I’m Not Alone

This past week there was an essay due. While I was working toward completion, I felt alone, yet I knew I was not alone. Each day as I sat at the computer, staring at the monitor, forcing the words to appear in some logical sequence and some cogent format, I felt alone. I struggled with my self to push the ideas onto the page. I cheated at times, taking breaks to allow the brain to drain. I negotiated with my self-imposed structures in order to get it done. Just do this one section, this one paragraph, this one sentence and then you can take a break. It was a running conversation with myself, as I pulled threads together to make some sort of logical argument from the research I’d read, from the thinkers on whom I was relying and on my own experiences with the topic of the essay.

I was alone, just me and my computer.

Yet I was not alone. I could feel the presence of the researchers on whom I was relying. I listened to their words, examined their thoughts, while reconstructing an image of what they were trying to impart. These people were with me in this struggle.

My classmates were with me too. I knew they were going through the same struggles at the same time. My perceptions of their self-imposed segregation from life, friends and family mirrored my own, so I felt less alone. Knowing they were ‘out there’ doing the same things I was doing, helped ease my isolation.

I was not alone since I knew many others had gone before me and many others around the world, even in my own institution, were going through this same work, or similar work, at the same time. As I struggled through hour after hour of writing, I sensed the presence of all those ‘others’ who shared this experience. I don’t know them and will never meet them, but they were there with me in a spirit of shared endeavour. 

It was the flurry of messages in What’sApp on the due date and the day following, that fully emphasized the togetherness and bond we’ve developed in this PhD cohort. While chocolate and wine became the focus on the day after, it was a shared push to completion that happened on the due date. This came from not just those in my own course, but the others in the cohort who were taking other courses. I hope that we can continue this support in the next section when most of us will be taking a self-directed learning course. We may lose touch and feel alone, but we will, in fact, not be alone at all. We’ll be a message away. We’ll just need to reach out and contact each other, to let someone know we’re still in the game, we’re working toward the end, and we’re not alone.