Yes, beginning yet another blog seems self-defeating, but this is specifically towards the performance work I do for my "alternative" dissertation, lamely named "Dissertation 2.0." I talk about the characters I have developed or am thinking about, and how they relate to my other research in the areas of American Nihilism, Feminism, and approaching the crone stage of life.
For example, the most recent character was me-not-me as a Fairy Princess-In-Training; I decided because I had burned out of three careers in 10 years, I would look to the first thing I most wanted to be when I grew up, a Fairy Princess. The sad news that there was actually a dearth of Fairy Princii in the 1970's led to my first compromise; if I could not be a Fairy Princess, I would then become a flight attendant. Compromising has led me to choose careers that were in my wheelhouse, like librarianship, but were not the penultimate; Joseph Campbell's entreaty to "follow your bliss" has mostly been an abbreviated set of lowered expectations and settling. Like, when I first joined the Catholic Church and decided I wanted to be a priest. I was immediately corrected about that possibility, and thought that being a nun might not be as bad. This is the second compromise I made. Luckily, I bombed out of school and the novitiate program because of being young, stupid, and largely without parental supervision after age 13. I think there was also some kind of emotional disturbance, but it may have been more social anxiety and PTSD from being bullied constantly through grammar school. It freed me up though to learn more about the world before retreating to a celibate, cloistered life.
In retrospect, this is also where I began to manifest all the symptoms of ADHD that exist today for describing the inattentive type. Perhaps becoming a novitiate may have helped; the order of nuns I would have joined were a teaching order and the women who taught me through grammar school were world-traveled and just very grounded, lovely people. I think they would have given me more structure than I got at home, and I may have made it through high school at least.
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