Pretty Lonely

 I dunno if it's the pandemic or whether it's about aging = having more years spent on this earthly life - but the word lonely has cropped up in chat convoes with peers. While theirs could be about grieving for a loved one or a love lost or just plain life as it is on some days or months, mine is about post-PhD life.

After completing my dissertation and program during the pandemic, I was really excited to get back to work and 'be with' my colleagues. But the busyness, the stress and some of them not being exactly around made me quite sad. Here I was excited about ideas here and there but with no co-facs to see face to face and bounce off ideas with, let alone celebrate my finish. But I still made good use of my energy to work on pet projects and this time with the  RAs/Staff willing to join and support such initiatives to make productive use of our time because doing otherwise would make us all feel hopeless with this pandemic and the manner by which it has taken a toll on our families and practically our lives.

The pet project on Research Journeys brought a bit of life to our daily/weekly and weekend-ly emails. With that was also me trying to forge ties with a bunch of women - Affiliate Program Chairs from the LB Campus who took on the roles of regular faculty members who are now on study leave. They put up with my blah blahs on another pet project on Short Courses in meetings with the Boss Dean and accorded me that space to explore my new found role FacSec (ahem, Fac-maypagka-alipin > the wrong person for the job BUT the right person to take it during this pandemic, as I thrive in chaos, haha). After a year of having a sense of normalcy with these women,  all of a sudden their appointments were no longer renewed upon orders of their mother unit.  The news came at a time when I just bounced back from 3 weeks of sinking underwater. That felt pretty much seeing my sandcastle being hit by the tides -  a castle I built with my playmates now all gone - washed away - and with it was my small happy space with UPOU.  This pandemic life experience in the Phils has been largely just like that - you have a go of trying to build things and the process has been a mix of joy and frustration - but you still still keep at it because otherwise, I really don't know how else to cope.

Though the one ever reliable thing to lean on  in this pandemic is my family, (and thank God for reminding me about that), my work (=play) has always been the alternate space to become create and feel a sense of worthiness and solidarity with others. But then yes, I now admit - it's getting pretty much lonely when you realize, people just come and go in your life. I did survive those as the years went by and moving from one job to the next = forging the connection then just disconnecting. In fact, I've moved on quite well. I am the type to BE there at the moment and relish the experience then when it's time to pack up and go, I move forward. 

Post PhD, the first pack up and go was saying goodbye to my small school - it was a gradual, quiet goodbye from my end. At the onset of my PhD, I was still volunteering to do a few more things with the school parents and children. But with the completion of my PhD, my K-12 quests have likewise reached its end - or felt more like a dead end. And end it was with an exclamation point of a PhD thesis on K-12 Blended Learning. 

BUT I  think what gets me pretty lonely post-PhD is that I really have no OU co-fac/colleague to turn to at my unive on my new found research interests. I find myself forcing to engage in undergrad program concerns as this was the space I grew into in my  initial years as a faculty member. My responses however were mostly administrative not entirely creative nor researchey. On the other hand, my current research projects, though still into VLCs,  have taken a different form or turn as it pulled towards research journeys, research writing  and now with a new PhD program proposal on a scratch paper and a collab research grant proposal as a spin off from Research Journeys webinar. My inner speeches and daydreams on research identities, research journeys and research collaborations are simmering for quite some time - and so talking to myself= isn't THAT pretty lonely!!!

And maybe that IS why I've kept other spaces outside of my Unive close to me - it makes this 'pretty lonely' realization liveable and bearable because there are other sandbox possibilities out there = the USQ RWL, the PGECR symposium, dyadic collab work with DE....then now, getting quite nervous about IDERN. I'm a bit excited because I hope to draw inspiration from the team so I could be brave enough to propose a PhD by R and PhD by P at UPOU. It's literally 'growing' a program.