January 1 is often treated as a symbolic reset, a cultural insistence that renewal can be declared on demand. Yet for many of us, particularly those shaped by long periods of precarity, caregiving, and professional vigilance, beginnings do not arrive cleanly.
Image: The Orange Suitcase
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
They arrive through the body.
On the morning of January 1, I pack an orange suitcase. The act is deliberate, slow, and unexpectedly revealing. Packing, I come to realize, is not merely logistical. It is an embodied practice of identity negotiation. What I choose to carry, what I leave behind, and how I tolerate the uncertainty created by that space becomes a form of inquiry into who I am becoming.
Identity as Process, Not Declaration
Identity is often narrated as stable or cumulative, something we have rather than something we continuously do. Sociological and narrative scholars have long challenged this assumption, arguing that identity is formed through ongoing meaning-making, particularly at moments of transition (Giddens, 1991; Bruner, 2004). January 1, framed as a beginning, intensifies this process.
As I pack, I notice what is absent. I do not pack teaching materials. I do not pack contingency plans. I do not pack symbols of productivity. This absence is intentional. For decades, my professional identity as an educator within precarious academic labour has required constant preparedness and an outward orientation shaped by what Butler (2004) describes as the demand to render oneself intelligible and viable within institutional norms. Packing without these artifacts is a quiet refusal of that script.
This is not an abandonment of identity, but a suspension. A temporary loosening that creates space for becoming.
Anxiety, Uncertainty, and the Body
Transitions often activate anxiety, particularly when identity has been tethered to performance and responsibility. Rather than conceptualizing anxiety here as pathology, I approach it as a learned response to prolonged uncertainty. As Ahmed (2010) reminds us, emotions do not reside solely within individuals; they circulate through social and institutional arrangements.
Packing on January 1, anxiety appears not as panic but as an impulse. The urge to overpack. The desire to anticipate every scenario. The need to force clarity before it is available. These impulses are familiar. They once functioned as strategies of safety.
What shifts in this moment is my response. Instead of obeying the impulse to force certainty, I practice restraint. I leave space in the suitcase. I allow questions to remain unanswered. In doing so, I engage what Brown (2021) describes as vulnerability not as exposure for its own sake, but as a willingness to remain present without guarantees.
This is not fearlessness. It is tolerance.
Relearning Safety Through Ordinary Acts
Much of the literature on trauma-informed and somatic inquiry emphasizes that safety is not established cognitively, but experientially (van der Kolk, 2015; Carello & Butler, 2015). Packing becomes one such ordinary site of relearning safety.
Folding clothes slowly. Choosing comfort over appearance. Closing a suitcase that does not strain at the seams. These small acts register in the body as signals: there is no emergency here. Nothing needs to be forced.
This reframing matters. In neoliberal academic cultures that reward speed, output, and endurance, rest and restraint are often misread as failure (Hersey, 2022). Yet what unfolds here is not disengagement, but recalibration. A shift from vigilance to attentiveness.
Leaving Without Idealizing Arrival
A common narrative trap in stories of departure is idealization. The assumption that leaving automatically produces healing, clarity, or transformation. I resist this framing intentionally.
As I pack, I refuse to script who I will be on the other side of this journey. I do not require the destination to justify the leaving. This aligns with Nash and Bradley’s (2011) description of Scholarly Personal Narrative as one that resists premature closure, allowing meaning to emerge rather than be imposed.
What I carry forward instead is presence. Attention. A commitment to noticing without narrating every experience into productivity or insight.
January 1 as Ethical Beginning
What emerges through this act of packing is not resolution, but integrity. January 1 becomes less about reinvention and more about consent. Consent to begin again without erasing the past. Consent to carry less. Consent to meet uncertainty without escalation.
In this way, packing becomes both method and metaphor. A lived demonstration of identity as process, anxiety as information rather than command, and beginning again as a practice grounded in care rather than force.
The orange suitcase closes easily. That, too, appears to be data.
