I was trying to become. No one in my family had gone to university. No one I worked with understood why I would spend money we could barely spare on books I read standing up behind a counter at five in the morning.
I think now about what I was learning in those hours before dawn. Beyond the content of the textbooks, though, that mattered. I was learning how to be with myself in the middle of chaos. I was learning that solitude differs from simple aloneness. You can be surrounded by people and still be utterly isolated in your purpose. You can be physically alone and feel accompanied by something larger than yourself. The space between five and nine, between the first customer and the last page I could read before class, became a kind of practice. I lacked language for it then. I do now. I call it alonetude: the contemplative, chosen engagement with solitude that allows you to be genuinely present to yourself rather than merely by yourself.
I was learning how to be with myself in the middle of chaos.
The Long Middle
Years passed. I completed my degrees. I built a career contract teaching at Thompson Rivers University, standing in front of classrooms instead of behind counters, talking about leadership, ethics, and organizational behaviour to students who reminded me of myself. Some of them worked night shifts before my morning classes. Some of them calculated whether they could afford both tuition and groceries. I saw them, because I had been them.
But the uncertainty never fully lifted. For seventeen years, I have worked as a contract faculty member. Each semester brings the question of whether I will be offered work. Each contract is temporary. I have applied for permanent positions more times than I can count and watched others receive what I was told remained just out of my reach. The institution depends on my flexibility, my expertise, and my willingness to show up semester after semester without guarantees. I have learned to live in the space between being essential and being disposable. I have learned that staying anyway is its own form of practice.
When people ask about my research on precarity and belonging in higher education, I sometimes want to say, “I am living this from the inside.” I am living it. The international students I research, the contract faculty I represent, and my children, who need me to show up every single day, regardless of what next semester holds. We are all navigating institutions that claim to welcome us while refusing to secure our place within them.
You can be surrounded by people and still be utterly isolated in your purpose.
Title: Where Light Breaks Open
Artist Statement
It began with colour before it began with form.
The yellow arrived first. Unplanned. Released. It spread across the page with a warmth that felt less like sunlight and more like emergence. Around it, blues and greens moved in to hold it, to give it somewhere to rest, The horizon line came later, almost as an afterthought, a quiet gesture to ground what was otherwise dissolving.
What I notice now is the permeability of everything.
No edge holds for long. Colour bleeds into colour. Water becomes sky. Sky becomes field. Even the darker mass on the right, tree or memory or shelter, participates in the landscape rather than interrupting it. This is what happens when I paint from sensation rather than observation. The world appears less fixed. More relational. More felt than seen.
In this way, the piece documents a state rather than a place.
A moment where brightness felt held, where saturation was safe to carry. Where expression moved ahead of interpretation. I released the outcome. I let the pigments find their own conversations across the paper.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Thirty Days on the Sea of Cortez
Today, I stood on a malecón in Loreto, Mexico, watching pelicans dive into the Sea of Cortez. I was three thousand kilometres from home, alone in a way I had forgotten since those early mornings behind the doughnut counter. Thirty days stretched before me. No students to teach. No meetings to attend. No one needed me to hold their world together. Just myself and the question of what I would find there.
What I found was presence. I began to understand that all those years of navigating precarity, of staying anyway when institutions offered no guarantees, had taught me something learned only that way. They had taught me how to be with uncertainty. They had taught me that safety lives in the felt sense, separate from the absence of risk, that you can meet whatever comes. They had taught me that meaning is woven into the walking itself.
I came to Loreto with a word: alonetude. This is a word I coined to describe the in-between place of loneliness and solitude. It names the experience of being genuinely present to yourself in solitude, of choosing to be alone in a way that restores rather than depletes. It requires four things: intentional choice, felt safety, present-moment awareness, and meaning integration. All four must be present. You cannot think your way into alonetude if your nervous system is screaming danger. You cannot force meaning onto empty time. But when the conditions align, something opens. You remember that you have always been enough, even when the world told you otherwise.
Title: Held in Stillness
Artist Statement
I noticed the posture before I noticed the figure.
