SACRED ambitions
Wow, it has been a long time since I’ve updated the website and written a blog post. I am restarting now with help, thanks to an initiative begun by Margy Thomas and Helen Sword, which they have called #AcWriMoments. It is 30 days worth of prompts about one’s academic writing and thinking. (Technically, this initiative fell in line with #NaNoWriMo and #AcWriMo last November, but I purposely only drafted my prompts to work on later; hence, my publishing them now). Since I’ve been facing a crisis of purpose lately with regard to writing and academia, I thought it might be good for me to take a moment (!) to reflect.
Honestly, I didn’t fully grasp the prompt on Day 1. Rereading it now a few months later, I understand better the aim: finding the will to carry on by finding inspiration, even guidance, in moments great or small. They distilled their idea into the acronym SACRED:
Strategic moments
Artisanal moments
Creative moments
Reflective moments
Embodied moments
Delicious moments
It’s not often that academic writing is treated as something “creative,” “artisanal,” or “delicious,” let alone SACRED. Yet now that I think about it, I became attracted to academic texts partly because of the lofty, refined style. I love it when a scholar manages to express an argument eloquently and rationally. To be able to take pride in writing like that has been one of my longest-standing dreams. And if I’m really honest, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do it. Maybe I don’t even want to anymore. I don’t know whether it’s burn-out speaking, the pressure of academia, or the fallout from the pandemic, but writing feels more and more like a luxury.
I can see that SACRED is meant to be a tool I can fall back on when ambitions begin to fade and the mundane starts to clutter the mind. A part of me is thanking myself for participating in #AcWriMoments all those months ago for what it’s giving me today: a moment to reflect and embody my hopes for the future. Especially now that I have decided to leave Malta (a topic for another post), and am facing a move back to my home country as well as unemployment, this question of what writing means to me is always somewhere on my mind. I’m glad to be publishing this post. That’s a decent step forward, right?