Figure: The Orange Suitcase
Created by NoteBook LM, 2026
References
Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press.
Bruner, J. (2004). Life as narrative. Social Research, 71(3), 691–710.
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. Routledge.
Carello, J., & Butler, L. D. (2015). Practicing what we teach: Trauma-informed educational practice. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 35(3), 262–278.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Stanford University Press.
Hersey, T. (2022). Rest is resistance: A manifesto. Little, Brown Spark.
Nash, R. J., & Bradley, D. L. (2011). Me-search and re-search: A guide for writing scholarly personal narrative manuscripts. Information Age Publishing.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
I am grateful for the year that did not ask politely. For the grief that pressed its full weight against my chest. For the darkness that stayed longer than comfort allows. For the depression that hollowed me out, for the loneliness that stripped away every performance, every borrowed certainty.
I am grateful for reaching the bottom and finding no floor— only myself, breathing, still here.
For the end of an era that did not close gently, but demanded surrender. For the opening of a new chapter written without promise, only willingness.
For a body that carried trauma in silence until it could not anymore. For the slow, unglamorous work of healing. For learning that peace is not a reward, but a practice. For finding the Creator not in answers, but in endurance.
For forgiveness that burned on the way through. For forgiving others without excusing the harm. For asking forgiveness without protecting my ego. For learning that love requires truth, and truth costs something.
For walking away from the classroom— not because I failed it, but because I outgrew the shape it required me to hold. For choosing a life of writing and research, where listening is labour, and honesty is the measure.
For closing the door on a decade of becoming brave enough to say goodbye to what once kept me alive. For understanding that survival and belonging are not the same thing.
For my children, who taught me what love looks like when it is tested. For my parents, as time rearranged everything we knew. For my sisters, whose depth and courage reminded me I was not alone.
For finding love with Tom— steady, chosen, real— and for finding myself, without apology, without permission, at last.
And now, I give thanks for choosing life with my whole body. For committing to kindness after bitterness would have been easier. For continuing the work of healing when no one is watching.
I walk forward toward the highest spiritual vibration I can hold, aware that I will falter, aware that I will grieve again, and willing still.
This is my gratitude. Not because the year was gentle, But because I survived it awake.
I imagine thirty days by the sea, not as a vacation, and not as a retreat in the romantic sense, but as a deliberate period of research on myself.
Arriving Without an Agenda
I imagine arriving with a minimal agenda. No deadlines. No performance expectations. No pressure to produce anything tidy or impressive. Instead, I come with curiosity, a notebook, a camera, my body, and time. The sea becomes my research site. I become both the subject and the observer.
The Body as Research Site
Each day begins quietly. I wake early and watch the sunrise before the world feels busy. I let my nervous system wake up slowly. Some mornings I swim, letting the salt water do its steady work on my breath and muscles. Other mornings, I walk along the shoreline, noticing birds, light, and small changes in the tide. I am learning again how to pay attention without trying to control what I see.
“Scholarly personal narrative writing is the unabashed, up-front admission that your own life signifies.” Robert J. Nash (2004, p. 23)
Movement becomes part of the inquiry. Yoga to listen rather than push. Walking and biking without tracking distance or speed, and swimming not to train, but to settle. My body becomes a source of information instead of something I manage or override. I notice where tension softens. I see where grief still lives. I notice when joy appears without effort.
“Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.” Bessel van der Kolk (2014, p. 101)
Art weaves its way through the days. Some days I paint or draw. Some days I photograph birds lifting from the water or shadows stretching across the sand. Some days, the art is simply sitting and watching the sea change colour. This is art therapy without diagnosis, without fixing, without interpretation. It is creation as companionship.
Silence as Data
Writing happens when it wants to. Sometimes it comes as complete sentences. Sometimes as fragments. Sometimes not at all. I permit myself to rest when there are no words. I am practising trust, both in myself and in the process. I am learning that silence is also data.