Hands pressed together. Head slightly lifted. In pause, rather than performance. The stone carried a weight of quiet that felt older than the building behind it, older even than the palms rising into the sky. It stood there without announcement, without instruction, simply holding its position between ground and air.
What stayed with me was the gesture of inwardness.
Prayer, perhaps. Or reflection. Or the kind of listening that happens when words are no longer necessary. The surface of the sculpture is rough, almost weathered, yet the stance is gentle. It receives attention slowly, if one is willing to stop long enough.
In that moment, I felt my own body respond.
Shoulders lowering. Breath slowing. A subtle mirroring of the stillness in front of me. Recognition, rather than formal reverence. A reminder that quiet postures carry their own forms of strength. That stillness, too, can be an active state of being.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Some things you carry with you. Some practices ask only for willingness. The conditions are secondary.
Staying Anyway
I hold what next semester brings with open hands. I hold whether the applications I have submitted will lead to interviews, to offers, to the security I have worked toward for decades. What I know is that I have learned to stay anyway. I have learned that the space between five and nine, between uncertainty and meaning, between isolation and alonetude, is where the real work happens. It is where we become the people we are trying to be, shaped by the precarity and carried through it.
The doughnut shop is long gone. But I still wake before dawn sometimes, still reach for whatever I am reading, still feel that particular presence that comes from being alone with your own becoming. Some things you carry with you. Some practices require nothing more than attention. They need only the willingness to stay, to pay attention, to believe that the doors of education are worth the cost of walking through them.
I am still walking. I am still staying anyway.
Title: Shared Horizon
Artist Statement
They stood on the same rock but faced different directions.
One turned outward toward the open water, body lifted, alert to movement beyond the shoreline. The other remained lower, closer to the curve of the stone, angled inward as if watching the rhythm of the waves meeting land. Two postures. Two orientations. One shared ground beneath their feet.
What held my attention was the balance between them.
There was no sense of separation, even in their difference. No competition for vantage point. Just a quiet coexisting. A reminder that presence rarely requires alignment. That companionship can exist without mirroring. That standing beside another means nothing about looking the same way.
I watched them longer than I expected.
The water moved constantly around the rock, never still, yet they remained steady within it. It felt familiar to me, this act of holding one’s place while everything else shifts. A small lesson offered without instruction. Stability as groundedness shared, across difference.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
A gratitude practice at the threshold of 2025: a quiet reckoning with what has been carried, what has been set down, and what it means to enter a new year with more gentleness than the last.
I am grateful for the year that arrived without politeness. For the grief that pressed its full weight against my chest. For the darkness that stayed longer than comfort allows. For the depression that hollowed me out, for the loneliness that stripped away every performance, every borrowed certainty.
I am grateful for reaching the bottom and finding no floor, only myself, breathing, still here.
For the end of an era that refused to close gently, but demanded surrender. For the opening of a new chapter written without promise, only willingness.
For a body that carried trauma in silence until it could hold no more. For the slow, unglamorous work of healing. For learning that peace is a practice, chosen daily. For finding the Creator beyond answers, in endurance.
For forgiveness that burned on the way through. For forgiving others without excusing the harm. For asking forgiveness without protecting my ego. For learning that love requires truth, and truth costs something.
For walking away from the classroom, because I outgrew the shape it required me to hold. For choosing a life of writing and research, where listening is labour, and honesty is the measure.
For closing the door on a decade of becoming brave enough to say goodbye to what once kept me alive. For understanding that survival and belonging are entirely different things.
For my children, who taught me what love looks like when it is tested. For my parents, as time rearranged everything we knew. For my sisters, whose depth and courage reminded me I had company.
For finding love with Tom, steady, chosen, real, and for finding myself, without apology, without permission, at last.
And now, I give thanks for choosing life with my whole body. For committing to kindness after bitterness would have been easier. For continuing the work of healing when no one is watching.
I walk forward toward the highest spiritual vibration I can hold, aware that I will falter, aware that I will grieve again, and willing still.
This is my gratitude, fierce and honest, But because I survived it awake.
Title: Where the Sky Learns to Rest
Artist Statement
There are evenings when colour arrives with such fullness it quiets the mind before thought can form.
