Isa
13 Sept 2025
Building is comforting. Making things that transcend the span of one’s own lifetime and lifeworld fascinates me. And those things can be words, houses, a family, or a community.
A message popped up on the Mac: ‘No backup for 87 Days’.
That’s the number of days I couldn’t write. Nothing worthwhile the backup.
5 months ago I published my doctoral dissertation after defecting from academia 2 years earlier.
87 days ago there was a fizzled-out attempt at imitating J.G.Ballard with AI-assisted sci-fi stories on authoritarianism, mystics and morality.
And then there was nothing.
A year ago at a dinner party, one of my supervisors, Scott, sat in-between me and a renowned Melbourne-based author, Christos.
Jokingly and perhaps half by way of nudging me to submit my manuscript (which I continued to work on for a year, which was ‘a year too long’, Scott would say), Scott asked Christos, how he knows when he’s ready to submit to editors.
Christos, soft-spoken, contemplated and replied: ’when I’m sure that I can take the criticism’.
Yet, most academic publications do not end with a bang; they end with a whimper, or nothing.
Nobel laureate, Christiane Nüsslein-Vorhard, admitted that the Nobel Prize was ‘a distraction’ and her career ended a little bit (‘und alles war aus’) after that.
Achieving a major milestone in life can be terrifying. The arrival fallacy, combined with imposter syndrome that frequently haunt female professionals and people of colour, can distort reality, leading one to lose sight of the present happiness.
But not for this winner. 5 years later, Prof. Nüsslein-Vorhard, published a cookbook.
For quite a while I couldn’t summon enough courage to open the 5 author copies delivered at my doorstep, let alone gift them to people of significance honouring the academic tradition, until I torn one down and made a nice lamp shade out of it.
I’m regaining the narrative, I thought, this writer’s block is under control.
I’m turning the writer’s block into a building block.
For me, building is comforting.
Not only am I building buildings at work and in private, I also research the topic.
More importantly, for the past decade I’ve been building a life with family and an increasing number friends in Melbourne, like a migratory bird that first learns to settle.
Making things that transcend the span of one’s own lifetime and lifeworld fascinates me. And those things can be words, houses, a family, or a community.
PS. It appears that J.G.Ballard also disregarded his debut novel, The Wind from Nowhere. And he was not alone.