“We do not live in reality itself. We live in stories about reality.” Robert J. Nash (2004, p. 33)
I imagine evenings marked by sunsets and reflection. I review the day gently, asking what surfaced and what settled. I do not rush to make meaning. I let experiences sit, knowing they will braid together in their own time. The sea holds my questions without demanding answers.
What I imagine most clearly is this: that after thirty days, I will not return with conclusions. I will return with something quieter and more durable. A steadier body. Clearer boundaries. A renewed relationship with creativity. A more profound respect for slow, embodied ways of knowing.
What Remains
This is what I imagine research can look like when it is grounded in care, honours the body, and allows healing to be a legitimate form of inquiry.
“The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.” Donna Haraway (1988, p. 590)
Photo Credit: Tucker, 2025, Sidney, British Columbia
“Care of the soul requires craft, patience, and a willingness to allow life to unfold in its own time.” Thomas Moore (2005, p. 5)
And perhaps that, in itself, is the finding.
References (APA 7)
Bridges, W. (2004). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes (2nd ed.). Da Capo Press.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066
Moore, T. (2005). Healing through the dark emotions: The wisdom of grief, fear, and despair. Gotham Books.
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.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
“Alonetude exists between being alone, loneliness, and solitude, where presence replaces performance.” Tucker, 2026
Living Inside Precarity: The Somatic Archive of Precarity
“Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies… The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort.” (van der Kolk, 2014, p. 9
Image: Amy Tucker (Pretending I am ok)
Credit: Amy Tucker, 2025
For more than eighteen years, I have lived inside the slow violence of precarious academic labour. The phrase “maybe next semester” has followed me through contracts, calendars, and classrooms, accumulating as a quiet weight in my body, a residuedifficult 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; it is the “unthought known” held in the body, a knowledge awaiting the words to catch up.
As I sit in this clinical layover, I recognize that my body has been trapped in a state of chronic activation. According to Stephen Porges’ (2011) Polyvagal Theory, I have been marinating in hyper-vigilance, scanning for the next demand rather than resting in the current moment. This is the hallmark of the Neutral Zone, the disorienting space described by William Bridges (2019), in which the old identity of the “office superhero” has ended but the new self has not yet arrived. I had spent so many years being available to others, the award-winning educator, the unpaid committee member, the advocate, that I had become profoundly unavailable to myself.
Choosing a Pause
This year marks a turning.
“Scholarly personal narrative writing is the unabashed, up-front admission that your own life signifies…” (Nash, 2004, pp. 23–24)
I am taking an unpaid sabbatical and undertaking a 30-day research and writing residency by the Sea of Cortez in Loreto, México. I am leaving with one large orange suitcase, guided by curiosity rather than certainty. This residency forms part of my Master of Arts Creative Expression Project in Human Rights and Social Justice. It has a simple intention: to pose different questions about recovery, dignity, and rest.
Image: Suitcase is Packed
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
The Somatic Archive of Precarity
For more than eighteen years, I have lived inside the slow violence of precarious academic labour. The phrase maybe next semester has followed me through contracts, calendars, and classrooms, accumulating as a quiet weight in my body. 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.
According to William Bridges (2019), I am navigating the Neutral Zone. This is the disorienting space where the old identity of the “office superhero” has ended, but the new self has not yet arrived. My body has been in a state of chronic activation, always on alert and scanning for demands. Drawing on Stephen Porges’ (2011) Polyvagal Theory, this residency is a movement toward a Ventral Vagal state of safety.
“Even though we may not be aware of danger on a cognitive level, on a neurophysiological level, our body has already started a sequence of neural processes.” Porges, 2011
From Performance to Presence
Image: The Stories Rocks Tell
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
“Traumatic stress is an illness of not being able to be fully alive in the present.” (Janet, as cited in van der Kolk, 2014, p. 314)
My goal is to move toward a state where my worth is no longer tied to my productivity. I am practicing being with a self that asks nothing except presence.