This was one of those evenings.
The palms bent slightly in the wind, their movement slow and unhurried, as though they too were participating in the closing of the day. The shoreline held a soft stillness. Even the water seemed to pause beneath the sky’s reflection.
I received this moment without spectacle. It felt more like permission.
Within my research on intentional solitude, I have come to understand that rest arrives through many forms beyond sleep or retreat. Sometimes rest occurs through witnessing. Through allowing the nervous system to soften in the presence of beauty that asks nothing in return.
The horizon asked nothing of me. It simply held colour, light, and the gentle evidence of transition.
I remained until the pink thinned into violet and the palms returned to silhouette.
A day completing itself. A body learning how to do the same.
A prelude: what I imagine the sea will feel like before I go. A meditation on anticipation, longing, and the particular kind of hope that belongs to someone about to give themselves thirty days of uninterrupted presence.
The research site is my own body. The methodology is presence.
A Deliberate Period of Research on Myself
What I Am Doing Here
I am sitting with my notebook, trying to articulate what this month is actually for. People keep asking. Are you on vacation? Are you writing a book? Are you running away from something?
The honest answer is: I am still finding the words. I know what I am leaving behind. I am leaving behind vacation in the way the word usually implies, with itineraries, tourist attractions, and the pressure to relax on schedule. I am beyond the wellness-industry retreat, where someone else structures my healing and tells me when to breathe deeply. I am running toward something, though I understand why the departure might look like a flight from the outside.
What I am doing is harder to name. I am conducting research. But the research site is my own body. The methodology is present. The data is whatever surfaces when I stop performing productivity long enough to notice what I actually feel.
This is what Scholarly Personal Narrative makes possible. Education scholar Robert Nash (2004) writes that “scholarly personal narrative writing is the unabashed, up-front admission that your own life signifies” (p. 24). My life signifies. My exhaustion signifies. My body, with its accumulated tensions and its slow-releasing grief, signifies. These belong to the research itself.
“For years, I have leapt out of bed with adrenaline already coursing, my mind racing through the day’s obligations before my feet touched the floor.”
Title:Selfie at the Beginning
Artist Statement
I nearly skipped this photograph. I have always avoided photographs of myself tired, and I have been tired for years. But Photovoice methodology, developed by Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris (1997), insists that the participant is the expert witness of their own experience. If I am going to document this inquiry honestly, I must document myself as I actually am, regardless of how I might wish to appear. This photograph is baseline data. It shows me at the beginning, before I know what thirty days of rest will do. The tiredness in my eyes is evidence. The uncertainty is evidence. The fact that I am here at all, despite everything, is evidence of something still beyond words. Perhaps courage. Perhaps desperation. Perhaps both.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Arriving Without an Agenda
I arrived with almost nothing planned. This was deliberate, yet terrifying.
For seventeen years, I have lived by agendas. Syllabi. Course schedules. Committee meetings. Deadline after deadline after deadline. My calendar has been a document of obligations, a record of all the places I needed to be and all the things I needed to produce. Arriving somewhere without a plan feels dangerous to a body trained by precarity to always be preparing for the next demand.
But that is precisely why I chose to come without one.
Transition theorist William Bridges (2019) describes the neutral zone as the disorienting space between an ending and a new beginning. In the neutral zone, the old structures have fallen away, but new ones are still taking shape. Bridges (2019) argues that this space, though uncomfortable, is essential for genuine transformation. If we rush to fill it with busyness and plans, we miss the creative potential it holds.
I am trying to stay in the neutral zone without filling it. I am trying to tolerate the discomfort of holding each day open, uncertain of what it will bring. This is harder than it sounds. My nervous system keeps wanting to make lists, set goals, and measure progress. I keep gently redirecting it back to the present moment.
What do I actually have? Curiosity. Books. A notebook. A camera. Art supplies. My body. Time. The sea.
The sea becomes my research site. I become both subject and observer.
