Ten Years Online: 2018

Buy Learning to Breathe which focuses on mental health, and Twist, Weave, Untangle about my becoming a critical digital pedagogue.

I keep saying it, but I can’t help it to be true – the closer and closer I get to the present, the harder these are to write. I can’t differentiate between the years, between the months, trying to remember what happened when and why and how it was important to me, but it is all important and nothing is important and that’s what happens when you have ADHD brain.

I was doing better. I was learning every day about how ADHD has impacted my life, and was writing through the process as I went through getting a diagnosis, getting medicated, getting better, figuring out how to live again. And I wrote on my blog here, and I wrote tiny letters and I wrote for my job, a report on digital fluency, developed a student beta-tester program. I kept writing, maybe writing more than I ever had before.

We went to Disney. As a family. And I had fun. We all had fun.

I got a message from a friend, asking me to write about Quebec for a new online outlet. And then another friend asked me if I could develop and teach an online course on Quebec. Suddenly, I was actually using my PhD research and expertise. The thing I had given up on ever really being able to use other than to dash people’s view of Quebec (and Canada) as some sort of socialist, inclusive utopia. But all my public hope-dashing was what lead to these opportunities, one because it was worth explaining, the other because they remembered I wouldn’t shut up about it.

And then, I found a publisher for the memoir I had just finished. And the memoir I was, because of these two opportunities, starting to write. A publisher who believed in my writing, my voice, what I was trying to do. A publisher who told me: yes, and!

I finish yet another leadership program, this one at UMW, and I manage to make one small change that might make a difference. Turns out, the report I wrote ends up having a massive difference, but that hadn’t happened yet, I get that news in 2019, and I am grateful.

And then I got the job at Georgetown.

What the hell, 2018?

So I’m writing for a new online venue, developing and teaching a new course, I’m writing two (well, three, but the third one keeps getting stuck) memoirs, and I’ve found a publisher for a book I’ve wanted to edit for a long time, so I send out a CFP. I am invited to write about adjunct and staff solidarity (which is probably going to turn into my next book project). I am invited (INVITED) to participate in three different things, including a free trip to Victoria, which we do as a family, and my husband and I spend night in a single dorm room, drinking wine from plastic cups, sitting on the bed listening to music, living an undergrad experience together, an experience we never had since we didn’t yet know each other.

October in ADHD Awareness Month, and because I don’t have enough to do, I decided to ask a fellow ADHD academic woman if she would like to do a podcast with me. We record hours and hours of audio, but neither of us have the patience of focus to edit it into anything resembling episodes. But it’s there, and it’ll be there a year later, but it’s there and maybe it isn’t quite time yet.

2018 ends with the family moving AGAIN. But this time, it feels slightly different. It feels like coming home, even if it is hard and complicated and the kids are older and well, we’re all older, but we manage to get rid of books which I never in my life thought would happen. ProfHacker also essentially ends in 2018. So many beginning and endings. It is, like every year I live it seems, a frantic, frenetic year, but one where I am feeling happier than I have in a long, long time, perhaps ever.

I am successful in ways I never even imagined. All the way through, I keep writing, and I keep going back to Twitter and FB because it is where I can be the most myself, but I’m finally starting to figure out how to be that person IRL. It has never felt so freeing.