Isolation vs. Solitude: I am learning that isolation is imposed and unwanted, whereas solitude is chosen and entered into intentionally.
The Body as Archive: My research shifts inquiry from the library into the body to attend to the “residue” left by years of adaptation and endurance.
The Discipline of Arrival: Alonetude begins with the practice of landing fully in a moment without any next thing pressing against the edge of the current thing.
“Only in a safe environment is it adaptive and appropriate to inhibit defensive systems and engage socially.” Porges, 2011
Moving Research into the Body: Scholarly Personal Narrative
My research shifts inquiry from the library into the body. Through Scholarly Personal Narrative and creative expression, I attend to what lives beneath years of adaptation and endurance. Long-term precarity leaves traces; it shapes posture, breath, sleep, and emotional tone. The body becomes an archive of what institutions leave unnamed.
The Methodology of Robert Nash
“Every life is a story, and every story has the potential to teach… Yours enlarges the circle.” (Nash, 2004, p. 54)
To ground this personal inquiry, I utilize the methodology developed by Robert Nash (2004). Scholarly Personal Narrative is a rigorous academic method that validates the use of personal story to address universal themes. Nash (2004) describes scholarly personal narrative as a method that validates lived experience as a legitimate site of knowledge production.
The Personal: I use my own transition and the exhaustion of my twenty-five-year performance as the primary site of inquiry.
The Scholarly: I anchor my experiences in established theories of transition, neurobiology, and ethics.
The Universal: My story of burnout serves as a mirror for a broader systemic crisis in labour and human rights.
The Body as Archive
This method allows me to move beyond the technical equipment of my desk and into the sensory reality of my own skin.
Pre-Reflective Awareness: My research attends to the unthought known—the embodied knowledge held in my jaw and breath that I have spent years outrunning.
Neurobiological Traces: Following Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, I am documenting the shift from a nervous system trapped in chronic activation toward the safety of the Ventral Vagal state.
The Archive of Precarity: For eighteen years, the slow violence of precarious labour has settled into my posture; Scholarly Personal Narrative gives me the tools to name these institutional shadows.
Alonetude as Method: The Pandemic Seed
The concept of alonetude first took root during the global stillness of the pandemic. While the world outside was fraught with uncertainty, I discovered that for the first time in my career, the absence of institutional obligation felt like freedom. It was, unexpectedly, the most peaceful time of my life, a moment when the quiet felt more like peace than loneliness.
Here, presence replaces performance. This residency is a direct engagement with the “unthought known”. This term, from Christopher Bollas (2017), describes the embodied wisdom I have finally stopped outrunning, the knowledge held in my body that I haven’t yet found the words to tell. By sitting on the floor of this clinical transition, I am finally allowing that wisdom to surface.
This inquiry traces a path toward alonetude, a practice I have come to define as a portable piece that travels into noise and connection. It is a deliberate space that exists between the physical state of being alone, the emotional experience of loneliness, and the intentional cultivation of solitude.
As I prepare for my trip, I am (trying to) let go of the need to perform. I am practicing arrival as an internal discipline, landing in this moment so completely that it expands to hold me.
Rest as a Human Right
“Etymologically, the word ‘scholar’ goes back to… skholē, meaning leisure or play.” (Nash, 2004, p. 42)
This work begins from an understanding that exhaustion is structural. Years of vigilance create patterns of bracing that extend far beyond any single contract. This is the neurobiological residue of burnout, a state of chronic activation in which the nervous system is continually on alert and scanning for demands.
Rest, when delayed for decades, becomes difficult for the body to trust. For the burnt out and the used up, the prospect of being alone with one’s feelings can even feel threatening. Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) affirms the right to rest and leisure. I am choosing to treat that principle as lived practice rather than distant declaration.
By reclaiming this right, I am moving toward a state of Ventral Vagal safety, in which the body finally recognizes that it is approaching a state of rest. This is the shift from appearing for others to truly arriving for myself.
