It's that time of year again...

There is just no way I can avoid a 'hyper' mod this coming week.

The sun is beginning to shine and it has been ten years since my football team had as much chance of snaring a flag.

It was not a good game but an interesting one to look at how the young players stood up under pressure and when it matters most. Now can those young fitter bodies and eagerness get 'us' across the line?

Add to this that this September we held our University PhD Colloquium. I always find the sheer concentration required by two full days of presentations simply needs an adrenaline hit. My head fills with fragments of ideas, theories, things to try, possible answers to my own writing problems. I come away just so inspired. This year's colloquium would have to have been one of our strongest academically. Better than some Conferences with staff presentations I have attended over the years.

The sheer collegiality and good spirit cannot be matched in any other forum. It seems amazing that over the last seven years the Practice-led research PhD program at the Institution That Must Not Be Named (ITMNBN), has been offered. In this time the enrolments have gone from three to over 25 (or more ???). Where once the discipline was constantly fighting pedagogical territory wars in an attempt to define a fixed notion of what PLR constitutes and whether or not it could demand enough academic rigour.

Even at peak national and international Conferences there seemed to be a prevailing attitude of disciplinary cultural cringe operating with the hierarchy skewing towards the longer privileged Science-based paradigm for PhD programs.

Luckily now the debate has advanced beyond this ridiculous and simplistic binary where we began to 'eat our own' between the academics and the Industry-based practitioners. Words such as those spoken by a Senior Writing academic from SA were almost vitriolic. 'Claytons literary grants' was the rhetoric when discussing a practitioners job within the academy, under the assumption that one cannot be both, or that a practitioner by virtue of their practice cannot research and teach.... at the same time when we were putting forward the case that Practice IS Research!

Now we can forget about that cringe mentality and expend our energy educating our colleagues across the disciplinary divisions. Our methodology is being pushed to be more expansive and exiting (PLR, PBR, ABR etc.) Other discipline scholars are embracing our qualitative research praxis as ana answer for their publication imperatives wrought by the new ERA and the dominance of HERDSA stats.

Thus when sitting at the PhD colloquiums, it is easy to feel inadequate when we reflect on our own presentations across the preceding years. We were at the start, forging a path through the jungle, slashing at vines to attempt to create a clear pathway. It is inevitable that those who follow us choose the well-worn path and add a degree of sophistication to it's construction.

In turn this fuels our own reflexivity as we take from their presentations ideas, concepts and lessons and integrate them back into our own practice. Is it any wonder I am always so invigourated intellectually and emotionally. And many BMD scholars and creatives inevitably use this upward surge to be optimally creative. This always co-incides with periods of mania followed by the inevitable crash.

I am writing this whilst I still have some outside perspective on my behaviour and moods. This will soon disappear as I become too far inside the hyper-state.

I hear you saying... well if you know it's coming why not adjust the medication and avoid the crash?

The simple answer/s:

I need this high.
I need this crazy phase of beauty.
I cannot live without it and although the price will be high I am prepared to pay it.
I cannot live without this aspect of my personality, in the same way that one cannot change any other genetically linked human attribute.

It is who I am.

But there is a safety net this time. I have taken time off my study, have scheduled psychiatric sessions regularly, will watch my diet, keep a trusted friend close (who can reflect to me my over-the-topness's appropriateness), and I will continue my hypnotherapy and yoga. I will thus not reach the depths and am prepared to go to hospital for intervention and re-balancing before my Conference deadlines and PhD deadlines. These I must meet.

By using 'must' I know that the swing up, down will also result in a further down after achieving these goals... but I will worry about that as the year draws to a close. I have changed in these last twelve months of journalling. I know I will survive and continue to succeed and grow.

The only concern is that I still need to convince the 'normal world of work' that us, 'crazies' offer so much that more than compensates for the small periods of non-productivity.

We are a workplace asset!