A story of a twenty-one-year-old woman impacted by COVID19 and her cluelessness about the online world.
At first glance, looking at the topics that Rebecca (my lecturer) had presented to us as potential topics for our seminar presentations, I was slightly scared. First, I honestly did not know what half of these topics were about, and secondly, I had no idea how I would go on presenting and then discussing at least half of them with others in an academic setting. So, I had chosen the topic of academic blogs, vlogs, and podcasts to discuss in my presentation as it appeared the less daunting topic still available at the time. The internet scares me, and it should.
Around the beginning of April, I started preparing for the presentation, where I had to decide if I wanted to discuss all three online mediums or pick just one. I knew I would not be able to provide an in-depth analysis of all three in the ten-minute allocated timeframe, so I decided on academic blogs because they seemed the most straightforward medium. We who have existed in the internet age have read blogs from people discussing various topics. Honestly, the first thing that came to mind was book blogs, as when I was younger, I had dreamt of running a blog reviewing books. You think that to be an academic blogger; there are some special criteria you need to fit into, which initially confused me when first learning about the genre of academic blogging. I started this research to understand what makes an academic blogger different from other bloggers, but that was the wrong way to approach that topic. The academic blogger was just a blogger involved in academia. So, when I was deciding on the week’s readings for the class to read, it was somewhat difficult because many of them were about the use of blogging in academic spaces and not so much about just the academic blogs. However, with help, I was able to find all three readings about academic blogs which were relevant enough in the discussion of digital history scholarship.
Although everything about technology and the online world scares me, I was excited about presenting; I had crafted a good presentation. I believed it would go to plan, so I was disappointed as I quickly stumbled over my words on some points, and my PowerPoint was somehow out of order (although if you had sat through my theatre302 presentation last year, you would know that my PowerPoints always let me down). I call this the absence of finetuning, which would usually be due to poor time management, but this was for health reasons. I was still recovering from COVID19 and was suffering (and to an extent am still) with post-COVID fatigue, my progress has been slow, and it has taken me longer to finish everything. COVID had me feeling mental and physically exhausted for the better part of the first semester. Then, when I felt somewhat better, I fractured my right foot, which left me more mentally drained. Five hospital visits later and five weeks of uncertainty about what was wrong with me, I became an overwhelmed, anxious mess. I had friends who all described their quote on quote ‘cursed’ year of studying where their mental health complicated their studies, and I thought I had escaped that cruse, but apparently, I had not. Academic blogs centred on the academic’s life, and just reading about their experiences of being in academia provided me comfort in understanding how other academics navigated their studies and made me feel less alone and inadequate. One classmate Liam had said something that stuck with me during our discussion: reading something published on a blog instead of something like a journal was like having a conversation with an academic over a couple of beers rather than at a formal conference or meeting. Blogging makes academics more personable to people, which I think is good.
Presenting a presentation about academic blogging was daunting and overwhelming; an assignment that would have usually been easy and enjoyable became very difficult because of outside circumstances, but alas, the presentation went ahead, and I am proud of everything I have done. You think talking to more people is scarier, but the fewer people in the room, the more terrifying public speaking can be. However, this blog is about my experience writing about the subject of academic blogging. I want to remind myself and everyone else that when life gets a little much as it has for me, take life one day at a time and that it is helpful mentally to blog about your experiences in academia.