Start Here: A Guide to Reading This Project

Reading Time: 4 minutes

In January 2026, I spent thirty days alone by the Sea of Cortez in Loreto, Mexico. I was studying something I had named alonetude: the intentional transformation of imposed aloneness into chosen solitude. After nineteen years of precarious academic labour, contract after contract, never sure whether next semester would hold a place for me, I needed to understand what it felt like to be present with myself without an institution watching. This blog is what happened when I tried.

Alonetude differs from loneliness. It differs from isolation. It is the third way: a practised, chosen solitude that asks something of you, teaches you something, and gives something back. If you are reading this for the first time, the reading guide below will help you find your way in.

Welcome to 30 Days by the Sea: A Research Inquiry into the Third Shore. This is a creative thesis blog by Amy Tucker, MA Candidate in Human Rights and Social Justice at Thompson Rivers University on Secwépemc Territory. The posts below are organized in their intended reading order. You are welcome to begin anywhere, but if you are reading as an examiner or new visitor, the sequence below will offer the fullest experience of the inquiry.

Table of Contents

Preamble

Dedication: To the land, the people, the spirit, and the Creator; and to all who live and work in precarity
Acknowledgements: With gratitude to the supervisory committee and all who made this work possible
Cover Page
Abstract

A Note on Form: Why a Blog

The choice to submit this project as a blog rather than a conventional thesis document was a deliberate methodological decision, rather than a platform convenience. A blog is sequential and public: it performs alonetude in real time rather than reporting on it retrospectively. The daily posts were written each morning in direct response to embodied experience, without the benefit of hindsight or editorial distance. That immediacy is data: it captures the arc of recovery as it happened, including the days of resistance, exhaustion, and unresolved tension that a polished thesis chapter would smooth over. The blog form also enacts the argument about audience: this project is written for a committee and equally for the broader community of people in precarious labour who have been told their exhaustion is a personal failing. A blog is accessible in ways a thesis is unable to be. The form is itself a political choice about who knowledge is for.

Part One: Before the Shore: Framing the Inquiry

30 Days by the Sea: A Research Inquiry into the Third Shore: The opening scholarly essay introducing alonetude, methodology, and the research context
Finding My Alonetude: On precarious labour, what the body holds and remembers, and what brought me to the sea
Beyond Loneliness: Defining Alonetude as a Third Way of Being Alone: Scholarly essay defining the concept
Navigating the Third Shore: A Scholarly Personal Narrative of Alonetude: The SPN methodology explained
Prelude: What I Imagine: An opening reflection before departure
Gratitude (2025): A threshold moment before beginning

Part Two: Thirty Days by the Sea: The Daily Journal

Part Three: Companion Essays and Reflections

Part Four: The Geography of Fear: A Series

Part Five: Memory & Vignette

Part Six: Poems

Closing: What Remains

The Third Shore: The concluding creative thesis chapter
Coda
Lonely in a Crowd: On Presence, Distance, and the Quiet Work of Connection
3 Minute Thesis: Alonetude at Thompson Rivers University

All photographs © Amy Tucker, 2026, unless otherwise noted. This blog is a creative research thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in Human Rights and Social Justice, Thompson Rivers University, Secwépemc Territory, Kamloops, British Columbia.