A quick personal update

I've just realised it's been over a month since my last post. The gap of that length wasn't intentional, i've just been busy with various things going on in my life, plus the usual wanting-to-write-about-lots-of-things-but-not-getting-round-to-it inertia. However, i think i owe whatever readers i have a bit more of an explanation of the events of the last 6 months or so in my life.

In September last year, the job i had had for more than a year as a PA for another (physically impaired) disability activist (as mentioned in this post) fell apart, and most of my life and plans for the future along with it. I don't really feel like going into the exact circumstances, but suffice to say that i was betrayed very deeply on both personal and political levels, and there were repercussions within both local and national activist movements. As a result of this, and the fact that other key people in my life had moved on and other local activist projects i was involved in had fallen apart due to lack of enthusiasm and/or organisation, there was really nothing left for me in Birmingham, and so i made the decision to move to Manchester, as that was the city where both the largest number of my friends and the most promising intersections of my activist interests were.

I probably could and should have moved to Manchester in September, but a combination of depression, inertia, isolation and indecision, exacerbated by the effect that winter always has on me both physically and emotionally, meant that it took until February for that to actually happen (after several episodes of trying and failing to effect a move, including twice missing out on flats that would have been ideal through inertia and indecision meaning others beat me to it before i could make my mind up). I'm currently sharing a flat with 2 other people, something that after the truly hellish experiences i had in previous shared houses (before the last place i lived in, my first fully self-contained flat, for almost 2 years) i really hadn't thought i would ever do again, and probably still won't do again in the long term, but for a relatively short-term arrangement it's working surprisingly well, and most of my fears about it were unfounded - i definitely think it was worth it for moving from Birmingham to Manchester. The only major problem with it is that it will only last until the end of June, and i really don't know what i'm going to do after that.

I still want to do the MA in Disability Studies at the University of Leeds, but am currently torn about whether to still go for it this autumn or not. I still need to investigate funding possibilities, as my original plan to save up enough money to fund myself was destroyed by the loss of my job (I haven't found any other paid work since, and don't really expect to in the foreseeable future, for a number of reasons). The likeliest option i have found is a Career Development Loan, but i still know little to nothing about the terms and conditions of them. There's also a large part of me that really feels like moving to another new city just a few months after the last time isn't that good an idea, particularly as, while some things have come slower than i hoped/expected them to, i have started to get meaningfully involved in local community projects in Manchester - including a group aiming to set up an autonomous social centre (i am planning at some point to write here about autonomous social centres) - and it would be very likely to feel like leaving Manchester just when things were properly starting to come tgether for me both in terms of personal social life and community involvement. I'm thus considering options including deferring going to Leeds for another year (although given that i've said i'd do the MA "next year" every year for the last 5 years, one does have to wonder at what point "next year" becomes "never"), commuting to Leeds while living in Manchester (which i can't help thinking would frustrate me by putting my academic life and my social/activist life in 2 different cities, when one of the things i passionately want to do in the field of disability is bring academia and grass-roots activism together), and as a bit of a wild card but one i'm not entirely discounting, possibly doing a course i was recently told about at Manchester Metropolitan University instead...

(On that note, i'll plug here an awesome-sounding conference happening at MMU on Wednesday 12th and Thursday 13th May, which Larry is a keynote speaker at and which i've managed to blag a place at: Critical Disability Studies Conference: Theorizing Normalcy and the Mundane. I'm very excited about both far too many of the conference presentations (including many that clash with each other and i really want to go to both!) and the kind of conversations that are likely to happen there...)

I've recently started posting on Twitter, mainly as an outlet for the many, many things that i find interesting enough to want to share a link to, but don't feel able to write actual blog posts about, but also in the hope that it might help me to get better at writing in a less long-winded, more to-the-point way (one of the things that i know have a major effect on the accessibility, or lack thereof, of my writing). I'm enjoying Twittering (if that's the right verb), tho i'm not quite sure if it is having the latter effect (i think a 140-character limit may be simply too short to meaningfully help me practice writing more concisely - a site with a limit of something like 100 or 200 words might be more useful).

I'm probably going to make a few more changes to the format of this blog at some time soon: while it's now much better than it was before, there are still some (relatively minor) things that i'm not quite happy with. I don't think the changes will be massive, though. As far as blog content is concerned, i have quite a few topics i intend to post about fairly soon, and am going to make an effort to post things of decent length at least a couple of times a week over the next month or so. I won't say which topics i'm going to post on next now, tho, as i have no idea which of them i'm going to do first.

I am now 28 years old. I was 25 when i started this blog. It's hard to believe that i've had this blog for almost 3 years, and there are still things that i have intended to write about in it for as long as i've had it, and still haven't got round to. My inertia can be truly ridiculous sometimes. Anyway, my absence from blogging over the last month or so has been mostly because my time and energy has been taken up by finding my way around a new city and getting involved in various offline things, rather than because of anything like serious depression or not wanting to blog any more, which was the main reason for this post. Hopefully (although, as always, this is certainly no guarantee) i will have a couple of more substantial pieces of writing finished within roughly the next week...