Waiting for Godot

This chapter takes the form of a journey in pursuit of an answer, exploring several layered forms of impairment that have punctuated, and sometimes shaped, an academic life. Some were, unbeknownst to the author at the time, self-inflicted. Others were reactive to exogenous and critical events or experiences that sometimes abruptly, even dramatically, impacted upon the journey. Samuel Beckett’s play ‘Waiting for Godot’ is used as a metaphor encapsulating some aspects of the journey, especially its start and ending. Three figures who both challenge and support the author shape the journey – an academic supervisor, a close teaching colleague, and a research collaborator. The narrative opens by discussing a search for clarity that never came and culminated in a breakdown. It moves on to subsequent morbidity, as suppression and negation shape an original perspective on reflexivity as a limit experience. Distance and relocation present a new form of estrangement while establishing a career in another country and the final movement addresses the experience of being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and alienated from one’s own body. While this segment is unresolved, the author nevertheless endures and remains.