starting somewhere

Silence again. I've been spending the last month struggling with making order out of chaos; of making a narrative out of overlapping pieces of reality. I started somewhere. Here:

The evening of my first day at Millside hospital I had arranged to go out to dinner with a friend: part catch-up, part beginning-of-fieldwork celebration. I met her at the station and we walked through the dark streets of the city towards the restaurant. I talked about my day and, three hours later walking back, I was still talking. She listened and offered words of support whilst reminiscing herself of her first few days of fieldwork in a school three years previously. I told her about my feelings of anticipation and anxiety; about the midwife who had taken me into a room, shut the door and tearfully poured out her feelings of helplessness to me while I listened, feeling equally helpless. Without the ability to critically analyse such a new and strange experience, that first day I had simply felt it. I had felt the relief of finally beginning after weeks of bureaucratic delays; the anxiety of wondering what would happen to the woman who had just walked in in labour when there wasn’t a single free bed in the place and the distress I hadn’t anticipated – that from being around people in pain.

These emotions changed as the weeks went by. I learned that you can always find space somewhere and as the cries of pain gradually became background noise, I began to see patterns which I could begin to use to think ‘critically’ about what I saw, in a way that I hadn’t had the emotional space to do earlier on. Despite finding my own coping mechanisms for managing emotion during my fieldwork, these feelings, both the midwives’ and my own, remained key to the experience of fieldwork. To write an ethnography without them seems inaccurate and disingenuous, and yet finding a way of writing emotion into an academic text has been a challenge. As social scientists ‘we are unaccustomed to coming into contact with the personal life and vulnerabilities of the author, or with concrete details involving the human responses of particular, suffering people’(Ellis and Bochner 1999: 230). This is partly because of the traditional demands to maintain some kind of academic ‘distance’ in writing social science, but also because it is so difficult to articulate in words the complexity which emotion brings to a social context. I could spend this chapter simply describing in detail the process by which I negotiated access to the two units, passed through the NHS Ethics process and spent my time on the wards but I would be missing a layer of complexity which both enriches the story and makes it very difficult to tell.


Today I feel introspective, inspired and carpe diem-esque.

On the bus I listened to Lou Rhodes as the sun came through the window from between the orange leaves. In these two songs, she can say things better:


Lou Rhodes - Each Moment New

A wise man said to me 'don't underrate simplicity'. So I strip my life away and try to live each day by day and feel each moment new. Though so hard I try, so many failings cloud my eye and with troubled mind a sense of peace so hard to find to feel each moment new.

But I will be all I can be. Do everything with all I have in me. Life is a blessing, this much I know; and every lesson can only help us grow to feel...each moment new.

Another thing we missed, love is really all there is and together, sure most anything we can enjoy. To feel each moment new; to feel each moment new.



Lou Rhodes - No re-run

Did you ever wake one day and wonder what you'd lost? Was your life a hidden dream that only now you know the cost? There is no rerun, won't you hear me true. Do what's yours to be done and the world she smiles on you.

Did you ever love someone and never let them know? Emotion bursting at your seams but too afraid to let it show. There is no rerun, won't you hear me true. Live second to none and the world she smiles on you.

Don't you know you're a blessing put upon this earth. Can't you hear her calling? Realise your true worth. Are you gonna live your life or let it slip away? So busy waiting for tomorrow that you miss today. There is no rerun, won't you hear me true. Sell your dream for no one and the world she smiles on you.


Thanks Lou