Reclaiming the Parts I Thought I Had to Leave Behind

A few times lately, I had been asked how my dissertation writing is going.

Not even that long ago, that question made me groan. Not theatrically. Just… honestly. Dissertation work felt overwhelming, insurmountable. Like a mountain I had agreed to climb without oxygen. What was I thinking?! Sure, I was surviving. Hiding from the work a little. I was intimidated by its size and what it seemed to require of me.

Back then, when someone asked, the despair would leak out before I could stop it.

Now?

I pause. I smile. I say, “It’s going fine. Thanks for asking.”

And the thing is, what’s surprising — it’s true. Actually.

What changed wasn’t just my productivity. It was my relationship to myself inside the work.

For a long time, I believed that in order to succeed in LIS, I had to rein in certain parts of myself. The Ethnic Studies grounding. The Cultural Studies instincts. The Sociocultural Anthropology training that taught me to read bodies, power, discourse, silence. Those parts felt… excessive. Too much. Political. Messy. Hard to translate into a field that often prefers documentation over lived genealogy, policy over embodiment.

So I tucked them away.

Not consciously. Just slowly.

Over time, I began to write as if I had to be a narrower version of myself. More procedural. More contained. Less sensitive. Less attuned to racialized governance and asymmetry. Less inclined to say that consent is produced, not freely given. Less likely to admit that institutional life is felt and lingers in the body.

And then something surprising happened.

The dissertation stopped terrifying me the moment I stopped writing against myself.

With structure — pacing and schedules, reading maps, conceptual scaffolding, identified anchors and tracings of thought — I started building instead of bracing. And as I built, the so-called “exiled” parts began reappearing. Not as decorative theory, but as load-bearing beams.

Ethnic Studies lets me see governance friction as racialized, not just bureaucratic.
Cultural Studies lets me treat discourse as constitutive, not descriptive.
Sociocultural Anthropology lets me position myself as insider without dissolving rigor.
Feminist Ethics of Care lets me track asymmetry without pretending neutrality.

These are not side notes. They are the architecture. And they are important parts of me.

I used to think bringing these intellectual threads forward would make my work less legitimate. Now, I see the opposite. Without them, the project was hollow.

There’s something profoundly relieving about realizing you don’t have to amputate yourself to be taken seriously.

Integration is quieter than breakthrough. It doesn’t come with applause. It feels more like a deep exhale. A sense that the voice coming out of your mouth actually belongs to you.

So yes. The dissertation is going fine.

Not because it’s easy.
Not because it’s tidy.
But because I am no longer fragmented inside it.

There is something defining about that.

I used to think I had to choose between embodied, relational meaning-making and LIS academic scholarship. Between life and theory. Between who I was trained to be and who I am.

It turns out the work was waiting for this reunion.

And it feels like an occasion worth marking.