Reading Time: 8minutesLas piedras hablan. The stones speak. A bilingual scholarly reflection on trauma, alonetude, and what it means to learn through geological time beside the shore of Loreto, Baja California Sur.
Reading Time: 8minutes
Las piedras no tienen prisa. Tampoco el dolor. Stones know no hurry. Neither is grief.
A Bilingual Scholarly Reflection on Geological Time, Trauma, and Alonetude
Las piedras hablan / The Stones Speak
I have been collecting stones since my first walk along this shore.
Gathering without purpose. Without cataloguing or arranging. Simply bending down, picking something up, turning it over in my palm, feeling its weight, its smoothness, its particular refusal to be hurried. Some I carry back to my room. Some I return to the water. Most I hold for a moment and set back down exactly where I found them.
This practice arrived unexpectedly. But here I am, two weeks into thirty days beside the Sea of Cortez, and the stones are teaching me something available through no other path.
Las piedras hablan. Pero no con palabras.
The stones speak. In a language beyond words.
Tiempo profundo / Deep Time
The stones on this shore are old in a way that rearranges something in the mind.
Geologists use the term deep time to describe the vast timescale of Earth’s history, a scale so large that human life occupies only a tiny fraction of it. The volcanic stone of the Sierra de la Giganta, rising at the edge of this bay, formed over millions of years. What I am holding in my hand has been shaped by water, wind, and heat across timescales I cannot fully imagine. And yet here it is. Smooth. Patient. Present.
Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) writes about the relationship between place and time, arguing that our sense of place deepens with duration, that the body learns a place slowly, through repeated contact and accumulating familiarity. The shore is teaching me this. Each morning, I walk the same stretch of beach, and it is never quite the same beach. The tide has rearranged it. The light falls differently. A stone I noticed yesterday has been turned over by water, offering me a different face.
El lugar me enseña paciencia. / The place teaches me patience.
This feels important. I have spent nineteen years in precarious employment, living inside what Rob Nixon (2011) calls slow violence: harm that unfolds gradually, accumulating across time without announcement. Slow violence has its own temporal logic. It teaches the body urgency. It teaches the nervous system that time is always running out, that the next contract may fail to arrive, and that rest is a risk. The body learns to treat duration as a threat.
The stones are teaching the opposite. They are evidence that time can accumulate as beauty rather than damage. That something can be shaped by forces larger than itself and emerge refined rather than broken.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
El cuerpo como archivo / The Body as Archive
I have been thinking about what stones and bodies have in common.
Both are shaped by what they have been through. Both carry the evidence of their history in their surface and structure. A stone makes no decision toward smoothness. Smoothness is what the water makes of it, over time, through persistent contact. And a body makes no decision to brace. Bracing is what survival is made of, over the years, through persistent exposure to uncertainty.
Resmaa Menakem (2017) writes that trauma is stored in the body rather than only in the mind, passed between generations through nervous system inheritance. What the body learned to survive, it continues to enact, even when the original threat has passed. The stone cannot stop being smooth simply because the water has receded. And for a long time, stopping the bracing was beyond my reach simply because the contracts had stopped.
El trauma vive en el cuerpo. La curación también.
Trauma lives in the body. So does healing.
Bessel van der Kolk (2014) describes how the body keeps its own score, maintaining a somatic record of experiences the conscious mind may have rationalized or set aside. Healing extends beyond intellectual understanding of what happened. It is to give the body new experiences that gradually teach the nervous system a different story. New evidence. Repeated contact with safety. The slow accumulation of something other than harm.
Holding a stone, I notice something release in my shoulders.
Gaston Bachelard (1969) argues that we think with our hands as much as with our minds, that the imagination is deeply material rather than purely visual or verbal, rooted in touch, weight, and texture. There is a kind of knowing that arrives only through the hands. Picking up a stone, I am feeling it rather than thinking about it, receiving what it has to offer through the sensory channels that precede language.
There is a kind of thinking that happens only in the hands. The stone offers no argument. It simply offers itself, and the body receives it.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Alonetud y piedra / Alonetude and Stone
The practice of picking up stones is a practice of alonetude.
Alonetude, as I am developing it, differs from both loneliness and the performed solitude of the retreat or the meditation app. It is a quality of presence, a willingness to be fully here with what is here, without an audience, without a purpose beyond the presence itself. It is the opposite of the hypervigilance that precarious labour instilled in me, the constant scanning, the waiting for the next demand, the inability to fully arrive in any moment because the next moment always carries threat.
Estar sola, completamente presente. / To be alone, completely present.
When I pick up a stone, my full attention belongs to the stone. The stone requires my full attention, because presence itself requires it,nce is simply what the encounter asks. I turn it over. I feel its weight shift. I notice the colour change where my warm hand has touched it. For these seconds, The sessional instructor waiting for a contract falls away. The researcher anxious about output falls away. I am a body in relation to a stone, and the stone is indifferent to all the rest.
This indifference is, strangely, a relief.
Philosopher Martin Buber (1970) distinguishes between I-Thou and I-It relationships, where genuine encounter requires full presence and mutuality. Most of my institutional life has been I-It: instrumental, transactional, surveilled. The stone cannot evaluate my performance. It cannot renew or decline to renew my contract. Its indifference holds no unkindness. It is entirely outside the economy of institutional assessment, and in that outside-ness, I find something I had almost forgotten how to feel.
La piedra no me juzga. / La piedra no me juzga. The stone withholds all judgment.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Las historias que cargamos / The Stories We Carry
Each stone has a history.
I know this intellectually, in the way geologists know it: that the smoothness of a river stone records the duration and force of the water that shaped it, that the colour of volcanic rock carries information about the temperature at which it formed, that the weight in my hand is a compressed record of pressures and processes that unfolded across scales of time I cannot inhabit.
But I also know it in another way. The way the body knows things.
Menakem (2017) writes about the concept of the somatic narrative: the story the body tells through tension, posture, gesture, and breath. The body’s story lives beyond words. It is told in holding patterns, in the places breath has learned to avoid, in the flinch that arrives before the threat is even named. To heal is to learn to read this narrative, to listen to what the body has been trying to say.
The stones, in their patient silence, are teaching me to practise this listening.
Clark Moustakas (1961) writes about loneliness as an inescapable dimension of human experience, one that contains within it the possibility of deep self-knowledge. Genuine solitude, for Moustakas, transcends the absence of others: it is the presence of oneself, a turning toward rather than a turning away. Picking up stones alone on a shore in Mexico, I am practising this turning. Meeting myself in the quiet that forms between me and the geological world.
Las historias de vida de las piedras son también las mías.
The life stories of the stones are also mine.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Lo que me llevaré / What I Will Take With Me
I am going to take three stones home.
I have been choosing them carefully over the past two weeks. Neither the most beautiful, nor the most dramatic. Three ordinary stones that fit together in my hand, that have become familiar to me through repeated handling, that carry now the warmth of my attention.
Robert Levine (2010) writes about the body’s capacity to complete interrupted experiences, the way trauma keeps a process alive that was never allowed to finish. Healing, in this framing, is completion: returning to something left unfinished and allowing it to resolve. I think of the past nineteen years as an interrupted experience. A process that never reached resolution because the conditions for resolution, security, time, witness, and safety, were never present.
These thirty days are the beginning of completion.
The stones will come with me as witnesses. Evidence that I was here. That something in me held still long enough to be shaped by something other than urgency. That the body can learn, slowly, the way stone is learned by water: through patient and repeated contact with what is real.
Estas piedras son testigos. / These stones are witnesses.
References
Bachelard, G. (1969). The poetics of space (M. Jolas, Trans.). Beacon Press. (Original work published 1958)
Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original work published 1923)
Levine, P. (2010). In an unspoken voice: How the body releases trauma and restores goodness. North Atlantic Books.
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery Press.
Moustakas, C. (1961). Loneliness. Prentice-Hall.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.
Tuan, Y-F. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. University of Minnesota Press.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Academic Lens
This reflection engages what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) describe as the essential function of Scholarly Personal Narrative: using the first-person account as a site of rigorous inquiry, where the researcher’s lived experience becomes both data and analysis. The bilingual structure enacts rather than merely describes the experience of living between languages and cultures, a methodological choice informed by Anzaldúa’s (1987) theorisation of the borderlands as a generative epistemic position. The stones function here as what Tuan (1977) calls place objects: material things that anchor us to a place and through that anchoring, to ourselves. The somatic learning described is aligned with Menakem's (2017) argument that healing must reach the body level beyond the cognitive, and with Bachelard's (1969) phenomenology of material imagination, the insight that we think with the substances of the world, and that stone in the hand is already a kind of knowing.
Translation note. Spanish language passages were generated using Google Translate and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
For a full list of all sources cited throughout this project, see the References page.
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.
ACADEMIC LENS
The paradox named in this title, that grief arrives with rest rather than with exhaustion, is clinically well-documented. Van der Kolk (2014) observes that the hyperactivated nervous system of the chronically stressed person suppresses grief as an unaffordable vulnerability: one cannot afford to feel the weight of what has been lost while still needing all available resources for survival. Menakem (2017) describes this as the body’s intelligent prioritisation: grief, like other emotions requiring duration and openness, must wait until the nervous system registers sufficient safety to permit it. Levine (2010) calls this the “thaw” phase of somatic healing: as the chronic bracing releases, the feelings it has been holding at bay begin to move through the body. The grief that comes with rest is therefore a sign that the rest is working rather than failing, it is working. Moustakas’s (1961) heuristic inquiry framework suggests that this grief is also data: it tells the researcher something specific about the scale of the loss that has been carried, and about the depth of the healing that the body’s intelligence has been waiting to undertake.
For much of my adult life, I believed that being alone was something to manage rather than something to understand. Like many people shaped by caregiving roles, professional responsibility, and constant availability, I learned to associate aloneness with either failure or escape. To be alone for too long was suspect. To seek it deliberately required justification.
Keywords: alonetude, loneliness, solitude, third way, being alone, human rights, rest, scholarly personal narrative, embodied knowing
Title: The Threshold
Artist Statement
I was drawn to this moment, arrival and release.
The body is positioned in rest, still partway toward surrender. Legs extended, feet bare, the posture signals pause rather than sleep. I am neither moving nor working. I am simply placed. The wooden railing forms a horizontal boundary across the frame, a subtle reminder of enclosure, of protection, of holding. Beyond it, the landscape opens without demand. Sand. Palms. Sea. Sky.
What strikes me most is how unfamiliar this posture felt when I first entered it. Rest, after prolonged precarity, comes with difficulty. The body takes time to trust stillness. Even here, overlooking water, there is a period of adjustment where the nervous system scans for urgency that is no longer present.
This photograph documents the early stages of relearning safety. Porges's (2011) polyvagal theory reminds us that the body must perceive safety before it can inhabit rest. The environment offers cues: horizon line, open air, diffused light, the absence of surveillance or expectation. Slowly, the breath lengthens. The shoulders release. The feet, unguarded, extend into space.