The Body as Research Site
Each day begins quietly. I wake early and watch the light change before the world feels busy. I let my nervous system wake up slowly, which is a practice in itself. For years, I have leapt out of bed with adrenaline already coursing, my mind racing through the day’s obligations before my feet touched the floor. Here, I am practicing a different kind of waking. Gradual. Gentle. Without urgency.
Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014) writes that “physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past” (p. 101). Physical self-awareness means noticing what is happening in the body: sensations, tensions, areas of ease and discomfort. It sounds simple, but for those of us who have spent years overriding our bodies’ signals, it requires relearning.
I am relearning.
Some mornings I swim, letting the salt water do its steady work on my breath and muscles. The sea holds me, and for once, I release the effort of holding myself. There is something profound about buoyancy, about being supported by something larger than my own effort. I float on my back and watch the sky and feel my shoulders release in ways they never do on land.
Other mornings, I walk along the shoreline, noticing birds, light, and small changes in the tide. I am learning again how to pay attention without trying to control what I see. This is what environmental psychologists Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan (1989) call “soft fascination”-the effortless attention that natural environments invite. Soft fascination allows directed attention to rest and recover. It is the opposite of the vigilant scanning my nervous system has been doing for years.
“Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”
Bessel van der Kolk (2014, p. 101)
Movement as Inquiry
Movement becomes part of the inquiry. But it is a different kind of movement from the one I am used to.
For years, I have been an athlete. Triathlon. Long-distance open-water swimming. I have trained my body to push through discomfort, to ignore fatigue, to override the signals that say stop,slow down, or this is too much. That capacity served me in competition. It also served me in precarious labour, where I pushed through exhaustion semester after semester because stopping felt impossible.
Here, I am practicing a different relationship with movement. Yoga to listen rather than push. Walking without tracking distance or speed. Swimming to settle rather than to train. I am measuring nothing. I am simply moving and noticing what my body tells me.
This is a form of interoception, which I introduced in earlier posts. Interoception is the capacity to sense and interpret signals from inside the body. Neuroscientist Stephen Porges (2011) emphasises that interoception is foundational to well-being. We cannot regulate what we cannot feel. We can only care for ourselves when we know what we need.
My body becomes a source of information instead of something I manage or override. I notice where tension softens. I notice where grief still lives, tucked into my hips and my jaw and the space between my shoulder blades. I notice when joy appears without effort, surprising me with its presence.
“My former life has ended. My new life is still taking shape.”
Title: Morning Light on Water
Artist Statement
I photograph the morning light because it teaches me about presence. This particular quality of light exists only briefly. A moment of inattention and it is gone. There is no way to capture it later or recreate it artificially.
It requires me to be here, now, in this specific moment. Philosopher Donna Haraway (1988) argues that all knowledge is situated, emerging from particular bodies in particular locations at particular times. There is no view from nowhere. There is only the view from somewhere. This photograph is my view from here, from this morning, from this body standing at the edge of this sea. It is partial, specific, and completely true.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Art as Companionship
Art weaves its way through the days. Some days I paint or draw. Some days I photograph birds lifting from the water or shadows stretching across the sand. Some days, the art is simply sitting and watching the sea change colour.
This is art therapy without diagnosis, without fixing, without interpretation. It is creation as companionship.
Arts-based research scholar Patricia Leavy (2015) argues that creative practice accesses dimensions of human experience that other methods cannot reach. Art speaks to the aesthetic, the emotional, the sensory, the embodied. It generates knowledge that cannot be reduced to propositions or statistics. When I paint, I am discovering rather than illustrating what I already understand. I am discovering what I know through the act of making.
I brought watercolours with me. They are forgiving, which I need right now. If a mark arrives uninvited, I can let it bleed into something else. I can work with the accident rather than trying to erase it. This feels metaphorically apt. I am learning to work with what has happened to me rather than pretending it never occurred.
These simple materials are an act of resistance against a system that valued me only for what I could produce.
I also brought my camera. Photography, within the Photovoice methodology I am using, functions as a form of witnessing. Wang and Burris (1997) designed Photovoice to enable people to record and reflect on their own experiences. The camera becomes a tool for noticing. It asks, “What do you see?” What matters? What wants to be documented?
