by Lilia Efimova on December 31, 2011
I go to Nancy’s blog to look for the Pear & Cranberry Chutney recipe to cook for tomorrow and then remember that I have a blog too and that it had been silent way too long. So here I am :)
The truth is that I feel a bit like a caterpilar in a cocoon – hiding from everyone and in a process of a transformation. I never thought that I would think of stopping blogging here – so much this blog was me. What I didn’t realise is that identities change or, to be more specific, some of those many identities in each of us take leading role for a while. Or, to be even more specific, I didn’t realise how much my professional identity was leading in my life. Untill I stopped working :)
Letting go professional identity gave time and space to all others that were also in me, hidden. It’s an interesting process to reflect on – letting go parts of your old life to give space for new things to emerge. And scary at times (enough not to write about it :)
As for the online writing – it feels funny to see how social media is getting picked up by lots of people I know and, at the same time, not to have much of the need to do it myself. I do write online – under a different nickname, mainly private and in Russian. Somehow that fits better what I need now (and helps building very different networks). Hopefully writing in Dutch will come as well (as I need it too), but I’m not there yet.
So, what I’m busy with now? All things “green” and local, sewing, house and kids, as well as alternative educational modes. There are a lot of things to write about there, although I’m not sure anymore that this blog is the right space for it (well, if you want to hear about my compost worms let me know :). The last topic would fit pretty well here, but at the moment writing about it feels a bit like writing about internal corporate issues while being employed there – it’s a thin line to navigate and I’m not there yet.
I do miss many of you with whom I connected via this space. Unfortunately letting go work also means that lots of shared activities and shared spaces where you connects with your network go to the background. So, I just send all of you my best wishes for the coming year – strength to go out of your comfort zone and time to enjoy life :)
Tagged as:
blog writing,
change,
identity
by Lilia Efimova on May 5, 2011
It’s hard starting after a break – there are way too many stories to tell and way too many thoughts that came in between. So I start somewhere.
I had a burnout – going on and off after my PhD defense and not very obvious behind the usual “not feeling normal” during my pregnancy. But eventually it came to the surface and things are slowly getting better. Between other things that means less time online (and mainly lurking :) and much more time making things with my hands (rather then typing and talking :).
And, of course, we had Anna. With her all the background thinking and feeling about “work, us and our kids” surfaced again. Only this time I didn’t have an excuse of having a PhD to finish, so I had to deal with it, making choices that I had to make to stay true to myself (like extending my maternity leave to the maximum possible).
And, with Alexander approaching school age, it was also a time to rethink all thoughts I had about learning and education from a very personal perspective. It’s much easier to think and write about learning as what it could be or learning as “this is how I want to learn”, but practicing what you preach when it comes to your own kids is far more difficult. Especially since you easily bump into lots of real constraints of the society you belong to.
The process is still on the way, but a few things are clear so far:
- I’m leaving work. I’m pretty sure I want to be active professionally, but I have to figure out a different way to do it. (Some say that a burnout is a signal that something is out of balance pretty badly :)
- Time to reinvent life to fit our kids there. Not as inconvinience or as a a well-fenced part, but as an integral part of how things work. In a short term that means being a mother more than everything else and focusing on the local physical world more than paying attention to the global network.
- Unschooling as a shortcut name for educational trajectory we find important for our kids and figuring out what does it mean in practice. May be a bit cryptic right now, but there is lots in the pipeline and I just have to figure out how to put it into words. Funny to think that I started this blog from an “edublogging” angle, then moved to all other topics, but now it feels that I’ll be back where I started very soon.
Tagged as:
learning,
no work-life balance,
parenting,
unschooling