Hi! There isn't much to say by way of an intro to todays entry so I'm just going to crack on.

Rabbit hole 1:

Do you have words that make sense to you on a felt level (i.e. this word describes what something feels like) but when you go to check the dictionary to check the meaning and context, you realise there is no such word in the first place?

As a counsellor, I enjoy the wordplay that appears in therapy. Both the speaker and the listener have an instant understanding of the concept of a word because of the emerging content. A subtle interplay between the cognitive and the affective takes place to indicate concreteness, uncertainty or another complicated emotion. The use of a made up word that does 'fit' is sometimes followed by, "Is that even a word?" to which the response is, often, "It is now!", both participants in the conversation recognising that it has emerged from a space outside of recognised vocabulary.

This exact thing happened for me this week, not in a therapy session, but during a peer supervision with D.

Rabbit hole 2:

"Outsidering." In some ways, it's a play on Simone de Beauvoir's concept of 'Othering' (The Second Sex', 1949), not that I realised this at the time. The question in which the word emerged was, "How am I outsidering myself?". It came up in the context of me saying, out loud, where my research interest is taking me and exploring my positionality as a practitioner-researcher. Like many good questions (Clutterbuck refers to them as EBD questions - Extremely Bloody Difficult questions), this one stopped me in my tracks. Whereas de Beauvoir argued that people don't put themselves into a weaker position, I know I disagree but I'm not sure why.

These realisations fill me with equal parts dread and excitement: excitement because of the novelty; dread, because I can get lost for days, even weeks, stumbling into more and more rabbit holes.Which brings me to ...

Rabbit hole 3:

When I am thinking about being an outsider, I am acknowledging the difference between belonging or not. In this case, specifically inside/outside institutional power. That is, "How do I 'outsider' myself from organisational/ institutional/ establishmentarian power?" I've just remembered that as my place in academia was confirmed, I had an anxiety dream about this. Aside from that, I am wondering, 'Isn't insider/outsider a tension we all have to hold?'

I notice though that I am not asking 'Why am I outsidering myself?' In some ways, that question would be easier to answer - safety, distancing, projecting, a failure/refusal to consider the complexities of institutional power. Also, in asking 'How do I ...?,' I am not asking about the practicalities of how I do it, to create a step-by-step guide. Or maybe I am, so that I can stop doing whatever it is that I'm doing unconsciously. However, I suspect that in my question of 'How do I ..?', I am questioning if I have an outdated or introjected script that isn't serving me well?

Hello, rabbit hole number 4. Yes, I'm coming ...