The reason for a photograph often arrives later. The image emerges first. The understanding follows, sometimes days afterward. This is part of the methodology. I trust that meaning will arrive in its own time.
Title: Art Supplies
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Artist Statement
I photographed my art supplies because they represent permission. For years, I abandoned art. I told myself time was absent, which was true. I told myself it was unproductive, which was the language of a system that valued me only for output. These simple materials, watercolours and paper and a few brushes, are an act of resistance against that system. They say: making something for its own sake is enough. Beauty is enough. Play is enough. Moore (1992) argues that caring for the soul is a crafted, patient practice that requires openness to life’s unfolding rather than attempts to control or accelerate it. These supplies are tools for soul care. They ask nothing of me except presence.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Silence as Data
Writing happens when it wants to. Sometimes it comes as complete sentences. Sometimes as fragments. Sometimes in silence.
I am learning to permit myself to rest when there are no words. This is difficult for someone who has spent her career producing text: syllabi, assignments, feedback, articles, reports, emails without end. I have been trained to believe that writing equals work equals value. It is a false equation.
Here, I am practicing a different relationship with language. I am practicing trust, both in myself and in the process. I am learning that silence is also data.
Nash (2004) writes that “we do not live in reality itself. We live in stories about reality” (p. 33). The stories I have told about myself, the overworked educator, the reliable colleague, the person who always says yes, have shaped how I experience my life. But stories can be revised. New narratives can emerge. This requires silence, space, and time for the old stories to loosen their grip.
Some days I write pages. Some days I write nothing. Both are part of the inquiry.
“We do not live in reality itself. We live in stories about reality.”
Robert Nash (2004, p. 33)
Evenings and Reflection
I imagine evenings marked by sunsets and reflection. I review the day gently, asking what surfaced and what settled. I resist the rush to make meaning. I let experiences sit, knowing they will braid together in their own time.
This practice draws on what contemplative traditions call discernment, the slow work of noticing patterns and allowing clarity to emerge. It is the opposite of the rapid analysis I have been trained to perform in academic settings, where every observation must be immediately connected to theory, and every experience interpreted and explained.
Here, I am practicing a slower kind of knowing. I am trusting that understanding will come when it is ready. The sea holds my questions without demanding answers.
Donna Haraway’s (1988) concept of situated knowledge provides an important epistemological grounding for this project. Haraway argues that knowledge is always partial, embodied, and located, and that broader understanding emerges from specific positions rather than detached universality. This perspective challenges claims of neutral objectivity, emphasising that what we know is shaped by where we are, who we are, and how we are positioned within power relations.
In this inquiry, Loreto serves as an epistemic site where geography, solitude, and embodiment actively shape knowledge production. By situating this work in a particular body and place, the project embraces partiality as a methodological strength and foregrounds reflexivity, positionality, and relational accountability in the generation of knowledge. I am somewhere particular: Loreto, México, the edge of the Sea of Cortez, this specific body at this specific moment in history. The larger vision I am seeking, whatever it turns out to be, can only emerge from this particular location. There is no shortcut. There is no way to skip the slow work of being here.
Title: Sunrise
Artist Statement
I photograph sunrises because they mark beginnings without certainty. The day begins, offering itself without promises. Light returns, yet it does so quietly, without spectacle or demand. There is comfort in this daily renewal, in the gentle assurance that illumination follows darkness.
Anthropologist Victor Turner (1969) wrote about liminality as the threshold state between what was and what will be. Sunrise is a liminal time. It belongs neither fully to night nor fully to day. I am drawn to these threshold moments because I am living within one. My former life has ended. My new life is still taking shape. I stand in the early light, attentive to what is emerging, noticing what the morning reveals about who I am becoming.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The Human Right to Imagine
I want to pause here and connect what I am doing to the human rights framework that grounds this entire project.
Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) states that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” This right to participate in cultural life, to make and enjoy art, is fundamental to human dignity, beyond luxury.
But precarious labour systematically erodes this right. When every hour must be monetised, when exhaustion is chronic, when the nervous system is trapped in survival mode, there is no space left for creativity. Art becomes something other people do. Imagination becomes a luxury we cannot afford.