There is also something important about perspective. The image is taken from the body rather than of the body. This matters methodologically. It situates the viewer within the experience rather than outside it. This is inhabitation rather than observation.
Rest, here, is recalibration.
The threshold is the body learning it no longer has to brace.
Description
A first-person view from a shaded balcony. Bare feet extend toward a wooden railing overlooking sand, palm trees, and the sea under a soft, clouded sky. The composition centres stillness, horizon, and embodied perspective.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
This tension has only intensified in recent years. Public discourse now frames loneliness as a public health crisis, with good reason. A growing body of research links chronic loneliness to increased risk of depression, cardiovascular illness, cognitive decline, and early mortality (Cacioppo & Cacioppo, 2018; Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015). Indeed, a meta-analysis of 148 studies involving more than 300,000 participants found that stronger social relationships were associated with a 50% higher likelihood of survival (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010).
Yet alongside this concern runs another, quieter exhaustion: many people feel overwhelmed by constant connection, by the expectation of perpetual responsiveness, and by the emotional labour of being continually available.
We are caught between two unsatisfying stories about being alone.
On one side lies loneliness, understood as a painful, unwanted disconnection. In contrast lies romanticized solitude, idealized as a rarefied retreat available only to those with time, money, or particular personality traits. During my research and lived inquiry, I came to believe that this binary is incomplete. There is a third way of being alone that is neither deprivation nor escape. I call this way alonetude.
Defining Alonetude
Alonetude is a cultivated, sustainable relationship with one’s own company. It is the capacity to be peacefully and intentionally alone without collapsing into loneliness or relying on fantasy versions of solitude. Alonetude represents a way of being, beyond any particular place or retreat.
Unlike solitude, which is a neutral description of physical aloneness, alonetude refers to an inner condition. One can be physically alone without experiencing alonetude, and one can experience alonetude in the presence of others. It is defined by relationship rather than isolation: specifically, the relationship one has with oneself. Recent qualitative research confirms that both laypeople and researchers distinguish between objective solitude (physical separation from others) and subjective solitude (mental disengagement from social demands), with the latter possible even in public spaces (Weinstein et al., 2023a).
This distinction matters because much of the harm associated with being alone arises from the meanings we attach to it rather than from aloneness itself. Loneliness, as defined in the literature, is the subjective distress that results from a perceived gap between desired and actual connection (Perlman & Peplau, 1981). Solitude, by contrast, describes the absence of immediate social contact. Aloneness refers to what can arise when solitude is approached with choice, care, and presence.
Choice, Autonomy, and the Conditions for Alonetude
Title: Witness on the Edge
Artist Statement
They were already there when I arrived.
Standing at the shoreline, unbothered by my presence, as if I had entered their space rather than the other way around. The water moved in its steady rhythm behind them, small waves folding themselves onto the rocky beach. Nothing dramatic. Just repetition. Breath-like.
What struck me first was their stillness.
The absence of urgency rather than movement. They stood in a way that felt deliberate, almost ceremonial. One closer to me. One slightly behind. A quiet companionship beyond the need for interaction.
There is something about vultures that unsettles people. We are taught to read them as symbols of decay, of endings, of what is left behind. Yet standing there, watching them, I felt recognition rather than fear or discomfort.
They are cleaners of landscapes. Carriers of ecological responsibility. They arrive where others turn away. They do necessary work without spectacle.
In that way, they felt less like ominous figures and more like witnesses. Keepers of threshold spaces. Present where land, water, and mortality meet.
The shoreline itself felt like a liminal zone that morning. Caught between ocean and land. A place of arrival and departure. Of what washes in and what is taken back out.
Seeing them there, grounded and unhurried, I felt reminded that presence can exist without performance. Some forms of being are observational. Attentive. Essential without needing to be visible in celebratory ways.
I stayed where I was.
I let the distance remain. A respectful space between species, between roles. I watched. They watched. And the water continued its steady conversation with the shore.
Less symbolism. More coexistence.
Photo Credit Amy Tucker, January 2026
One of the most consistent findings in psychological research is that the quality of time spent alone depends less on personality and more on motivation. Research grounded in Self-Determination Theory demonstrates that solitude supports well-being when it is chosen and values-aligned, and undermines well-being when it is imposed or avoidant (Ryan & Deci, 2017; Nguyen et al., 2018). A 21-day diary study of 178 adults found that the detrimental effects of solitude on loneliness and life satisfaction were nullified or reduced when daily solitude was autonomous, that is, chosen rather than imposed (Weinstein et al., 2023b).
This insight reshaped my own assumptions. I had long believed that comfort with being alone was a matter of introversion. The research suggests otherwise. Three experimental studies by Nguyen et al. (2018) found that autonomous motivation for solitude predicted positive outcomes regardless of participants’ introversion levels. When people choose solitude for reasons such as restoration, reflection, or creativity, they tend to experience greater emotional regulation and clarity. When solitude is driven by fear, exclusion, or obligation, it often intensifies distress.
Alonetude emerges under conditions of autonomy. It arrives through allowance rather than force; one chooses to remain present with oneself rather than immediately seeking distraction or validation.
The Body’s Role in Being Alone Well
Another central insight from my research is that alonetude is, first and foremost, a physiological achievement. How the nervous system responds to safety and threat offers a helpful lens here. According to this framework, the autonomic nervous system continuously scans for cues of safety or threat through a process called the body’s instinct to scan for safety, the detection that occurs below conscious awareness and shapes emotional and relational capacity (Porges, 2011). When the body perceives a threat, the sympathetic nervous system mobilizes the fight-or-flight response, and being alone can feel agitating or unbearable.
When the body experiences safety through activation of the genuine safety pathway, quiet becomes accessible. This distinction explains why simply telling oneself that solitude is “good” rarely works. Felt safety cannot be reasoned into existence. It is established through rhythm, gentleness, predictability, and sensory cues that the body recognizes as regulating. Only when the nervous system settles does reflective capacity return.
In this sense, alonetude is a body-felt practice. It develops through repeated experiences of staying present long enough for the body to register safety, rather than through insight alone.
Alonetude and Relational Capacity
A common concern is that time alone weakens social bonds. My findings suggest the opposite. When individuals cultivate a stable, companionable relationship with themselves, they often return to others with greater attentiveness and emotional availability.
This aligns with research suggesting that positive solitude correlates with enhanced intimacy rather than diminished connection (Long & Averill, 2003). In their foundational exploration of solitude’s benefits, Long and Averill identified intimacy as one of four key benefits, alongside freedom, creativity, and spirituality, and noted that time alone can deepen rather than diminish our capacity for closeness. The relational ethicists Carol Gilligan (1982) and Nel Noddings (1984) similarly argue that secure self-connection supports healthier interpersonal engagement. Alonetude strengthens what I describe as relational capacity: the ability to engage with others without losing oneself, over-functioning, or seeking constant reassurance.
From this perspective, alonetude prepares the ground for connection rather than competing with it.
Loneliness as Visitor, as Teacher
Alonetude holds loneliness alongside itself. Even within chosen solitude, moments of missing others still arise. The difference lies in how these moments are met.
When loneliness is approached with presence rather than avoidance, it often reveals itself as evidence of attachment and care rather than deficiency. It signals what matters. Research on emotion regulation supports this approach, suggesting that allowing emotional states to be experienced without immediate suppression supports long-term well-being (Gross, 2015). Attempts to suppress or avoid emotions are counterproductive, whereas acceptance and reappraisal facilitate adaptive processing.
In this sense, loneliness is part of the terrain one learns to walk with steadiness.
Alonetude as a Gentle Discipline
Developing alonetude requires what I call the discipline of staying. This is discipline as faithfulness rather than rigidity or endurance, but discipline as devotion. It is the repeated choice to remain present with oneself rather than immediately filling silence or discomfort.
This practice echoes contemplative traditions while remaining accessible in everyday life. Alonetude is cultivated through small, consistent acts of attention: staying with a morning cup of tea, allowing quiet to stretch a little longer, noticing the impulse to distract and choosing to pause instead.
Over time, these practices create an inner refuge that can be carried into the noise of daily life.
Coming Home to Oneself
Alonetude is a relationship developed over time rather than a destination reached once. It allows a person to move through the world without constant self-abandonment, to be with others without depletion, and to return to oneself as a place of steadiness.
As I continue to write and research in this area, I find myself returning to a simple question that now guides much of my work:
What if home is a relationship we learn to inhabit within ourselves?
Title: What We See
Artist Statement
I almost missed it.
Simply because it was underfoot. Embedded into the ground in a way that asked for attention without demanding it. A circular marker, worn slightly by footsteps, weather, and time.
“Hacia el Camino Real. Loreto.”
Toward the Royal Road.
Standing there, I felt the quiet gravity of direction. Orientation rather than movement or departure. A reminder that paths existed long before I arrived and will continue long after I leave.
There is something humbling about markers placed in the earth rather than raised above it. They require you to look down. To lower your gaze. To acknowledge place before progress.
The stone held history without narration. No explanation panels. No instructions. Just an invitation to consider where you are standing and what routes extend outward from that point.
I stood within the circle for a few moments, noticing the textures beneath my feet. The worn edges of the lettering. The way the morning light caught the surface unevenly.
It felt less like a tourist marker and more like a threshold.
A place that holds both arrival and continuation. A reminder that every journey includes pauses of orientation. Moments where the body registers location before choosing direction.
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614568352
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLOS Medicine, 7(7), Article e1000316. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
Long, C. R., & Averill, J. R. (2003). Solitude: An exploration of the benefits of being alone. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33(1), 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5914.00204
Nguyen, T. T., Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2018). Solitude as an approach to learning to settle the nervous system. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(1), 92–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217733073
Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. University of California Press.
Perlman, D., & Peplau, L. A. (1981). Toward a social psychology of loneliness. In S. Duck & R. Gilmour (Eds.), Personal relationships 3: Personal relationships in disorder (pp. 31–56). Academic Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton.
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Press.
Weinstein, N., Hansen, H., & Nguyen, T.-V. (2023a). Definitions of solitude in everyday life. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(8), 1185–1200. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221115941
Weinstein, N., Vuorre, M., Adams, M., & Nguyen, T.-V. (2023b). Balance between solitude and socialising: Everyday solitude time both benefits and harms well-being. Scientific Reports, 13, Article 21160. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-44507-7
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.
ACADEMIC LENS
This conceptual essay performs the work of what Moustakas (1961) calls existential inquiry: beginning with lived experience and working outward toward theoretical articulation. The term alonetude is proposed here as a distinct third category that existing frameworks cannot fully contain. Cacioppo and Patrick (2008) have documented loneliness as a chronic stressor with measurable physiological consequences, while Bowker et al. (2017) have distinguished productive solitude as a restorative state. Yet neither framework captures the particular quality of at-home-ness that alonetude names: a felt sense of completion in one’s own company that is neither deficit nor withdrawal. Tillich’s (1963) distinction between loneliness and solitude provides an important antecedent, but alonetude moves beyond Tillich’s spiritual framing toward an embodied, relational understanding. Buber’s (1970) I-Thou ontology is also relevant: alonetude might be understood as the possibility of genuine I-Thou encounter with oneself, where presence replaces performance and the self becomes available to itself. The image of the threshold in this post, the body neither arriving nor departing, enacts what van Gennep (1960) terms liminality: occupying the productive uncertainty of the in-between.
