Mixed feelings

🤷‍♀️ Mixed feelings.
Last week, I was standing here with the proof print of my PhD dissertation: Navigating the Storm: Towards Coexisting Ways of Knowing in Approaching Environmental Distress, which I will defend on 27 March 2026 at Maastricht University.

I am proud. Of both the content and the design.

And at the same time, I am tired. Four intense years in which this project lived in every free minute I had; working in our garden shed, and later in a garage in Norway. Alongside work, a study at LSHTM, emigration to another country; and motherhood.

I am also confused. The first question people ask when I tell them about this 400-page work that I am proud of is rarely about its content. Almost immediately, it is about whether it will “pay back”, or whether I have already found a job.

And honestly: sometimes I then feel shame and insecurity. Because I had no income over the past year. Because I finished this work without a tight career plan, but because I felt that I had to do this. Because it also gave me joy. Because it reawakened my creativity and sensitivity; qualities I had lost for many years as a rationally trained medical specialist within a Western scientific framework.