This residency is an exercise of my right to participate in cultural life. I am making art. I am writing. I am imagining possibilities beyond survival. These are expressions of human dignity, denied me for too long by years of precarious working conditions.
Van der Kolk (2014) emphasises that trauma recovery requires more than the absence of symptoms. It requires the restoration of imagination, play, and creative engagement with life. Healing is about being able to imagine and pursue a life worth living, beyond feeling less bad.
I am here to recover my imagination.
What I Imagine Finding
What I imagine most clearly is this: that after thirty days, I will return with something quieter and more durable than conclusions, etc.
A steadier body. One that has remembered what rest feels like and can recognise the difference between genuine peace and the numb exhaustion that masquerades as calm.
Clearer boundaries. The capacity to say no without guilt, to protect my time and energy, to refuse demands that diminish my wellbeing.
A renewed relationship with creativity. The knowledge that making art is a way of being in the world, beyond any reward for finished work, that I have a right to claim.
A deeper respect for slow, embodied ways of knowing. The understanding that wisdom arrives through many paths beyond analysis and argument. Sometimes it arrives through the body, through sensation, through the patient’s accumulation of presence.
Title: Before the Sea
Artist Statement
I include this photograph from before I left because it reminds me of where I started. This is the coast I know, the cold Pacific waters of British Columbia, where I have lived and worked and struggled for years. The Sea of Cortez, where I am now, is warmer, calmer, different in almost every way.
But I carry the northern waters with me. They are part of my body's memory, part of the archive I am learning to read. Including this image honours the full journey, the arrival and the departure, where I am and where I have been.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2025
What Remains
This is what I imagine research can look like when it is grounded in care, honours the body, and makes healing a legitimate form of inquiry.
I am producing no outputs, generating no deliverables, optimising nothing. I am simply here, attending to what surfaces, trusting that the inquiry itself is valuable even if I cannot yet articulate what it will yield.
Moore (1992) suggests that caring for the soul involves attentive practice, patience, and an openness to the natural unfolding of life rather than attempts to control or accelerate it. I am practicing that patience. I am cultivating that willingness. I am learning to let life unfold without forcing it into predetermined shapes.
And perhaps that, in itself, is the finding.
The ability to envision a life beyond survival is a human right.
An Invitation
If you are reading this and you have forgotten how to imagine, I want you to know: the capacity is still there. It may be buried under exhaustion, under obligation, under years of being told that dreaming is a luxury you cannot afford. But it is there.
Imagination is a human right. Rest is a human right. The ability to envision a life beyond survival is a human right.
I am here, by the sea, trying to remember what I already know.
Estoy imaginando. Estoy aprendiendo a soñar de nuevo.
I am imagining. I am learning to dream again.
Title: Where the Colours Meet
Artist Statement
This piece began without a plan.
I was sitting with paint, searching for a feeling rather than an image. The yellow came first. Wide. Expansive. Almost insistent. It held the space like light that refuses to dim.
Then water arrived. Blue, then green. Movement over stillness. A shoreline forming without being drawn.
There is a darkness on the right side that I chose to leave unresolved. It felt honest to leave it there. Some things in the landscape simply exist alongside the rest.
Within my creative practice, works like this function as emotional cartographies. They are less about representation and more about locating where I am internally at a given moment in time.
This one sits somewhere between emergence and rest.
Meeting itself. Between departure and arrival.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
I am here, by the sea, trying to remember what I already know.
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
Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes (40th anniversary ed.). Balance.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
Moore, T. (1992). Care of the soul: A guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life. HarperCollins.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Publishing.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Wang, C., & Burris, M. A. (1997). Photovoice: Concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assessment. Health Education & Behaviour, 24(3), 369–387. https://doi.org/10.1177/109019819702400309
Alonetude exists between being alone, loneliness, and solitude, where presence replaces performance.
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) writes that “traumatised people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies… The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort” (p. 103). When I read those words, I recognised 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 eighteen 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.