SPN works in layers. I came to this project already carrying the question, which Nash (2004) calls the pre-search: the internal motivation that precedes and shapes the inquiry. Mine was specific: I needed to know whether the capacity for stillness had survived nineteen years of precarious academic labour, or whether it had been quietly extracted along with everything else. I arrived in Loreto with that question in my body before I could put it into words.
The thirty days that followed were the me-search, in Nash’s terms: the structured excavation of lived experience as field text. I wrote every day. I photographed every day. I read, and I let what I was reading land in my body rather than filing it away as information. The daily journal entries, the photographs, the artist statements, the vignettes that surfaced unbidden: these were the data. The researcher was also the researched.
The re-search moved through those materials in conversation with the scholarship: Porges on the nervous system, hooks on engaged pedagogy, Standing on precarity, Hersey on rest as resistance. Theory arrived as recognition rather than as framework imposed from outside. And the we-search, the translation from personal to collective, is what this piece attempts: to take what happened to one body by the sea and ask what it might mean for anyone who has spent years forgetting how to stop.
Core Principles
The SPN methodology is made real through four principles that Nash (2004) names: vulnerability, perspective, action, and scholarly engagement. Each element informed my cultivation of alonetude.
Perspective transforms personal disclosure into something intelligible for an audience by embedding it in conceptual contexts. I framed my experiences against the “capacity to be alone,” a concept from Donald Winnicott (1958) that suggests aloneness is safe when one feels held by something larger. This interpretive layer ensures the narrative remains grounded in a broader human experience.
Vulnerability functions as a tool for honest knowing, enabling the writer to critically reinterpret moments of personal significance. In Loreto, this meant practicing self-interrogation and confronting the internal noise that surfaced when external distractions subsided. Vulnerability is selective; it serves the thread running through rather than standing as an isolated anecdote.
Action represents the translational moment where insights inform choices and behaviours. Cultivating alonetude required intentional shifts in practice, such as “mornings without performance” and “watching without comment.” These actions were enactments of sense-making that altered my daily routines.
Scholarly engagement ensures that narrative sense-making extends beyond this experience to reach the broader community. I integrated research on learning to settle the nervous system to explain how chosen time alone supports well-being. This embeddedness means that one person’s lived experience can open up questions for everyone.
Title: The Circle of Witness
Artist Statement
This drawing emerges from my inquiry into relationality, witnessing, and the ethics of presence within alonetude. While solitude often carries connotations of separation, my work continues to reveal the opposite. Even in moments of intentional aloneness, I am held within circles of relation.
The figures in this piece are simplified, almost archetypal. Bodies reduced to gesture. Heads bowed or turned inward. Leaves extending from each form as though each figure is both human and ecological, person and landscape simultaneously. I am interested in how identity is always a relational project.
The circle has no leader. No one at the head. Everyone equal, the centre empty and open. That is what I was trying to draw: a space where listening is possible.
In my practice, drawing functions as a form of thinking. Each line is a small act of settling. Something loosens when I draw slowly. Ideas surface that hurrying would foreclose.
What this captures is being surrounded by quiet forms of support that speak beyond language.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Reading the Body as Archive: A different way of holding memory
A central pillar of my methodology involves reading the body as an archive. This concept positions the body as a repository of lived experience, challenging traditional, conventional ways of keeping records that privilege textual documentation (Derrida, 1996).
By treating the body as a site of knowledge, I engaged in a different way of holding memory. This approach recognizes that bodies retain past experiences, particularly traumatic or transformative ones, as implicit body-based memories (van der Kolk, 2014). My methodology utilized several tools to document what the body carries:
body journal: Documenting physiological and sensory shifts during the 30-day retreat.
Visual Witnesses: Using photography to capture the “the gentle pull of the natural world” of the environment, which facilitates the quiet way nature restores us (Kaplan, 1995).
reading journal: Connecting scholarly reading to lived, felt experiences in real-time.
This framework is supported by Porges’s (2022) polyvagal theory, which suggests that a state of felt safety, a state of genuine safety and connection, is required to access these deep body-based archives (Porges, 2022). In the quiet of the Sea of Cortez, the absence of threat triggered the body’s sense of safety, enabling a downregulation of defensive states and an opening to what the body holds.
The Portability of Alonetude
The ultimate goal of this methodology is the capacity to reach others: the capacity for a narrative to evoke recognition across contexts. Alonetude is a portable internal posture that remains available regardless of external circumstances. By employing the SPN and reading the body as an archive, researchers can bridge the gap between inner truth-telling and public knowledge-making. This process reveals that the home we seek is often found within ourselves, preserved in the very tissues of our being.
Title: Hydration, Paused
Artist Statement
This image sits within my visual inquiry into alonetude, embodiment, and the quiet rituals that sustain attention. Spectacle holds no interest for me. Ordinary moments where the body registers care before language has time to intervene.
A glass of mineral water, a slice of lime, condensation gathering along the surface. These are small events. Yet within them lives a form of restoration that is both sensory and relational. The body cools. The hand steadies. Time slows.
In my broader research, I examine how identity, labour, and precarity shape the nervous system’s orientation to rest. Here, relief is tactile. Visible. Measurable through droplets, temperature, and light.
This photograph is an act of noticing. It asks what becomes possible when attention is returned to the micro-gestures of care that make endurance sustainable.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
References
Derrida, J. (1996). Archive fever: A Freudian impression. University of Chicago Press.
Kaplan, S. (1995). The restorative benefits of nature: Toward an integrative framework. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 15(3), 169–182. https://doi.org/10.1016/0272-4944(95)90001-2
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Porges, S. W. (2022). How the nervous system responds to safety and threat: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, Article 871227. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 39, 416–420.
ACADEMIC LENS
This piece functions as the methodological statement of the project, grounding the thirty-day inquiry in Nash’s (2004) Scholarly Personal Narrative as a recognized form of educational research. SPN insists that the researcher’s own story, told with intellectual rigour and self-awareness, constitutes legitimate scholarship rather than mere anecdote. The “third shore” as metaphor draws on Turner’s (1969) liminal space, the territory between departure and arrival where transformation becomes possible. Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) argue that writing is itself a method of inquiry rather than merely a way to represent research, a method of inquiry, and this entire project proceeds on that premise. The concept of alonetude, developed as the research question and the research site simultaneously, positions embodied experience as epistemologically valid, aligning with Moustakas’s (1961) heuristic inquiry, which centres the researcher’s direct, personal engagement with the phenomenon under investigation. The image of “sediment of memory” in this post also gestures toward Bachelard’s (1969) phenomenology of material imagination, where physical substance becomes a vehicle for layered knowing.
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) describes how traumatized people carry a persistent sense of bodily unsafety, with the unresolved past continuing to register as physical tension and discomfort in the present. When I read those words, I recognized myself. The gnawing is familiar. It has lived in my stomach for years. I had simply stopped noticing it because noticing felt like a luxury beyond reach.
For more than nineteen years, I have lived inside the slow violence of precarious academic labour. Slow violence, a term coined by literary scholar Rob Nixon (2011), describes harm that unfolds gradually and often invisibly, accumulating over time rather than arriving as a single dramatic event. Precarious labour is slow violence. It arrives without announcement. It settles. It accumulates. It becomes the water you swim in until you forget you are wet.
The phrase maybe next semester has followed me through contracts, calendars, and classrooms. It has accumulated as a quiet weight in my body, a residue difficult to name. Over time, that uncertainty settled into my jaw, my breath, and my nervous system. This is how survival feels when flexibility is demanded, and care remains absent.
Title: Pretending I Am Okay
Artist Statement
I chose this image because it documents the performance of precarious labour demands. For nineteen years, I showed up. I smiled. I won teaching awards. I served on committees. I said yes when I meant no. I performed wellness because the alternative felt too risky. What would happen if they saw how tired I really was? Would they renew my contract if they knew I was struggling? This photograph is evidence of what sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2012) calls emotional labour, the work of managing one's own emotions to fulfil the requirements of a job. Emotional labour is exhausting precisely because it is invisible. It appears on no workload document. It earns no compensation. But it is real, and it accumulates in the body. This image documents that accumulation.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
What the Body Holds
I have come to think of my body as an archive. An archive, in the traditional sense, is a place where records are kept. It is where we store documents that matter, evidence of what has happened. My body is an archive of what institutions leave unnamed.
The term body-based comes from the Greek soma, meaning “body.” When I speak of what the body holds and remembers, I mean the way my body has recorded and stored my experiences of precarious labour. These records are held in my jaw, which clenches without my awareness. They are held in my shoulders, which rise toward my ears when I hear an email notification. They are held in my breath, which shallows in the presence of institutional authority. They are held in my sleep, which remains shallow and easily disrupted.
Van der Kolk (2014) established that the body keeps the score. What I am learning is that my body has been keeping score for nineteen years. It has recorded every contract renewal that came late. Every semester, I taught an overload to make ends meet. Every meeting where I was treated as disposable. Every time I was reminded, subtly or directly, that I occupied the margins.
These experiences passed through me without resolution, through me. They accumulated. They settled. They became part of how my nervous system operates.
The body becomes an archive of what institutions leave unnamed.
When the Body Forgets What Safety Feels Like
Neuroscientist Stephen Porges (2011) developed a the polyvagal theory to explain how the autonomic nervous system responds to these states. I introduced this theory in my opening post, but I want to return to it here because it helps me understand what has happened to my body.
Porges (2011) explains that the body initiates its threat-response sequences below the level of conscious awareness, meaning a person can be fully convinced they are calm while their nervous system is already mobilizing for danger. This means my body can respond to a threat even when my conscious mind insists that everything is fine. My nervous system has its own intelligence. It reads cues from the environment and responds accordingly, often before I am aware of what is happening.
For years, my nervous system has been stuck in what Porges (2011) calls the body’s alert state. This is the fight-or-flight response. It is useful in genuine emergencies. It mobilizes energy, quickens the heart, and sharpens attention. But it becomes harmful when it is chronic. When the nervous system remains in a state of alert for years, it begins to treat that state as normal. The body forgets what safety feels like.
Porges (2011) points out that social engagement and genuine connection require the prior condition of perceived safety; the nervous system holds its defensive posture until it registers that the environment can be trusted. I have felt unsafe at work for a very long time. My body has been vigilant, scanning, bracing. It has been waiting for the next threat, the next demand, the next reminder that my position was contingent.
This time by the sea is an attempt to shift my nervous system toward what Porges (2011) calls a state of genuine safety and connection. This is the state of safety and connection. It is the state from which healing becomes possible. But I cannot simply decide to feel safe. I must create the conditions that allow my nervous system to perceive safety. That is why I am here, by the sea, in a place where no one needs anything from me.
