No. 4: Day in the Life.
So here’s a nod to my personal lack of boundaries / work life balance kilter, I was going to post about working for the Indigenous Curatorial Collective today, but it’s SATURDAY. In light of respecting my boundaries, I do other things on the weekend, you can hear about the IC/CA another day 😄
For me, I don’t use the weekends to “recharge” I use the weekends to refocus on my PhD and side projects. I don’t sleep in on the weekend, I wake up at the same time because if I sleep in it throws everything off when the work week starts. Again, repetition is everything. I won’t lie though, sometimes Bryan and I will have lazy weekends and that’s really nice, but I do this sparingly so they’re more meaningful.
I love the work I’m doing for my PhD, it is incredibly important to me and my supervisor/magical unicorn Dylan is literally the best.
I began my PhD because I was upset after having done extensive research to find academic texts that spoke to urban Indigeneity in a way that I could relate to, but all I found were texts that reduced us to statistics and urban “trends”. I began my PhD because I was angry. Because I see poetry in the way we express ourselves as urban Indigenous folks and the beautiful, albeit complex ways we move through these spaces especially when we are living on lands that are not that of our ancestors. I ask: what does it mean to gather and care for community on lands that are not your own? I like to use street art as an example because that’s where my journey began, putting up stickers in Montréal so that I could see a glimmer of myself represented back at me from the city that works so hard to erase Indigenous presence.
My PhD is difficult and I’m sure many other candidates can relate: It’s really hard to get in the zone. So getting in the theoretical/academic zone is what I spend the majority of my weekends trying to do. You may have noticed my watercolours - this is what I do when I’m having a hard time getting in my PhD zone, but also procrastinating lol 😂
(According to Instagram apparently Dissertation Hell is a real place, but it’s 1,144km away from me so maybe I’m safe for now)