Title: Pretending I Am Okay
Artist Statement
I chose this image because it documents the performance of precarious labour demands. For seventeen 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 fulfill 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
The Somatic Archive
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 somatic comes from the Greek soma, meaning “body.” When I speak of a somatic archive, 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 seventeen 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.
The body becomes an archive of what institutions leave unnamed.
The Nervous System Trapped in Activation
Neuroscientist Stephen Porges (2011) developed polyvagal theory to explain how the autonomic nervous system responds to safety and threat. 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) writes that “even though we may not be aware of danger on a cognitive level, on a neurophysiological level, our body has already started a sequence of neural processes” (p. 11). 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 sympathetic activation. This is the fight-or-flight response. It is useful in genuine emergencies. It mobilises energy, quickens the heart, and sharpens attention. But it becomes harmful when it is chronic. When the nervous system remains in a state of sympathetic activation for years, it begins to treat that state as normal. The body forgets what safety feels like.
Porges (2011) observes that “only in a safe environment is it adaptive and appropriate to inhibit defensive systems and engage socially” (p. 13). 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 residency is an attempt to shift my nervous system toward what Porges (2011) calls the ventral vagal state. 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.
The Neutral Zone
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 neutral zone.
The neutral zone 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 neutral zone. The identity I built over seventeen 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 neutral zone 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.
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
From Performance to Presence
Nineteenth-century psychologist Pierre Janet, as cited in van der Kolk (2014), observed that “traumatic stress is an illness of not being able to be fully alive in the present” (p. 314). 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 residency is to move from performance to presence. I want to practice 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.
I have spent so many years being available to others that I have become profoundly unavailable to myself.
The Unthought Known
Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas (2017) introduced the concept of the unthought known. 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 unthought known. 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.
Scholarly Personal Narrative, the methodology I am using throughout this project, provides a framework for accessing the unthought known. By attending carefully to my own experience, by sitting with sensation and memory rather than rushing past them, I create conditions for embodied knowledge to surface.
Bollas (2017) suggests that the unthought known often emerges in moments of stillness, when we stop the busyness that usually keeps it submerged. This is another reason for this residency. I need to be still long enough for what I know to become thinkable.
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 realise, 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 agentic labour 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.
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 seventeen 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 prioritise it.
Education scholar Robert Nash (2004) reminds us that “etymologically, the word ‘scholar’ goes back to… skholē, meaning leisure or play” (p. 42). The original scholars were people with enough leisure to think, to wonder, to follow curiosity without the pressure of immediate utility. What does it mean that contemporary academics, particularly those of us in precarious positions, have so little leisure that we cannot embody the original meaning of our vocation?
I am choosing to treat the right to rest as lived practice rather than distant declaration. This residency is an exercise of a fundamental human right that has been systematically denied to me by the conditions of my labour.
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 soft fascination, the kind of gentle, effortless attention that natural objects invite. Soft fascination 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
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) writes that “scholarly personal narrative writing is the unabashed, up-front admission that your own life signifies…” (pp. 23–24). 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) encourages writers to trust their own voices. He writes: “Do not risk losing something vital and special to your humanity: your own gritty and beautiful, hard-won voice” (pp. 26–27). 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 recognise themselves in it.
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.
Within the Alonetude project, 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) writes that “neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience” (p. 209). Healing requires interoception, the capacity to sense and interpret signals from within the body. Interoception is how we know when we are hungry, tired, anxious, or at peace. For those of us who have spent years overriding our bodies’ signals, interoception must be relearned.
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) emphasises that physiological regulation 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.
Within the Alonetude project, 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
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 rather than a destination to be reached and possessed. It is a quality of presence to be practised.
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) writes that “agency starts with what scientists call interoception” (p. 209). Interoception, as I explained earlier, is the capacity to sense the body’s internal state. It is the foundation of agency because we can only act on our own behalf when we know what we need.
I am here to recover my interoception. 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, who I am beyond performance for an institution that no longer employs me.
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
I arrive by the sea to listen, to write, and to remember what a body feels like when it receives permission to rest.
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.
Within the Alonetude inquiry, 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 recognise 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.
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 unthought known. 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 self-regulation. 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.