In Between: The Space That Has No Name Yet
Transition theorist William Bridges (2019) describes a three-phase model of change. The first phase is endings, where something familiar comes to a close. The third phase is new beginnings, where something new emerges. But between these two phases lies what Bridges calls the in-between.
The in-between is disorienting. It is the space where the old identity has ended, but the new self is still in formation. Bridges (2019) describes it as a time of confusion, uncertainty, and even despair. It is also, he argues, a time of profound creativity and possibility, if we can tolerate the discomfort of holding open who we are becoming.
I am in the in-between. The identity I built over nineteen years, the contract faculty member, the award-winning educator, the person who was always available, has ended. That person existed in a relationship to an institution that no longer employs her. Without the institution, who am I?
The honest answer: I hold the question open still. I am sitting in the uncertainty, trying to resist the urge to fill it with busyness, with productivity, with another performance of competence. Bridges (2019) suggests that the in-between requires slowing down and a willingness to be in the in-between without rushing toward resolution.
This is harder than it sounds. My nervous system wants to do something. It wants to scan for threats, make plans, and solve problems. Sitting with uncertainty feels dangerous to a body trained by precarity to always be preparing for the next crisis.
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 Letting Go of Performance
Nineteenth-century psychologist Pierre Janet, as cited in van der Kolk (2014), observed that traumatic stress is fundamentally an inability to inhabit the present fully, a condition that traps the person in past events even when the original threat has long since ended (as cited in van der Kolk, 2014). This resonates deeply. For years, I have been present only for performance. I have been performing presence while my attention remained split, part of me always monitoring for danger, calculating risks, managing impressions.
Performance, in the sociological sense developed by Erving Goffman (1959), refers to the way we present ourselves to others in social situations. Goffman argued that social life is like a stage, where we play roles and manage the impressions we create. This is entirely human. It is simply how social interaction works. But for precarious workers, the stakes of performance are particularly high. We perform competence, enthusiasm, and wellness because our livelihoods depend on it. We cannot afford to let the mask slip.
My goal for this time by the sea is to move from performance to presence. I want to practise being with myself without an audience. I want to discover what it feels like to be free from the tether of my productivity.
This is unfamiliar territory. I have spent so many years being available to others that I have become profoundly unavailable to myself. I have lost the thread of my own wanting, my own needing, my own feeling. These are things I need to relearn.
What My Body Knows Before I Do
Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas (2017) introduced the concept of what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it. This phrase describes knowledge we hold in our bodies and our being, still waiting to be articulated in conscious thought. It is what we know without knowing that we know it.
I carry a great deal of what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it. My body holds knowledge about precarity that I have never fully articulated. It knows things about survival, about adaptation, about the cost of endurance. This knowledge has been waiting for words to catch up.
This is what Scholarly Personal Narrative does for me. It keeps me honest. By sitting with sensation and memory rather than rushing past them, by refusing to leap to conclusions, I make room for what I already know yet left unsaid.
Bollas (2017) suggests that what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it often emerges in moments of stillness, when we stop the busyness that usually keeps it submerged. This is another reason for this time by the sea. I need to be still long enough for what I know to become thinkable.
Alonetude: The Concept Takes Root
The concept of alonetude first took root during the global stillness of the COVID-19 pandemic. While the world outside was fraught with uncertainty, I discovered something unexpected. For the first time in my career, the absence of institutional obligation felt like freedom.
This was confusing. I was isolated, like everyone else. The news was frightening. The future was uncertain. And yet, paradoxically, I felt more at peace than I had in years. The quiet felt more like peace than loneliness. The absence of commuting, of meetings, of the constant performance of institutional belonging, created space for something I had been without for a very long time.
I began to wonder about this. What was the difference between the isolation I was experiencing and the loneliness I had felt at other times in my life? What made this aloneness feel restorative rather than painful?
The answer, I began to realize, had to do with choice. During the pandemic, aloneness was imposed on everyone. But within that imposed condition, I was able to choose how I inhabited my solitude. I could structure my days according to my own rhythms. I could attend to my own needs without constantly deferring to institutional demands. The aloneness was imposed, but the quality of presence within it was chosen.
This is what I am calling alonetude: the active, intentional work of transforming imposed isolation into chosen presence. It is a practice, something that must be cultivated. It requires intention, attention, and care rather than arriving on its own.
Rest as a Human Right
I want to return to the human rights framing I established in my opening post, because it matters deeply to what I am doing here.
Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) affirms the right to rest and leisure. This is a fundamental human right, no suggestion or reward for productivity, as essential to human dignity as the right to food, shelter, and freedom from torture.
And yet. For the past nineteen years, I have been unable to fully exercise this right. I have worked through summers, through illnesses, through grief. I have taught overload semesters to pay my bills. I have never had a sabbatical, paid or otherwise, until now. And even this sabbatical is unpaid. I am funding my own rest because my institution refused to prioritize it.
Nash (2004) notes the etymology of the word scholar, tracing it back to the ancient Greek skholē, a term that meant leisure and play before it ever meant study or scholarship. The original scholars were people with enough leisure to think, to wonder, to follow curiosity without the pressure of immediate utility.
I am choosing to treat the right to rest as lived practice rather than distant declaration. This time by the sea is an exercise of a fundamental human right that has been systematically denied to me by the conditions of my labour.
Title:The Stories Rocks Tell
Artist Statement
I began collecting stones during this journey, and I photograph them because they teach me about time. A stone is patient. It takes its time. It has been shaped by forces acting over thousands or millions of years. When I hold a stone, I am holding time I cannot comprehend.
This practice connects to what environmental psychologists Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan (1989) call the gentle pull of the natural world, the kind of gentle, effortless attention that natural objects invite. the gentle pull of the natural world is restorative. It allows directed attention to recover from the depletion caused by sustained cognitive effort. These stones are small teachers. They remind me that my urgency is one way among many to be in the world. They remind me that slowness is wisdom. They remind me that I, too, am being shaped by forces beyond my control, always becoming.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Moving Research into the Body
Scholarly Personal Narrative, developed by Robert Nash (2004), shifts inquiry from the library into the body. This is a profound methodological move. It says that lived experience is data. It is evidence. It is a legitimate site of knowledge production.
Nash (2004) describes scholarly personal narrative as an unapologetic insistence that the writer’s own life carries genuine scholarly meaning, that experience counts as a legitimate form of knowing alongside abstraction. This admission is both liberating and frightening. It liberates me from the pretence that I am a detached observer of phenomena held at a safe distance. It frightens me because it requires vulnerability. I cannot hide behind the passive voice or the third person. I must say I. I must own what I know and how I know it.
Nash (2004) describes the elements of effective scholarly personal narrative:
The Personal: I use my own transition, my own exhaustion, my own body as the primary site of inquiry.
The Scholarly: I anchor my experiences in established theories of transition, neurobiology, trauma, and human rights.
The Universal: My story of burnout serves as a mirror for a broader systemic crisis in academic labour.
Nash (2004) urges writers to preserve the distinctive, hard-won quality of their own voice in favour of academic convention; the particularity of that voice, he insists, is itself the most valuable thing a scholarly personal narrative can offer. I am trying to trust my voice. I am trying to believe that what I have lived is worth telling, that my experience contributes to understanding, that my story might offer something to others who recognize themselves in it.
Daily Practices by the Sea
Title: Learning the Rhythm
Artist Statement
I stood at the shoreline watching the waves come in, one after the other, without urgency. There was no need to measure time here. The water moved as it always has, steady and unconcerned with outcome.
I found myself staying longer than planned. Beyond thinking. Just watching the repetition, the way each wave arrived fully and then released itself back into the whole.
This moment became a quiet lesson in pacing. Nothing forced. Nothing held. Motion without pressure.
I am learning that restoration has its own rhythm. It cannot be rushed. It can only be entered.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, February 2026
Van der Kolk (2014) emphasizes that neuroscience consistently points toward body-based awareness, the capacity to sense what is happening inside the body, as the necessary entry point for emotional change. Healing requires inner body awareness, the capacity to sense and interpret signals from inside the body.
My plan for the days ahead remains intentionally simple:
Writing in the morning light. Words come differently when the day is new and quiet.
Swimming in salt water. The sea holds me, and for once, I release the work of holding myself.
Walking without a destination. Movement without purpose. Presence without productivity.
Painting without expectation. Colour and water on paper. No outcome required.
Sitting long enough to feel sensation return. This is perhaps the hardest practice of all.
These are ordinary activities that create conditions, beyond any elaborate intervention, for awareness. They are the practical application of what I am calling the discipline of arrival, which is the practice of landing fully in a moment without any next thing pressing against the edge of the current thing.
Porges (2011) emphasizes that the body’s ability to find calm is biological and experiential, shaping how individuals engage with the world, relationships, and perceived risk. If I want to experience the world differently, I must shift my physiological state. This cannot be accomplished through willpower alone. It requires environmental conditions that communicate safety to my nervous system. It requires time. It requires patience with a body that has forgotten what rest feels like.
Title: White Ford Bronco
Artist Statement
I passed this white Ford Bronco while walking, sun already high, palm shadows stretching across the road. It was parked without urgency, dust settled into its surface, gear strapped to the roof as if ready but in no rush to move.
I stopped because it felt familiar. The stance drew me rather than the vehicle itself. Prepared, yet resting. Capable of motion, yet still.
This moment reflected something I am learning to practise. Readiness can hold stillness. One can be equipped for the road while allowing pause.
I am beginning to understand that rest is part of the journey rather than its opposite.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, February 2026
Stepping onto the Third Shore
I think of this month as a movement toward what I am calling the Third Shore. If one shore is loneliness (the pain of unwanted isolation) and another shore is solitude (the peace of chosen aloneness), then the third shore is alonetude: the space where imposed isolation is transformed through attention and care into something generative.
The third shore is a threshold. It is a liminal space. It is a quality of presence to be practised: a quality, never a destination.
I arrive by the sea to listen. To write. To breathe. To remember what a body feels like when it receives permission to rest.
Van der Kolk (2014) argues that the capacity to act in one’s own interest, genuine agency, depends on inner body awareness, the ability to sense and interpret the body’s internal signals. Inner body awareness, as I explained earlier, is the capacity to sense the body’s internal state.
I am here to recover my inner body awareness. I am here to relearn the signals my body has been sending that I have spent years ignoring. I am here to discover what I need, what I want, and who I am beyond performance for an institution that no longer employs me.
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
An Invitation to Continue
Title: Holding the Same
Artist Statement
Two pelicans moved slowly across the marina, bodies low, unhurried, carried more than directed by the tide. Boats rested behind them, tethered, waiting for other hands, other departures.
I lingered here longer than expected. What held my attention was their rhythm rather than the birds themselves. Separate, yet aligned. Moving through the same water without the need to converge.
