I came back from a weekend in London and i have to say that i was left with many reflections around ‘culture’. We had this joke between me and my friend that the city shall be really called BLONDON, due to the ammount of blonde women we saw there, it was as if the whole Eastern Europe has immigrated! London feels like a different country, as if its not UK, you hardly hear any english on the streets and the variety of races and ethnicities encountered is phenomenal…there was a sense of inner freedon in all that, sth that i have felt on other occasions around the experience of being an immigrant myself in a country with so much diversity. I feel that my attention and awareness around culture and identity are heightened due to this PhD topic that i am working on…i was recently saying to my supervisor that i feel my eyes getting bigger and bigger, as if my vision expands around what culture is and how it affects and relates to our sense of being that sometimes i want to close them down, to stop seeing, it is as if it nearely hurts. When in london, i was also aware of the matter around sub-cultures in the same country…the urban as opposed to the rural, the crowded as opposed to the serene…and mainly, the fact that the ammount of nationalities that live in london is so big that itis like a miniature of the globe….this is so different to Athens, for example, where i grew up….when i am travelling to Athens now, after living in the UK, i feel like going to a village, although it is a capital city of 5 million population. i guess this also related to the different mentality, although things are changing indeed, maybe in ways that my awareness cannot even realise or hold as yet. There is less tolerance around self-exppression in Greece. On the other hand, there is more warmth amongst people, or certain ‘restrictions’ keep things more safe…so much to reflect on really, will let it rest for now

Love day today and at university we had this seminar about ‘loving’ our research…:-). I shall admit that doing a PhD is like having a partner, in a love and hate relationship almost…there are moments that u are inspired and ‘in love’ with the whole thing and other times that it all gets too overwhelming and you nearly feel like throwing everything out of the window…i see that i develop ‘compassion’ towards myself through the research process and ofter the Thesis gets personified into a ‘being’ that i relate to in different ways. I see that in other PhD students also when we talk about that process which is actually comforting … Read more »

As i have been preparing a 6 month progress report that is due at our School’s administrator, i realised how much i have done really! It has been a hard period in terms of finding the partcipants, sometimes having so much travelling involved, also due to all the emotional responses that this topic triggers for me…i feel i have had excellent support from supervision and peers though, i thank all those involved…so, this is just a quick line to say well done to myself for what i have achieved so far! and also try to be kind to myself for the challenging time ahead with the analysis and writing.

I attended the CRG meeting earlier today and wrote down an interesting quote related to narrative inquiry. Here it is:

“When the story of our life doesn’t make sense to us, we need to explore alternatives in identity…to fashion a new myth” by McAdams, 1993