Image: Whale Bones
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
Daily Practices by the Sea
“Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience.” (van der Kolk, 2014, p. 208)
My plan for my days during this residency remains intentionally simple. Writing in the morning light. Swimming in salt water. Walking without a destination. Painting without expectation. Sitting long enough to feel sensation return. I am listening for shifts in attention as the body slowly releases its grip.
These simple acts are the practical application of Arrival. According to William Bridges (2019), the Neutral Zone requires a slowing down to allow the old self to fall away before the new one begins to take shape. By engaging in these daily practices, I am facilitating a shift from chronic activation toward Ventral Vagal safety.
I am practicing the discipline of staying, which is the work of being fully where I am with no next thing pressing against the edge of the current thing. This is how I engage with the unthought known. Following Bollas (2017), these quiet activities allow the embodied wisdom held in my body to surface, finally. I am no longer a vehicle carrying a brain to a meeting. I am choosing to be a body in water, a being alive on a planet spinning through space.
(Who am I trying to convince?)
“Physiological state shapes how we experience and respond to the world.” Porges, 2011
Lineage and Quiet Teacher
I carry with me a lineage of thinkers and writers who trusted silence, interior life, and attention as ethical teachers. Their work reminds me that meaning arrives through patience, and that care often emerges quietly.
“Do not risk losing something vital and special to your humanity: your own gritty and beautiful, hard-won voice.” (Nash, 2004, pp. 26–27)
Stepping onto the Third Shore
I think of this month as a movement toward the Third Shore. A threshold where presence with oneself becomes sufficient. A place where recovery holds dignity rather than urgency. A space where rest offers knowledge.
I arrive by the sea to listen. To write. To breathe. To remember what a body feels like when it receives permission to rest.
“Agency starts with what scientists call interoception.” (van der Kolk, 2014, p. 96)
I hear the sea call my name.
Image: Sea of Cortez
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
“I arrive by the sea to listen, to write, and to remember what a body feels like when it receives permission to rest.” Tucker, 2026
Figure: Alonetude: Healing Burnout Through Intentional Solitude Infographic
Created by Notebook LM, 2025
References
Bollas, C. (2017). The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. Routledge.
Bridges, W., & Bridges, S. (2019). Transitions: Making sense of life’s changes. Balance.
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.
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
“I have learned that precarious labour does not simply exhaust the mind; it settles into the body as a long, slow violation of the human right to rest.”
My research starts with the understanding that the body keeps the score [Bessel van der Kolk, 2014]. I examine systemic exhaustion as a structural condition that violates the human right to rest, as articulated in Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
For more than eighteen years, I have lived within the slow violence of precarious academic labour. The cycle of maybe next semester has accumulated as a profound somatic weight in my body, a quiet but persistent strain carried over time.
This year, I am taking an unpaid sabbatical.
During the upcoming winter semester, I will undertake a thirty-day research and writing residency by the Sea of Cortez in Loreto, México. This residency is designed to ask a different set of questions through a triad of writing, creative expression, and somatic research.
This work also forms part of my Master of Arts Creative Expression Project in Human Rights and Social Justice at Thompson Rivers University.
Purpose:
I am exploring how creative practice functions as a rigorous form of inquiry into recovery. By shifting research from the library into the body, I draw on Scholarly Personal Narrative to trace a pathway toward “alonetude”, a state that exists somewhere between being alone, experiencing loneliness, and cultivating solitude.
Evidence:
This inquiry begins from the premise that the body carries what institutions often refuse to acknowledge. Drawing on trauma-informed scholarship that recognizes how lived experience is stored somatically, I attend to the ways seventeen years of survival have settled into my jaw, my breath, and my nervous system.
“The body remembers what institutions deny, carrying years of survival in breath, muscle, and nervous system.”
Image: Travel Awaits
Photo Credit: Amy Tucker, 2026
“I travel with one bag and no promise of output, trusting that care, attention, and silence are forms of knowledge.”