This moment offered a gentle teaching. Solitude allows proximity without requiring isolation. It allows proximity without pressure. Presence without performance.
There is room to share space while still remaining wholly one’s own.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, February 2026
This is the second entry in a thirty-day inquiry. I hold what comes next as still open. I know only that I am here, that my body is beginning to register the absence of institutional demand, and that something is shifting in ways I cannot yet name.
If you are reading this and you recognize yourself in these words, I want you to know: you are held in a community of exhaustion. It is structural. It is systemic, lodged in conditions beyond your personal failing.
And if you are lucky enough to have security, to have rest, to have a body that rests rather than constantly bracing for the next threat, I hope this offers a window into what precarious labour actually feels like from the inside. I hope it helps you understand why your contingent colleagues seem tired, why they hesitate to say no, and why they perform well even when they are struggling.
The sea is calling. I am going to answer.
Estoy llegando. Estoy aprendiendo a descansar.
I am arriving. I am learning to rest.
Note. Spanish-language passages were generated using Google Translate (Google, n.d.) and subsequently reviewed and refined by the author. Any remaining infelicities reflect the limits of machine translation rather than intent.
References
Bollas, C. (2017). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the what we hold in our bodies before we have words for it. Routledge.
Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes (40th anniversary ed.). Balance.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.
Google. (n.d.). Google Translate. https://translate.google.com
Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.
Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. Cambridge University Press.
Nash, R. J. (2004). Liberating scholarly writing: The power of personal narrative. Teachers College Press.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and finding our own calm. W. W. Norton & Company.
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Publishing.
Ulrich, R. S. (1983). Aesthetic and affective response to natural environment. In I. Altman & J. F. Wohlwill (Eds.), Human behaviour and environment: Advances in theory and research (Vol. 6, pp. 85–125). Plenum Press.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
ACADEMIC LENS
This post enacts what Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) describe as writing as inquiry: the personal narrative constitutes the research itself rather than merely illustrating it. The somatic methodology here draws directly on van der Kolk’s (2014) clinical finding that traumatic experience is encoded in the nervous system rather than declarative memory, which is why the body’s vigilance persists long after the threat has passed. The concept of alonetude developed in this reflection names a state that existing scholarship leaves only partially captured: neither Moustakas’s (1961) existential loneliness nor Tillich’s (1963) contemplative solitude, but a third orientation characterized by presence without performance. Hochschild’s (2012) framework of emotional labour helps name the invisible cost of precarious institutional life, while Nixon’s (2011) concept of slow violence illuminates how institutional harm accumulates gradually, without announcement, leaving the body as its primary archive. The research methodology is autoethnographic in the tradition of Ellis and Bochner (2000), using the first-person body as both site and source of knowledge.
I have learned that precarious labour exhausts the mind while also settling into the body as a long, slow violation of the human right to rest.
Keywords: alonetude, scholarly personal narrative, precarious labour, embodiment, human right to rest, body-based inquiry, Sea of Cortez, Loreto, Mexico, arts-based research, thirty days
Arriving
The letter arrived by email. After nineteen years, that is how it ended. Just a number on a spreadsheet.
I am writing this from Loreto, México, a small town on the western shore of the Sea of Cortez. I arrived here with one orange suitcase, a camera, a notebook, and no promise of output. For the next thirty days, I will live alone in a casita surrounded by date palms and cactus. I am conducting a research inquiry that begins where I believe all honest inquiry must begin: in the body.
This is my body. It is tired. It is sixty years old. It has carried nineteen years of semester-to-semester contracts, ten courses (plus) per year, graduate studies completed while teaching full-time, and the persistent institutional fiction that maybe next semester would finally bring security. The promise remained unfulfilled.
The semester ended on April 30, 2025. The letter arrived by email. After nineteen years, that is how it ended. Just a number on a spreadsheet.
I am here because I need to understand what happened to me. I am also here because I believe what happened to me is happening to thousands of other contract faculty across Canada and beyond. My exhaustion is personal, yes. But it is also structural. It is political. It is, I have come to believe, a human rights concern.
Before I left, I photographed the moment of gathering. This was the beginning.
I am conducting a research inquiry that begins where I believe all honest inquiry must begin: in the body.
Title: Travel Awaits
Artist Statement
This photograph shows packing as an impressionistic still life, where colour, texture, and accumulation gesture toward a life in motion. The bright orange of the suitcase and backpack punctuates a field of muted fabrics and paper, suggesting urgency held within containment. Books, journals, and folded garments spill outward, creating a layered composition that blurs the boundaries between intellect and embodiment, thought and movement.
The scene is intentionally unresolved, echoing the unfinished quality of departure and the emotional ambiguity of leaving. Packing here is less about order than about gesture: a gathering of fragments, identities, and intentions into a provisional form. The image holds a quiet tension between weight and lightness, burden and possibility, capturing the liminal moment before travel when objects become proxies for memory, desire, and the hope of becoming otherwise.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
This project is part of my Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. It is also something more than an academic requirement. It is an attempt to take my body back from systems that treated my endurance as an inexhaustible resource and my personhood as contingent on productivity.
…an attempt to take my body back from systems that treated my endurance as an inexhaustible resource
What I will find here remains open. That uncertainty is part of the methodology. I am here to pay attention, to document what emerges, and to trust that care, silence, and presence are forms of knowledge. I am hoping to heal and find my peace.
That uncertainty is part of the methodology.
What Is This Project?
I am exploring something I call alonetude. This word refers to a state that lies between being alone, experiencing loneliness, and cultivating solitude. Let me explain what I mean by each of these terms, because the distinctions matter. It is a term I thought about during the COVID-19 era.
Loneliness is the pain of unwanted isolation. It is the ache of unwanted aloneness, the sense that connection is missing, and the hurt that absence causes. For theologian Paul Tillich (1963), loneliness names the ache of unwanted isolation, the suffering that accompanies being separated from others against our will. Loneliness arrives without our consent.
Solitude, by contrast, is chosen aloneness. Tillich (1963) also distinguishes solitude as the affirmative counterpart, the dignity and richness that aloneness can hold when it is chosen rather than imposed. Solitude is what we experience when we step away from the world willingly, when we seek quiet and find peace in it. Solitude is restorative. It is a gift we give ourselves.
But what about the space between? What do we call it when isolation is imposed by circumstance, by structural conditions, by the exhaustion that follows years of precarious labour, and yet we choose to make something meaningful from that aloneness? This is what I am calling alonetude: the active, intentional work of transforming imposed isolation into chosen presence.
Let me unpack those terms. intentional means having agency, which is the capacity to act and make choices even within constraints. Labour here means effort, work, the energy required to create meaning. Alonetude requires practice, learning, and cultivation. This blog documents that practice.
Title: What I Choose to Carry
Artist Statement
I stood over an open case on the floor before closing it. Efficiency and fit were the furthest things from my mind. I was thinking about what belonged.
Each item had a reason for being there. Clothes wrapped around notebooks, pens, and small tools for making and noticing. The traveller’s notebook stayed near the top where I could reach it easily. Writing was never meant to sit at the bottom of the bag. A hat rested beside it, practical and grounding, a reminder that sun, heat, and care for myself were part of this journey too.
Nothing here was packed out of aspiration. I was preparing to stay close to who I already am. I was preparing to stay close to myself.
This moment marked a shift in how I understood preparation. Packing was no longer about productivity or planning outcomes. It became an act of discernment. I chose what would support attention, rest, and reflection, and left behind what carried urgency or performance.
Intentional solitude begins long before arrival. It begins in these quiet decisions, made without audience or expectation. What I carried was about return. It was about protection, about creating the conditions where I could finally slow down and listen.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Why This Matters: The Human Right to Rest
I want to be clear about something from the beginning: I am framing this project as a human rights inquiry. This is deliberate. This is political.
Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) states: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.” Article 25 establishes the right to health. The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (United Nations, 1966) elaborates these protections, recognizing in Article 7 the right to “rest, leisure and reasonable limitation of working hours.”
These are rights. They are supposed to belong to everyone.
But here is what I have learned from nineteen years of contract academic work: these rights are systematically denied to precarious workers. I have never had a paid sabbatical. I have never had job security. I have worked through illness, through grief, through exhaustion, because stopping meant losing income, losing courses, losing the fragile toehold I had in an institution that never quite made room for me.
The body remembers what institutions deny, carrying years of survival in breath, muscle, and nervous system.
When I say that precarious labour settles into the body as a long, slow violation of the human right, I mean this literally. My body carries the evidence. The jaw that clenches. The shoulders that rise toward my ears when I open an institutional email. The breath that shallows in the presence of authority. The startle response, which is activated by unexpected sounds.
These are symptoms of chronic stress. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014), in his book The Body Keeps the Score, established that traumatic experiences are stored in the body itself. Trauma, in this context, refers to experiences that overwhelm our capacity to cope, leaving lasting imprints on our nervous systems. Trauma survivors carry their histories in patterns of muscular tension, in the ways their nervous systems respond to perceived threat, in physical sensations that persist long after the original events have passed. van der Kolk (2014) argues that the body keeps the score; it remembers what the conscious mind may have forgotten or suppressed.
I believe precarious labour is a form of chronic trauma. I believe my body has been keeping score for nineteen years. This project is my attempt to read that score, to understand what it says, and to begin the slow work of recovery. Situating this narrative within critical scholarship on institutional violence and trauma, I approach precarity as both a structural condition and an embodied experience. Research on trauma-informed theory suggests that prolonged exposure to insecurity, hyper-surveillance, and power asymmetries can produce cumulative psychological and physiological effects that become embedded in the body (Herman, 1992; van der Kolk, 2014).
Within higher education, neoliberal governance structures (institutional arrangements that prioritize market efficiency and cost reduction over human welfare and labour security) and contingent employment regimes can operate as forms of institutional violence, shaping subjectivity, health, and identity through chronic uncertainty and disposability (Ahmed, 2012; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). By reading my embodied experiences as data, this study frames recovery as both a personal and political act, connecting bodily memory to broader systems of structural harm and ethical responsibility.
The Methods I Am Using
This project integrates three research methodologies. I want to explain each one clearly, because understanding the methods will help you understand what you are reading in this blog.
Scholarly Personal Narrative
Scholarly Personal Narrative is a methodology developed by education scholar Robert Nash (2004). Nash argued that lived experience is legitimate scholarly data. He believed that when we examine our own lives with rigour, honesty, and theoretical grounding, we generate knowledge that matters.
This differs from traditional academic research, which often asks researchers to stand outside the phenomenon under study, observe from a distance, and remain objective. Scholarly Personal Narrative says: your life is the text. Your experience is the data. Your body, your memories, your struggles, and your questions are valid sources of knowledge.
Nash (2004) identified four elements that make scholarly personal narrative effective. I think of these as the VPAS framework:
Table 1
The VPAS Framework for Scholarly Personal Narrative
Element
What It Means
Vulnerability
The writer takes genuine personal risks by sharing experiences that are difficult, uncertain, or unresolved. The writer refuses to perform mastery or pretend to have all the answers.
