Everything in Its Right Place

Warning: this is a long post, so you can skip to the last paragraph and the instructions bit at the bottom if you're feeling too lazy or find my writing too confusing/boring or you just can't be bothered. 

I think this picture of me perfectly captures the
anguish a hater carries inside.
You can see the early manifestation of the
  space-between-the-brows wrinkle
that signals an uneasy disposition to worldly matters. 

When I was little I hated studying. I used to complain a lot about having the obligation to go to school each day. “Children should only be supposed to play”, I used to say. Or at least that’s what my mother recalls. This is part of my childhood mythology*. 

So I was a hater from an early age, but I still couldn’t find the strength to tell the world to f* itself and do whatever I wanted. I had a huge sense of responsibility when I was little. I hated studying but I was among the best students in my class because all my mother wanted was for me to be a good student, and I loved my mom so I had to. Of course at some point all of that backfired because puberty hit me really hard in terms of mental stability (being a hater from an early age and all), so when I was in high school I finally started being lazy and thinking about dropping out. Of course I didn’t, because I’m a coward who’s been well indoctrinated, so I carried on studying and finished high-school with lousy grades (for my standards, at least). 

However, life has a way of screwing with you (or maybe helping you), so even when I wasn’t at all interested in studying and having a traditional life with a traditional career, I sat for the PSU (or PAA at that time) and got a rather decent score despite the fact I hadn’t prepared for it. Due to that twist of fate, I decided to consider university and ended up enrolling in the BA in English Language and Literature at this university, which I finished, although it took me longer that it was supposed to since I truly hated having to go to class and all. But anyway, I did, and after I did I realised that I had to continue studying if I wanted to be something other than a high-school teacher because, being the hater I am, I also hated school and couldn’t imagine a life forced to work inside one. So I did a BA in Education just to have more options and improve my reputation (since I had been a lousy student in my first BA and I needed to prove my teachers I had changed) and then enrolled in my first Master's degree at this same university with the same teachers that had witnessed the worst side of the student me (yes, I managed to convince them). I did this in an attempt to escape fate, but also because I really liked English linguistics so I wanted to have the chance to teach something I enjoyed rather than just present simple and past tense in an ever-ending loop, as I imagined most teachers did in the school context.

My copy of the 1989 edition of one of
Fairclough's most influential books

I still haven’t finished that Master's though, because I got a scholarship to study abroad when I was starting to write the thesis and was too overwhelmed to carry on with it. However, it helped me to realise that I actually loved learning, specially about linguistics and gender, so everything changed and I ended up doing an MA in English Language at the University of Manchester and writing a dissertation using corpus methods to do critical discourse analysis on British newspaper articles about lesbian women. I was high on my love for learning at that time, so I decided to do a PhD in Linguistics at Lancaster University studying gender and sexuality in the Chilean context. I chose this university because that’s where Norman Fairclough worked and he is one of the most important scholars in the field (of course I met him). Also, I wanted to be supervised by Paul Baker, who specialises in language and sexuality discourse studies using corpus methods, and he was also in Lancaster. I got accepted and then started hating everything again, but that’s another story. Luckily, I finished my degree and now I’m super motivated again, so I’m glad my sense of responsibility has played this trick on me once more, forcing me to carry on along the path that best suits me despite all my efforts to resist it. Honestly, I’ve reached this point in life when I feel everything I've done has led me to this and everything in my past  makes so much sense. I took these courses because I realised that linguistics for the sake of it was not my cuppa, that I needed to do something that I felt had an effect in the world and being a language lover cisgender woman who’s always been sort of an outlier I really felt that this is what I was meant to do all along (namely language, gender and sexuality studies with a queer linguistics perspective).  

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So, today you have to write about a postgraduate course that you would consider taking in the future. You can tell us about your motivation to undertake that course and the reasons why you like that discipline. However, if you don't feel too chatty (unlike me), you can just stick to the task and mention:

- The course (duh)
- Reasons to do it

- Subject(s) you would like to study

- Where you would like to study (Chile or abroad)

- How you would like to study (distance learning, blended system, part-time course, etc.)

- Any other relevant ideas

• This entry has to be written in 220 words.
• Make comments on 3 of your classmates’ posts and 1 comment on my post.

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childhood mythology**: this expression refers to those stories about one's childhood that everyone in one's family knows but still get continuously told during Sunday lunchtime or family gatherings. This task is usually performed by mothers and grandmothers, who can't get over their (grand)children's lives due to their imposed role as child carers. 

** I think this is probably a misnomer, but I recently coined this term and now I'm trying to make it a thing, so please bear with me.