TW: Childhood abuse, pet illness

I became disabled in 2019, and my world changed.

I was in the final year of my Undergraduate degree in History as an off-campus student of an interstate university, and by some small miracle, completed my degree with outstanding results. I immediately applied to complete Honours in 2021 at a local university so I could study on campus. Those plans changed when Covid-19 hit Australia, and we were forced to study off-campus, but my marks were high enough that I qualified to apply for entry to the PhD program, and I did. After the intensity of Honours, the idea of continuing felt like I was building on my Honours work and a way to remain inside a thinking, writing bubble.

I had, however, underestimated the effect of ongoing mental illness on my ability to actually complete a PhD. Since becoming disabled, I had been seeing a psychologist regularly to deal with complex PTSD and clinical depression. Becoming disabled retriggered flashbacks of childhood abuse and trauma because, as a child, my pleas for help were ignored. Now, as an adult, my symptoms were being ignored, as were my pleas for help. I found myself trapped in that cycle all over again. This time, though, I was dealing with clinical depression and menopause. It was not one manageable problem but rather a convergence of three serious issues, an unholy trifecta that made ordinary life feel like a battle and the sustained cognitive labour of a doctorate feel impossible.

My original PhD proposal evolved from my Honours thesis, Cultural wars in videogames: an examination of ideological contestation of game ownership and the right to play. The research would have examined video games as contested cultural spaces. I was interested in how the expectations of gamers and the commercial practices of developers differ when games are no longer being maintained, or are abandoned, and what happens to those games that are being lost to history in this way. I was deeply invested in the topic, but it required sustained clarity, endurance, and a stable mind.

It became obvious very quickly after being accepted that I would not be well enough to do it.

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