Broader Significance
The personal story is connected to larger patterns. Individual experience is situated within theoretical frameworks that help readers understand how one person’s story connects to collective realities.
Action
The narrative shows movement or change. Something shifts. Something is learned. Something remains unresolved but is honestly acknowledged. The writer reflects critically and then acts on what has been learned.
Scholarly Engagement
The personal story is woven together with relevant research, theory, and critical analysis. Lived experience and academic discourse become conversation partners.
Note. Adapted from Liberating Scholarly Writing: The Power of Personal Narrative (pp. 25–35), by R. J. Nash, 2004, Teachers College Press.
I write from a place of vulnerability. I share what is hard. I bring in the theory because it helps me name what my body already knows. I sit inside the research rather than above it. And I attend carefully to what shifts.
Title: Notes for Moving Slowly
Artist Statement
I wrote these notes on the plane, somewhere between departure and arrival, when the journey had already begun and I had yet to land. The handwriting is uneven. The list is unfinished. I was orienting myself rather than writing goals. Reminding myself of why I was going and what I hoped to hold onto when I got there.
The notes move between history, place, and practice. El Camino Real. The Royal Road. Loreto named as lineage rather than destination, shaped by movement, translation, and layered meaning. Walking appears here as meditation rather than exercise. The Malecón beside the Sea of Cortez becomes a site of attention rather than achievement. Watching the sunrise and sunset is written as practice rather than pastime.
This page documents intention-setting as an embodied, ethical act. I was planning permission rather than productivity. Each line gestures toward slowing down enough to notice tides, temperature, light, and sound. The repetition of watching, finding, riding, dipping signals a desire to follow rather than control. Nothing here is extractive. Nothing demands outcome.
This image matters because it captures the moment when the inquiry was still forming, before theory, before articulation, before interpretation. It shows learning in its earliest state, when it exists as attention rather than argument. The notebook holds the trace of a commitment made quietly: to move through this time with care, to let place lead, and to trust that presence itself would be sufficient.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Photovoice
Photovoice is a participatory visual research methodology developed by Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris (1997). The method positions participants as expert witnesses of their own lives. It recognizes that photographs can document realities that words alone cannot capture.
Wang and Burris (1997) designed Photovoice for community-based health research. The idea was simple but powerful: give cameras to people affected by an issue, ask them to photograph their experiences, and use those photographs as a basis for critical reflection and dialogue.
In this project, I adapt Photovoice for solo inquiry. I am both a researcher and a participant. I use photography to document my experience of alonetude, recovery, and embodied knowing. Each image in this blog is accompanied by an artist statement, a critical reflection that explains what I noticed when I took the photograph, what I felt, and how the image connects to the theoretical frameworks guiding this inquiry.
The photographs are primary data. This means they are evidence, just as interview transcripts or survey responses would be in other research methodologies. For example, a photograph of running shoes on volcanic sand is data about what the body carries. A photograph of the sea at dusk is data about the environment that holds this inquiry.
Title: Passing Through the Arc of Loretto
Artist Statement
I took this photograph while walking beneath the stone arch that marks entry into Loreto’s historic centre. I paused long enough to notice the geometry of the structure, how it frames the street beyond without dictating what happens next. The arch witnesses movement rather than stopping it.
What drew me was the sensation of crossing rather than the architecture itself. Behind me was arrival, logistics, orientation. Ahead of me was daily life unfolding at an unhurried pace. Palm shadows stretched across the ground, light pooled unevenly, and the street opened rather than narrowed. There was no instruction here, only passage.
This image documents a transition from arrival into inhabitation. Thresholds matter. They mark change without spectacle. This arch simply allows transformation rather than announcing it. Passing beneath it, I was neither tourist nor resident, neither working nor resting, neither finished nor beginning. I was in between.
This photograph matters because it captures the moment when attention shifts outward again, after the inward work of preparation. It shows that entry is a process rather than a single event. One crosses in stages. One crosses, pauses, looks up, and continues.
The arch frames a choice rather than a destination. It holds space for movement without urgency, for presence without demand. In this way, it mirrors the practice of alonetude itself: a way of moving through the world that honours thresholds, resists acceleration, and allows meaning to emerge at walking speed.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Arts-Based Research
Arts-based research, often abbreviated as ABR, is a methodology that positions creative practice as a legitimate way of generating knowledge. Scholar Patricia Leavy (2022, 2015) has been instrumental in establishing this field. Leavy argues that human experience has dimensions that traditional research methods cannot access: the aesthetic, the emotional, the sensory, the embodied. Art can reach these dimensions.
Throughout this project, I work with multiple creative forms: photography, watercolour painting, found object collection, and drawing. These are ways of knowing. A painted stone holds memory differently than a written paragraph. A poem says what prose cannot. Art is inquiry.
Leavy (2022) identifies several things that arts-based research does particularly well:
It explores emotional and embodied dimensions of experience
It makes visible what has been hidden or overlooked
It creates work that can reach diverse audiences
It challenges dominant assumptions about what counts as knowledge
It fosters empathy and understanding
I chose arts-based methods for this project because my inquiry is fundamentally embodied. I am studying what my body carries, how it responds to rest, and what happens when exhaustion is finally given permission to surface. Words alone cannot capture this. I need images, colours, textures, the weight of a stone in my palm.
Title: What the Water Holds
Artist Statement
I made this piece slowly, allowing the material to move before I decided what it was becoming. The surface carries bands of colour that echo the geography I have been walking through: sea, shore, land, and return. Turquoise presses against yellow. Brown settles unevenly in the centre, neither fixed nor fully dissolved. Nothing here is cleanly separated. Each layer bleeds into the next.
What mattered was responsiveness rather than control. I followed the way the medium resisted and yielded, noticing where it thickened, where it thinned, where it pooled. The raised textures record time spent waiting rather than correcting. This was an attempt to stay with sensation rather than capture a landscape. It was an attempt to stay with sensation long enough for something to surface.
This work documents learning through making. The colours correspond to place, but the process corresponds to attention. I was working without urgency, without a desired outcome, letting the piece find its own balance. The central form emerged gradually, shaped by gravity and flow rather than intention. It resembles land only because land was present in my thinking. The resemblance arrived without plan.
This piece matters because it holds a record of slowing down enough to trust process. It shows how meaning can arise when effort is reduced and listening is extended. The material carries traces of patience, of allowing, of staying present through uncertainty. In this way, the work mirrors the practice of alonetude itself: remaining with what is unfolding rather than forcing resolution.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The Paradigm I Work From
Before I go further, I want to explain the worldview that shapes this entire project. In research, we call this a paradigm. A paradigm is the lens through which a researcher sees and understands the world. It includes our beliefs about what is real, what counts as knowledge, and how we can come to know things. Every researcher works from a paradigm, consciously or otherwise (Guba, 1990). I want to name mine.
I work from what scholars call a critical transformative paradigm. Let me explain what this means, because the words matter.
My Ontology: Reality Is Constructed and Multiple
My exhaustion is personal, yes. But it is also structural. It is political.
I believe that reality, particularly social reality, is constructed through human experience, language, and relationships. This holds that reality is constructed and still real. The sea outside my window is real. My exhaustion is real. The letter I received in May 2025, telling me there was no contract for the fall and winter, was real. But the meaning of these things is constructed. It is made through interpretation, through the stories we tell, through the frameworks we use to understand our experiences.
This view is called constructivism or social constructionism. Sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (2016) argued in their influential book The Social Construction of Reality that human beings create the social world through their interactions, and then experience that created world as if it were an objective, external reality. We forget that we made it. We treat institutions, categories, and social arrangements as natural and inevitable when they are, in fact, human creations that could be otherwise.
I also believe that reality is multiple. People situated in different social locations experience different realities. My reality as a sixty-year-old white woman who has spent nineteen years in precarious academic labour is different from the reality of my tenured colleagues. It is different from the reality of the international students I have taught. It is different from the reality of the administrators who decided to terminate my contract. These are, in important ways, different realities altogether. They are, in important ways, different realities shaped by different positions within power structures.
Feminist philosopher Donna Haraway (1988) called this situated knowledge. All knowledge, Haraway argued, comes from somewhere. It is produced by specific bodies in specific locations with specific histories. All knowledge comes from somewhere. It is produced by specific bodies in specific locations with specific histories. Every claim is situated. Recognizing this makes knowledge more honest.
How I Come to Know: Knowledge Is Embodied, Relational, and Political
I believe that knowledge lives beyond what can be measured, counted, or observed from a distance. Knowledge also lives in the body. It emerges through relationships. It is shaped by power.
what the body knows is knowledge that we hold in our bodies, often without conscious awareness. It is the knowledge my shoulders carry when they rise toward my ears at the sound of an institutional email notification. It is the knowledge my breath holds when it shallows in the presence of authority. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) argued that we know the world first through our bodies, through perception, movement, and sensation. The body is a site of knowing as much as any vehicle for the mind.
This project takes what the body knows seriously. When I attend to what my body carries, I am practicing a form of inquiry that recognizes the body as a legitimate source of evidence.
Relational knowledge is knowledge that emerges through connection with others, with place, with more-than-human beings. Indigenous scholars have long emphasized that knowledge is relational rather than individual (Wilson, 2008). We know through relationships rather than in isolation. In this project, the sea, the stones, the date palms, and the light are participants in the inquiry. They teach me things I would never learn on my own.
Political knowledge recognizes that knowledge production is never neutral. What counts as knowledge, who gets to produce it, whose knowledge is valued and whose is dismissed: these are questions of power. Philosopher Michel Foucault (1980) demonstrated that knowledge and power are deeply intertwined. Those with power shape what counts as truth. Those without power often find their knowledge marginalized, dismissed, or erased.
I approach this project knowing that my embodied experience of precarious labour went uncounted as knowledge within the institution that employed me. My exhaustion was treated as a personal problem rather than as evidence of structural violence. This project insists that my experience is evidence. It is data. It matters.
Title: Measures
Artist Statement
I took this photograph without arranging anything. My hand rested on the counter beside a fork, both placed as they were in the ordinary flow of a day. What caught my attention was proportion. The familiar scale of the utensil, something designed to be neutral and standardized, sat beside a hand that carries time, labour, and history.
The surface of the skin is marked by use. Lines deepen where grip has been repeated, where work has been done without pause. This image is about accumulation rather than decline. It is an image about accumulation. The hand holds evidence of years spent teaching, writing, preparing, carrying, and adapting. It holds memory without narrative, experience without explanation.
This photograph documents how comparison quietly enters daily life. The fork offers an external measure. The hand resists it. Standardization fails here. There is no neutral scale for what has been carried or endured. The image interrupts the assumption that labour leaves only abstract traces. That belief is false. It leaves marks.
