The Intellectual Autobiography assigned for the Interdisciplinary Futures lecture last week had me – unexpectedly – struggling. It’s a deceptively simple assignment: convey your intellectual journey, be that academic or professional or personal, and note down which disciplines influenced your thinking and decision-making over time.
Ironically, when I looked at my finished draft, it didn’t at all reflect my own impression of my journey up to this point. When others comment on my life and lifestyle, it’s usually to point out how many things I’ve done, tried, seen, or experimented with. When I reflect on my own self-image, that tracks – I find myself drawn to the unusual, to the absurd, chasing experiences in part simply to have gone through the experience. To know what it’s like. To have done it, and then continue on. It’s why I keep moving on to new cities and countries when others I know still live in the town they completed their undergrad in, why even my closest friends sometimes say, “Wait, hang on, when did you do that?” and why I answer so many questions of why with ‘Because I thought it’d be interesting.’
My draft for the Intellectual Autobiography, on the other hand, shows only a single track: Writing.
In part, this is due to the short-lived nature of my other interests. With several decades of personal development to look back on, there are many things I delved deeply into for a few months or even a year or two that left no significant impact on my biography. I tried it and moved on from it, so out it goes. Writing is something I’ve been doing for decades and, unlike many other things, something I never stopped doing after I’d started, so it’s the bold red throughline in a life full of tangents and ‘pointless’ excursions, full of upheaval and attempts at self-discovery and joyful chaos.
Still, looking at it all laid out on (digital) paper, it feels frustrating. Insufficient. So many missing chapters of disciplines that I loved at the time, many of which I was decently good at and could well have turned into a career. So many things that could have had massive impact on my life and choices, but somehow didn’t.
That’s not how I want to look back on my dissertation.
A dissertation that only reflects one aspect of my skillset, no matter how well it turned out otherwise, seems like it would feel incomplete. Considering how interdisciplinary EFI is, and how foundational it’s made for us to practice interdisciplinarity, the thought of creating a dissertation that is, ultimately, only a piece of writing feels simplistic and disappointing. For once, I’d like to span the divide between my one prevailing, constant interest and the flights of fancy that flit into and out of my life at random. It’s hard to pinpoint one of them when there are so many (and, looking back at my life to put them into words for the Intellectual Autobiography assignment, so many that I was so very passionate about at that moment that I’ve not really touched or thought about in years), but I know I want to explore more than ‘just’ writing. I want to dig into the interdisciplinarity of EFI and find a topic that utilizes my strengths – both my ability to write and my ability to adjust, adapt and become passionate about so many other topics.
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