A return to arms

It's been a long and weird year.

I spent a lot of my second year of study dancing around the subject. I think I was scared of the immense weight of the body of text available to me, and as a consequence I wanted to write about everything - a stance that isn't very conducive to a clear and concise thesis. Updating this blog had also become something I was scared of doing, because I often felt as though I should only update it if I had something meaningful to say, and it very rarely felt as though that was the case. The entry from 24th September 2011, "Losing My Way," is a good summation of my attitude for a lot of the past year.

I'm a great believer in harsh personal criticism, so I have no qualms about saying that my behaviour, in which I put off things I needed to do because I was too scared of doing them, was incredibly stupid. After all, who am I writing this blog for, if not for myself? I can't lie to myself in my own research notes, either.

The second-year blues hit me very hard and I took the long way round with regards to my research, something I wish I hadn't done. I hate the phrase, "I don't believe in having regrets," because the regrets I hold have been very important in shaping who I am. There are things I've done in my life (both personally and professionally) that I'm not proud of, or I wish I'd handled differently. Of course I regret the stuff I did and said when I was twenty-one - I was an idiot when I was twenty-one - and thinking about those things makes me cringe and want to do better. I don't let bad memories consume me, but they're a good motivator.

That's how I'm going to consider last year. I was an idiot, but it was a learning curve; as my supervisor said to me (rather ruefully): "Sometimes you need to explore all the wrong avenues to find out which one is the right one." Last year wasn't a total failure: I managed to get two publications and two conferences in. I wish I hadn't spent so much time exploring, but what's done is done and I've learnt from it. At least I finally feel better-grounded in the literature of the period.

Coming up in the next week: castrati, burlesque opera, and eighteenth-century fears about Continental maleness.