This photograph matters because it refuses abstraction. It insists on proximity. It brings the inquiry back to the material reality of lived experience, where systems register in policies and contracts and also in flesh, texture, and scale. What appears ordinary becomes evidentiary. What is usually overlooked becomes legible.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Who I Am in This Story
I write this as a white, settler, cisgender woman of middle age, shaped by nineteen years of precarious contract work in post-secondary education on Secwépemc Territory in what is now called British Columbia, Canada. I am a student in the Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice programme at Thompson Rivers University. I carry the specific exhaustion of someone whose labour has been consistently undervalued within institutional structures that depend on that labour to function, and I carry the specific privilege of someone who was able to choose, even briefly, to stop. My inquiry into alonetude is simultaneously a scholarly undertaking and an embodied necessity. I cannot separate my research questions from my lived conditions, and I make no effort to. In the tradition of Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), my subjectivity is data. My body is a site of knowledge. My experience of precarity, rest, and recovery is the very ground this inquiry stands on.
My Methodology: Critical, Creative, and Transformative
A critical approach to research begins from the recognition that society is structured by unequal power relations. Critical researchers acknowledge rather than pretend to be neutral observers. They take sides. They align themselves with those who have been marginalized, exploited, or harmed by existing arrangements. Critical research aims to understand the world and to change it.
Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1970), in his foundational work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, argued that research and education should be acts of liberation. Freire rejected what he called the “banking model” of education, where knowledge is deposited into passive recipients by authoritative experts. Instead, he advocated for reflective action: the integration of critical reflection and transformative action. We reflect on the conditions of our lives, and then we act to change them.
This project is an act of reflective action. I am reflecting critically on the conditions that produced my burnout. I am documenting those conditions as evidence. And I am acting, in the modest way available to me, by refusing to be silent about what was done to me and to thousands of other contract faculty.
A creative approach to research recognizes that artistic practice generates knowledge that other methods cannot access. Arts-based researchers such as Patricia Leavy (2015) have demonstrated that creative expression, including photography, painting, poetry, and narrative writing, can illuminate dimensions of human experience that statistical analysis and propositional argumentation miss. Creativity is a way of knowing, beyond mere decoration added to research.
A transformative approach to research is explicitly oriented toward social change. Transformative researchers work in solidarity with communities affected by injustice. They aim to produce knowledge that serves liberation rather than domination. Donna Mertens (2008) developed the transformative paradigm as a research framework that centres the experiences of marginalized groups and challenges oppressive structures.
I situate my work within this transformative tradition. I conduct this research from inside precarious academic labour, without the safety of distance. I am a precarious academic worker conducting research from within my own experience. I am living burnout rather than studying it as an abstract phenomenon, documenting it, and refusing to let it be individualized as my personal failure.
Title: Between Here and There
Artist Statement
Somewhere between departure and arrival, I found myself watching the land recede beneath me. Mountains folded into water. Shorelines curved without urgency. From this height, the structures that had organized my pace disappeared.
Flight created a suspended space where expectation loosened. I was no longer inside the systems that had shaped my days. The rhythm I was seeking lay still ahead. I was simply in transit.
Distance rearranged the weight of experience without erasing it. Perspective widened. Breath slowed. The moment held release without resolution, movement without demand.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Why Paradigm Matters
I have taken the time to explain my paradigm so you understand what you are reading on this blog. This is a situated, embodied, and political inquiry conducted by someone who has skin in the game.
Some readers may find this uncomfortable. Traditional academic norms suggest that good research is neutral, dispassionate, and objective. I reject this suggestion. I believe that the pretence of neutrality often serves to protect existing power arrangements. When researchers claim to be objective, they are often simply hiding their assumptions, making it harder for readers to evaluate their claims.
I stand in plain sight. I am telling you exactly where I stand. I stand with precarious workers. I stand with those whose labour has been extracted and whose personhood has been dismissed. I stand with those who carry structural violence in their bodies and have been told that their exhaustion is their own fault.
This is the paradigm I work from. It shapes every word I write in this blog.
I conduct this research from inside precarious academic labour, without the safety of distance. I am a precarious academic worker conducting research from within my own experience.
The Theories That Guide Me
Several theoretical frameworks inform this project. I want to introduce them briefly here, because you will encounter them throughout the blog.
The Body Keeps the Score
I have already mentioned Bessel van der Kolk’s (2014) work. His central insight is that trauma is stored in the body. When we experience overwhelming stress, our bodies record it in ways that persist long after the event has ended. Survivors of trauma often carry their histories in chronic pain, in patterns of tension, in nervous system responses that remain activated even in the absence of present danger.
This framework helps me understand my own exhaustion. Seventeen years of precarity have left marks on my body. My jaw. My shoulders. My breath. These are records of what I have endured. This project attends to those records.
Title: What Remains
Artist Statement
I came across these bones laid out in the open, bleached by light and time. There was no enclosure, no ceremony, only quiet exposure. They rested between palm trees and dust, held in place and visible.
I stood there longer than expected. The scale of them, the stillness, the fact of what endures after life has moved on. Nothing about the scene asked for interpretation. It asked only for witnessing.
This moment brought me back to material truth. What is carried. What is worn down. What remains when motion stops. The sun does its work slowly. So does recovery.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, February 2026
How the Nervous System Reads Safety and Threat
Neuroscientist Stephen Porges (2011) developed the polyvagal theory to explain how the autonomic nervous system responds to safety and threat. The autonomic nervous system is the part of our nervous system that operates without conscious control. It regulates heartbeat, breathing, digestion, and our responses to danger.
Porges (2011) emphasizes that felt safety matters more than objective safety. Our nervous system responds to what it perceives, which may differ from what is actually present. A person can be objectively safe but remain physiologically activated if their nervous system continues to detect threat cues.
This insight is crucial for understanding recovery. Healing requires creating conditions where the nervous system can perceive safety. The environment matters. The pace matters. The absence of surveillance matters. So does the absence of demand. This blog documents my attempt to create those conditions.
Precarity and Academic Capitalism
Sociologist Guy Standing (2011) coined the term precariat to describe a growing class of workers characterized by chronic insecurity. Precarious workers lack stable employment, predictable income, and the protections that previous generations took for granted. They live in a state of permanent uncertainty.
Within universities, scholars Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades (2004) documented the rise of what they call academic capitalism. Universities have increasingly adopted market logic, treating knowledge as a product to be sold and faculty as contingent labour to be hired and discarded according to fluctuations in enrolment.
Contract faculty now teach the majority of undergraduate courses in Canadian universities. We carry the teaching load while being denied the security, benefits, and recognition afforded to permanent faculty. We subsidize institutional flexibility with our own instability.
Philosopher Isabell Lorey (2015) argues that this precarity is deliberate. It is a mode of governance. Keeping workers insecure keeps them compliant, grateful, and willing to accept conditions they might otherwise refuse. Precarity disciplines. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2010/2015) describes this as a feature of achievement society: workers exhaust themselves through internalized demands, mistaking self-exploitation for personal ambition.
I situate my own experience within these frameworks. My burnout is personal, but it is also structural. My termination is individual, but it reflects systemic patterns. Understanding this helps me resist the temptation to blame myself for what was done to me.
The Third Shore: A Liminal Space
Title: Sea of Cortez
Artist Statement
I photographed the sea on my first full day in Loreto. I was drawn to the quality of light, the way the water seemed to hold colour rather than simply reflect it. I was also aware of standing at a threshold. Behind me: the life I had been living. Before me: something still beyond my understanding. The word liminal comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold. Anthropologist Victor Turner (1969) studied liminal states, the betwixt-and-between moments in rituals and life transitions when a person is no longer what they were and is still becoming what they will be. This sea represents the liminal space I am inhabiting. I am no longer the contract faculty member teaching ten courses per year.
I am in the threshold, still becoming whatever comes next. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1964) described interior spaces as holding the imagination of those who inhabit them, places where memory and possibility are gathered together. This casita is becoming such a space for me. Environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich (1983) demonstrated that visual exposure to water and natural environments reduces stress and supports psychological restoration. The sea is participant in this inquiry. It is co-researcher.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
The title of this project, The Third Shore, references this liminality. 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.
I travel with one bag and no promise of output, trusting that care, attention, and silence are forms of knowledge.
What Comes Next
Over the next 30 days, I will post regularly to this blog. Each entry will include:
Narrative writing that documents my experience in the authentic first-person voice of a Scholarly Personal Narrative
Photographs and art with artist statements explaining what I was noticing and how the image connects to the theoretical frameworks guiding this inquiry
Theoretical engagement that situates personal experience within broader scholarly discourse
Human rights framing that connects individual recovery to collective concerns about dignity, rest, and the conditions necessary for human flourishing
What I will discover remains open.
Scholarly Personal Narrative requires genuine vulnerability, which means following the inquiry where it leads rather than performing conclusions I have already reached. I am here to learn what my body knows. I am here to document recovery as it unfolds, in whatever ways it chooses, including ways I cannot predict.
Title: The Workspace
Artist Statement
This is where I write. I photographed my workspace because the environment of inquiry matters as much as the questions I bring to it. the quiet way nature restores us Theory, developed by environmental psychologists Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan (1989), proposes that natural environments promote psychological restoration through four characteristics: being away (psychological distance from routine demands), extent (coherence and scope that engages the mind), fascination (stimuli that engage attention effortlessly), and compatibility (alignment between environment and purpose).
This space offers all four. The threshold quality of this setting, simultaneously sheltered and open, creates conditions where contemplative work can unfold. I am learning that where we think shapes what we can think. The simplicity of this workspace is deliberate. It holds only what is needed: tools for writing, tools for making images, space for stillness. There is no clutter of obligation here. There is only the invitation to attend.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
Estoy aquí. Estoy prestando atención.
I am here. I am paying attention.
Title: Beginning Where I Am Standing
Artist Statement
I took this photograph while standing still, looking down at my own feet. The question of running, walking, or turning back inside was still open. What I noticed first was sensation rather than motivation: weight settling evenly, the familiar pressure of shoes that have carried me through years of endurance.
These shoes know something about survival. I have used running as regulation, as escape, as a way to manage stress accumulated through precarious academic labour. For years, movement was rarely chosen freely. It was necessary. It was one of the few ways I could quiet myself enough to keep working, teaching, producing. Forward motion felt safer than stopping.
In this moment, I was practising something different. I paused to ask what I could genuinely offer rather than telling myself what I must do. The downward gaze marks that shift. Attention turns inward, away from performance and toward presence. There is no destination in this image, no finish line. There is only the honesty of where I am standing.
This photograph documents a subtle but meaningful change. Movement is no longer assumed as virtue. Stillness is no longer framed as failure. I am invited into decision-making rather than being managed by internalized expectations. This pause becomes data, recording a moment when pressure loosens and permission appears.
This image matters because it captures the beginning of recovery as quiet reorientation rather than dramatic transformation. Restoration arrives through many paths beyond motion. Sometimes it begins by standing still long enough to listen.
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, January 2026
References
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Haraway, D. J. (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
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Lorey, I. (2015). State of insecurity: Government of the precarious (A. Derieg, Trans.). Verso. (Original work published 2011)
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Mertens, D. M. (2008). Transformative research and evaluation. Guilford Press.
