It’s been over a year since I last posted to my website or wrote a blog post. Honestly, it feels really strange starting to write again in a non-academic way. A lot has happened between this blog post and when I last posted. I have spent most of my time over the past year working on (and stressing about) my PhD, dealing with bereavement, rehabilitating multiple physical injuries while trying to stay a somewhat functional human being. My living situation has been pretty terrible and still is, I had to work with some toxic people in a part-time job which I’ve only recently left and things are still pretty stressful with two house moves on the horizon. 

On a more positive note, I have had the opportunity to present my PhD work at an international conference, explore my interest in running, travel to some beautiful places and spend quality time with my loved ones. 

It felt really strange seeing all my medic friends graduate recently. After all, I would’ve been amongst them if I didn’t take the time out for my PhD. More recently I have felt my passion for Medicine wane because I don’t feel optimistic about what it means to be a doctor and aspiring clinical academic now. I love doing research but the post-PhD journey still seems very murky to me. By murky, I mean that there isn’t enough wider support for MB PhDs after they return to the medical degree. A lot of funding appears to be for clinicians further along their training to do research and the struggle to do high quality, original research when back in clinical medicine is very real, especially if you’re like me wanting to do wet lab research. With all that on my mind, I struggled to continue writing as I wrestled with the feeling of wanting to produce helpful content yet feeling like my life is slowly crumbling around me. I have missed being able to write like this but with everything going on, I couldn’t quite get the words out. 

While I wanted to get back into writing blog posts, it also did not feel right for me to continue hosting my website on Wix in light of the Israeli occupation of Palestine (Wix is an Israeli company). I did not want to support that so a few months ago, I started migrating my website and custom domain over to WordPress instead. This took much longer than expected, because Wix does not allow blog posts on a Wix site to be exported directly to other platforms. Instead, I had to upload each blog post manually in between everything else I was doing, but thankfully that work is finally done so I can focus on writing now. I hope you enjoy the new website (all feedback is welcome) and stay tuned for what’s to come! If you’d like to stay up to date with my posts and haven’t done so already, please subscribe below so you can get a notification when I upload!