I’ve been here before. That point that you get to at a certain time in your studies, where in one way you are confident you can make your way forward. I’m coping quite well in my classes: I can write assignments that get me through fairly effortlessly, and I’m also trying to push myself to do more than just get by. At times I feel I’m doing well in practice: at others, not so good. And yet it’s that point when there’s also a sudden sense of “so what”? If I follow through in my programme as a full-time student, I’ll be finished with my coursework requirements by April next year. Then there’ll be a summer free, then eight months of practicum, and I’ll be qualified as a counsellor. And then, I have to confess I’m unsure. Part of me almost wants to slow down, to explore the social context of mental health and wellness much more closely, not primarily through reading but through experience. And part of me also wants more time in my life: studying, as I’ve found in the past, sucks out my creative and intellectual energy for other projects. I’d still like to do some form of textual and historical research; I’d still like to write; I’d like to read deeply, in an engaged manner, rather than flipping through the pages of fiction as I seem to do at the moment. I’d like to spend more time with my partner and friends, and also more time looking inward. I’d like to pause and look around.

If I’ve been here before, I’ve also responded  to these feelings of “so what”? I took time between each of my degrees: a year working in children’s theatre before my masters’: periods teaching in China, Taiwan, and working with Vietnamese refugees in the UK before my doctorate. While studying for my PhD at UBC, I carved out two further slices of time out: three months in Hong Kong on a scholarship, and then a year to learn Mandarin in Taiwan. Even as an academic, I negotiated unpaid leaves of absence from time to time in addition to my sabbatical leave: it was important to recharge, to do something different, to not always to be driven by research productivity. I could take a break this September, or simply take things more slowly, with one or two courses a semester for the next two years. I’ve researched this, and its possible, even though there would be a gap in continuity between the practice-based courses that would be difficult to fill.

Why not pause? Perhaps above all because of a sense I now have of ageing, of things being different, of having limited time. In my twenties and thirties and forties, still, possibilities seemed infinite. Now doors seem to close more often then they open: if you try to prop them ajar, you never move on. Friday 31^st of January was one such transition for me: I ceased to be a citizen of the European Union, and I will never be an EU citizen again. And this made me think again of the dizzying changes I’ve been through in the last three and a half years after the Brexit referendum.

I was in England on a visit to my father in June 2016, just before the Brexit vote, although I’d lived away too long to be able to cast a ballot myself. I found a diary entry from that time. I walked through the village where I spent my teenage years, itching to get away to London. Nothing much had changed: the banks, the butcher, the Chinese takeaway, and the green grocer were still in place, even if they were now interspersed by a rash of charity shops. Even the weather was the same: showered and then watery sunlight on the red brick of the buildings in the shopping parade. It had been the Queen’s birthday or some other such event, and each of the buildings were festooned with bunting and flags. All as I remembered it, and yet something strangely different, the closer you looked. The Union Jacks alternated with Saint George’s flags, red crosses on a white ground, flags that I could only remember far right extremists using when I was a young adult. Something disturbing, then, in this apparent calm, as if the whole row of shops was a façade, hollow, easily blown away. Three and a half years later, and the storm has blown through, both in the world and in my own life. Detergent, Trump, Bolsonaro, Brexit: a world remade. My father has passed on, and when we go to the village churchyard to visit my parents’ grave I can only see the house where they lived, where I lived for that last year before I went to study in London, from the outside. The house was never really home to me, but there was a strange reassurance in the fact that it persisted, even in the last years as my father became less mobile, moss growing in the cracks between the brick surface of the front yard, even turning the front gate from white to a shabby green. On my brief visits I’d try to put everything right, wipe the gate down, rake up forgotten leaves from the winter, not quite sure if my father appreciated this, or if he felt somehow, silently, rebuked.

I’d return from these visits to Singapore, confident that the city state was my new home, never really thinking that my application for citizenship would be rejected. Just after that Brexit visit, I realise, I flew to Canada, taking as summer courses my first undergraduate prerequisites in Counselling Psychology at UBC. I didn’t think the that we’d settle in Canada, only that we might go there to take another of those pauses, those times of reflection. And even as I write this I’m conscious of not quite knowing how to use “there” and here.” I am in Canada now, and yet part of me is still not, even after two years, really here.

My father, I realise, was someone who liked to close doors. At seventeen, he left the town in the Yorkshire Dales where he had grown up and went off to join the British Navy. When he came back, his father had left, and his brothers and sisters had dispersed: home was no longer there. As he built his career, he moved from place to place, dragging my mother, and my older sister, and me in his wake, seeking a better life for us all. Each time he moved, another door shut for my family, but also for me. I would be uprooted from a circle of friends whom I would never see again. When he retired from his position as a school principal he was scrupulous in not interfering in the school. He cut himself off, closing up that part of his life. I wonder if I didn’t learn something from him, unconsciously. In my twenties I lived in London, Gainesville in Florida, Changsha in China, Taipei in Taiwan, and then Haslemere, Surrey, in the English Home Counties. If I went back to some of those places to visit, I never really kept in touch with the people there I once knew, whose lives I was very much part of. I wonder if now that closing of doors so habitual to him also became a default gesture for me.

And yet I’m also curious about how these doors still remain open, without my paying attention to them. In January, I went to the MLA Convention in Seattle and was surprised how comfortable it felt. I was an invited speaker on a panel, and attending talks, having conversations with scholars and friends I know, and getting to know new people, was surprisingly effortless. None of that drama of the job interview, or the anxiety of a new book. So I might perhaps reach an equilibrium, still doing scholarship, albeit at a reduced rate, in the summer months. And then I turn back to my course work, and my to do list, and think that something has to give. When you are old, my father once said to me, your whole time is taken up simply with the routine of staying alive. I’m not there yet, but I can sense changes coming, the need to close up some areas of my life, at least for now, so that I can enter those that seem most promising. And yet there’s still an impossible dilemma. How to gain time to look around? Which doors to keep open, which to enter, which to allow to gently close?