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.
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Standing, G. (2011). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury Academic.
Tillich, P. (1963). The eternal now. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Turner, V. W. (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.
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
Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Fernwood Publishing.
Note. Spanish-language text appearing in this project was translated into English using Google Translate (Google, n.d.). Translations are intended to convey general meaning rather than certified linguistic precision.
ACADEMIC LENS
This foundational post positions the entire 30 Days project within Nash’s (2004) Scholarly Personal Narrative framework, explicitly naming precarious labour, embodiment, and the human right to rest as its central analytical concerns. The identification of the body as both research site and research instrument draws on a lineage that includes Moustakas’s (1961) heuristic inquiry, in which the researcher’s direct, personal engagement with the phenomenon constitutes legitimate scholarship. Van der Kolk’s (2014) clinical documentation of how trauma is encoded somatically provides the theoretical ground for treating the body’s changing states as data. Nixon’s (2011) concept of slow violence names the structural dimension: the harm of precarious academic labour is cumulative rather than dramatic or singular, unfolding across nineteen years without announcement, leaving its evidence in the body rather than the institutional record. Richardson and St. Pierre (2005) establish the methodological permission: writing as inquiry, the text as the site where meaning is made rather than merely reported. Together, these frameworks constitute what this project calls the Third Shore: the epistemological territory between personal experience and scholarly understanding where alonetude becomes both the subject and the method of research.
A scouting note: what I found in December before I knew what January would become.
I had been to Loreto before.
The way I would return was different. Alone. Thirty days. A notebook and a research question I barely had the language for yet. The first time I arrived in Loreto, it was May, and I came with about thirty other people, and the purpose was simple and uncomplicated: to swim.
It was a masters swim camp. Open water. The Sea of Cortez. I had swum with this group before, and this trip was for fun, for the pleasure of moving through water with people who understood why that mattered. We swam in the mornings. We ate together. We watched the pelicans. I went to Loreto in May for the swimming, and only the swimming.
But the sea found me anyway.
Arriving in Loreto, Baja California Sur
Photo credit: Amy Tucker, December 2025
What the Sea of Cortez Did
There is something about open-water swimming that bypasses the thinking mind entirely. You enter the water and the water reorganizes you. The sound changes. The light changes. Your body, which on land carries its history in shoulders and jaw and the tight place between the shoulder blades, begins, for the duration of the swim, to release its grip.
Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014), whose work I would come to lean on heavily in the months ahead, describes how the body holds the accumulated evidence of what we have lived through. The nervous system, he argues, distinguishes poorly between past and present. It carries unresolved experience as physical tension, as breath that shallows, as vigilance that never fully stands down. What I know now, and only suspected then, is that I had been carrying nineteen years of precarious academic labour in my body, and the Sea of Cortez was the first environment in a very long time that asked nothing of that carrying.
None of this was conscious in May. I only noticed that I felt at ease in a way I had forgotten was available to me. I felt at ease in the water, in the town, in the unhurried rhythm of a place that knew nothing of my contracts, my committee work, or the endless institutional question of whether I would be renewed.
The seed was planted without my knowing it had been planted at all.
The Sea of Cortez, December
Photo credit: Amy Tucker, December 2025
December: Burnt Out and Looking for Something I Could Not Yet Name
By the time I returned to Loreto on December 4th, everything had changed. My teaching had ended in April. My contract ended in June. My Masters in Leadership, a creative expression project at Royal Roads University, was pressing toward completion. The defence was ahead of me. My doctoral ambitions were sitting alongside everything else, demanding attention I had long since depleted. I was trying, in the slow and often disorienting way of someone in the middle of a life transition, to determine what my post-institutional life was actually going to look like.
I turned sixty on December 12th, in the middle of that scouting trip. I had a quiet dinner alone by the water. There was no party, no ceremony, no performance of milestone. Just the sea, and the fact of the number, and the strange calm of being somewhere that asked nothing of me on the day I crossed into a new decade. It felt right. It felt, in retrospect, like the first honest birthday I had given myself in years.
I was exhausted in a way that sleep alone cannot touch.
Transition theorist William Bridges (2019) describes this phase as the in-between: the disorienting space between an ending and a new beginning, when the old structure has dissolved but the new one has yet to appear. It is the most generative phase of any transition, and also the most uncomfortable. Everything the old identity rested on has been removed. The person stands in the open, uncertain, without the familiar scaffolding of role and institution to tell them who they are.
The person stands in the open, uncertain, without the familiar scaffolding of role and institution to tell them who they are.
That was where I was in December. Standing in the open. I went back to Loreto because my body remembered something there that the rest of my life had stopped offering: the possibility of ease.
The Mission Arch, Loreto Town Centre
Photo credit: Amy Tucker, December 2025
Morning Light on the Boulevard
Photo credit: Amy Tucker, December 2025
Scouting: What I Was Actually Doing
I called it a scouting trip, and it was that. But scouting is too practical a word for what December was. I was doing more than checking logistics. I was asking the place a question: Can you hold me for thirty days? Is this somewhere I can be safe enough to finally stop performing, and still enough to actually think?
The practical answers were important. I walked the malecón at night and in the early morning. I ate alone at local restaurants. I walked unfamiliar streets without a map. I assessed, as a woman travelling alone, whether the community felt safe. It did. Loreto is a small town. People are visible to one another. There is a particular quality to places where community is woven into the daily fabric of life, where the evening paseo is a real institution, where the dogs sleeping in doorways and the fishermen heading to their boats and the families eating in the plaza all exist within an unhurried and readable world. I felt held by the ordinariness of it. Unknown, perhaps, but unobserved in the way that mattered. No one knew my institutional history. No one required anything of me. I could be simply a woman walking, and that was enough.
I found the casita I would return to in January. I walked through it slowly. I noted the light in the morning, the sound of the sea through the window at night, the small kitchen, the balcony where the palms moved in the wind. I checked whether it had what I needed: little, but exactly enough. A desk. A bed. Space for stillness.
I booked it before I left.
First Morning in the Casita
Photo credit: Amy Tucker, December 2025
Pelicans at the Loreto Harbour
Photo credit: Amy Tucker, December 2025
The Body Keeps the Score: Reading in December
I had brought my notebook and camera with me, as I always do. But the book I was reading during those two weeks in December was the one that would change the frame of everything I thought I was doing.
Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score (2014).
I had known the title for years. I had recommended it to students, cited it in passing, been aware of its argument in the way we are aware of important things we keep at a careful distance. In December, sitting in a small restaurant on the malecón with the sea outside the window, I read it properly. I read it in the way you read something when you are ready for it, which is to say, I read it and recognized myself on nearly every page.
Van der Kolk (2014) argues that trauma is, at its core, a disruption of the body’s capacity to feel safe in the present, rather than a discrete event. The nervous system, shaped by overwhelming experience, remains in a state of chronic alert long after the original threat has passed. The body continues to respond as if the danger is ongoing, even when the conscious mind insists otherwise. The jaw clenches. The breath shallows. The shoulders stay locked. Sleep remains partial and vigilant. These are the body doing what it learned to do to survive, and nothing more.
I sat with this and let it account for things I had been explaining to myself in other ways for years.
The book changed what I thought January was for. It was no longer only a writing retreat, or a research project, or a recovery from burnout. It was something more specific: an experiment in creating the conditions under which my nervous system might, finally, learn to rest. Van der Kolk (2014) is clear that this requires environment, duration, and the consistent absence of demand. It cannot be rushed. It cannot be scheduled. It requires time and a place that asks nothing.
I looked up from the book and out at the Sea of Cortez, and I understood why I had come back.
Roots That Hold: A Fig Tree on the Malecón
Photo credit: Amy Tucker, December 2025
The Ideas That Began to Form
By the end of December, something had begun to clarify. It was the outline of something, still unformed, still becoming. I began writing in my notebook in ways that felt different from anything I had written before. For no committee. For no course. Without the need to demonstrate competence or meet a deadline. Writing to find out what I thought. Writing as a way of listening to what my body already knew.
Writing as a way of listening to what my body already knew.
I made notes toward a plan. A loose daily structure: writing in the morning, swimming and walking in the afternoon, painting and reflection in the evenings. No targets. No word counts. No deliverables. A commitment to presence rather than productivity.
I sketched the outline of what would become this project. I wrote notes toward a book. I asked, for the first time in a disciplined way, what I had actually experienced in nineteen years of precarious academic labour, and what the body was carrying that the institutional record had never recorded. I wrote about rest as something that had been taken from me rather than something I had neglected. I wrote about the right to stillness. I wrote about what it would mean to recover: from exhaustion, but also from the deeper erosion of having been treated as disposable for nineteen years.
The concept I would eventually name alonetude had no name yet. But I could feel its shape. The particular quality of solitude I was experiencing in Loreto, chosen, inhabited, generative rather than empty, was already doing something to me that I had no words for yet. I wrote around it in December the way you write around something you know is there but can barely bring yourself to look at directly.
December in the Plaza
Photo credit: Amy Tucker, December 2025
Navidad en Loreto
Photo credit: Amy Tucker, December 2025
What December Gave Me
I left Loreto on December 17th with a booked casita, a notebook full of early thinking, and a body that had, for two weeks, been allowed to exist without institutional demand. I felt unhealed. Unready. More honestly, like someone who had confirmed that the thing she was looking for was real, even if she had no name for it yet.
The place was right. The sea was right. The unhurried community, the small town’s legible rhythms, the quality of the light in the early morning, the sound of waves through a window at night: all of it was right.
I would return on January 1st with one orange suitcase, a camera, a notebook, and a research question I was still learning to ask.
December had shown me where to look. January would begin the looking.
Note. This post is a retrospective account of a scouting trip taken December 4–17, 2025, prior to the thirty-day research retreat documented in the main body of this blog. It is situated before the formal inquiry begins, as context for the journey that follows.
Loreto and the Sea Beyond
Photo credit: Amy Tucker, December 2025
References
Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes (40th anniversary ed.). Balance.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
ACADEMIC LENS
December was the ground before the inquiry. This scouting note does what pre-research always does: it records the conditions that made something possible before that something had a name. Van der Kolk’s (2014) central argument, that the body holds unresolved experience as ongoing physiological tension, provides the theoretical ground for understanding why a specific place, encountered first through embodied pleasure and only later through scholarly intention, could function as a restorative environment. The reading of The Body Keeps the Score in December constitutes a threshold moment in Nash’s (2004) Scholarly Personal Narrative framework: the moment when lived experience and scholarly framework find one another, and the inquiry becomes possible. Bridges’ (2019) concept of the in-between names the structural condition that made this scouting trip necessary: the researcher, displaced from her institutional identity, required a place that could hold her while she found a new way of understanding what had happened to her. Loreto, encountered first through the body in May and returned to in December through intention, functions as what Bachelard (1964) calls a poetic space: a container intimate enough to allow genuine reflection, and generous enough to hold what that reflection would uncover.
