Crackedmirrors & angelpie is my new blog, specifically for personal writing that is related to my postgraduate research.
The title comes from two completely different (and yet, as so often, curiously related) parts of my life. Crackedmirrors is a state of mental health – a precarious state when grasp on the concrete reality that surrounds us begins to slide. The connectedness of everyday life begins to uncouple, the mirror in which our own normality is reflected begins to crack.
Angelpie is a term of endearment, origins completely unknown to me, which I have used for all four of my children as babies, and continue to use with my two adult daughters (but not my adult sons!)
This blog is part of academic work, but I will be writing it in the first person, in terms that are personal and intimate rather than formal and dry. One of my academic methods is autoethnography, a method that has been criticised for its lack of academic rigour, yet seems admirably suited to exploring the business of living as a manic depressive. Like Kay Jamison, I prefer the colourful and descriptive term ‘manic depressive’ rather than the currently accepted term ‘bipolar’. The former term incorporates the idea that manic and depressive states can coexist, as well as each state on its own. I also eschew the appendices ‘illness’ and ‘disorder’ because, like many others, despite the potentially life threatening situations that being a manic depressive can provoke, I would not choose to be without it.
crackedmirrors and angelpie 