Full circle

February 2025

On the long list of things I thought I might do the year I turn fifty, going back to university didn’t even make the top ten. But with all other decisions and plans still pending, that’s the one thing I know I’m doing. I can’t even decide whether to have a birthday party or not,* but somehow I’ve applied, been accepted, enrolled, paid the fees, got a supervisor and posed for my ID photo.** Think of it as the power of cumulative activity — I applied thinking that it would be a way to test out the desire and that I could just see what happened, and then one thing led to another and there I was on Tuesday last week, reading list in hand, scouring the shelves and wondering whether I could afford a coffee. I don’t want it to sound like I’m flippant or half-hearted about this choice. Following my nose, my heart, my gut has led me to right choices far more often than not, and this feels like a very right choice, one that I couldn’t foresee but that will bring a lot of happiness and new possibility. Not that it will be easy, but it will be a good sort of hard. I’m going to give it my best shot.

Lots of things have changed since I was last here, and lots… have not. When I quit my PhD in 2006, I had a newborn and creeping anxiety. Grant Robertson, whom I had followed into the Registry occupation a few years previously, was laying the groundwork that would see him win the Wellington Central seat in the 2008 general election. He’s now the Vice Chancellor of the university after a stellar political career, my baby is nineteen and has been joined by a brother and an assortment of animals, my parents have died — too young and too hard — and the anxiety has morphed into perimenopausal mental disarray held precariously at bay with an ever-changing regimen of patches, exercise and the occasional deep breath.

I did yoga then, sometimes the gym, a lot of walking. I’m still walking but I’ve swapped the yoga for barre or, if I must, yoga barre. I’ve started going to the gym again, sporadically. The student ID will come in handy for that. My body, which has functioned fairly well for almost fifty years — thank you, Jesus — suddenly has a tendency to throw an almighty hissy fit when I do anything odd like carry a bag or do up my shoes. The first time it happened, I couldn’t move my arm more than a few inches in any direction unless I was under water or guiding it with my other hand like a robot. The second time I couldn’t breathe properly for a day. Generally, I don’t feel old but in those moments I do.

The campus is familiar, but I’m more grateful for the many toilets and the decent seating everywhere. I know the names of more plants, and in fact there are more plants. More sculpture too, and the river’s flood protection has been reworked to incorporate a more natural flow, plantings and wider banks. The birds like it better, maybe the fish too. I don’t think there was a university-wide help desk when I was there last — there were some central support services, but you went to your department for most things. I was dubious about centralising this function, but I’m a convert. The staff are diverse and authentic, genuinely lovely human beings. Nothing seems like a fuss — they solve problems and answer questions with a straightforwardness that many other institutions and companies would do well to emulate. They have an uncanny ability to suss out exactly what sort of help you need and how much. In my case, this means walking me five metres across the floor to the library catalogue machine, which is in full view but somehow invisible to me, then leaving me alone to look up the books I want. I had a brief moment of panic when I thought that the last time I’d used the catalogue it was on cards, but that’s not true — the electronic version came in while I was at uni. Email came in too, but it’s possible we thought the fax was at least as likely to be the tech with real longevity. I still like to have a banana in my bag for a snack, I still write the quotes I like in a book as I read, and the photos of the Burns Fellows still run along the wall just past the lifts and the toilets on the second floor. I know more of those faces now though. I still find writing hard, but I have twenty more years of churning out content to deadlines under my belt. I’ve become more distractible, and better at hauling my brain back onto the tracks when I need to.

Other things, too, have changed — but not as much as they should. Rampant homophobia and the fight for queer rights were hallmarks of my teenage years and my early twenties. Combined with a church upbringing, this was nearly lethal. Civil unions had just become legal when my baby was born, and we chose that as our form of commitment when he was just a few months old. We’ve come so far since then — such beauty and pride and joy in our rainbow youth and oldies — and suddenly Trump and his ilk are putting it all at risk. I don’t remember climate change being a big topic of conversation, but we all knew about the ozone hole and gave up our spray deodorants with a grudging willingness to do the right thing for the planet. I learnt about Te Tiriti o Waitangi while I was at university, and the people I learnt from are still friends and fellow activists. The Foreshore and Seabed Hīkoi in 2004 was the biggest march I’d ever been on — until Hīkoi mō te Tiriti in 2024. Around Te Moananui-a-Kiwa, independence movements flowered in the face of subjugation and violence. Now we have a genocide and mass destruction in Palestine. The long struggles for sovereignty, independence, tino rangatiratanga continue, pathways created step by step, hand in hand out of a colonised and colonising world.

I don’t tend to make decisions for one overwhelming reason. More often, I’ll wait something out until layers of factors start to overlap, building a picture that something is very wrong or definitely the right path. When I quit my PhD, it was partly for the little baby I was suddenly responsible for. I had seen the strain academia placed on mothers, and I couldn’t see how to navigate it. But if I’d known how to write a PhD then, I think I would have stayed and figured it out. It felt impossible, the need to stay on task, to focus, to magic deep thought out of slow reading and slower writing. If someone had whispered “neurodiversity” in my ear back then, I might have learnt something about myself and how to work with my brain. Without that framing, I was left with self-doubt, loathing and shame. Understanding myself better has given me permission to try again, to shift the parameters and trust that I have enough tricks up my sleeve to make it work.

August 2026

Well, that was a year. I did it. I did the Masters, passed with Distinction, graduated last weekend. It was all different, it was all the same. I wrote a novel! I loved the whole process, the dwelling in imagination, letting characters find their way, opening up all the portals of creativity and language. I worked with a wonderful group of women and a supervisor who always knew how to point me in the right direction. One of my markers loved the novel, and the other one hated it —I’ve processed all the feelings, it’s all good.

Returning to normal life has not been the easiest, but graduation was awesome. I spent the weekend hanging with the family and my classmates, and I didn’t feel nervous at all, just kind of happy and chill. Rabbit took photos, and a very lovely woman asked if he would like her to let him into the Clocktower to take some there. Turns out it was the Chancellor. She smiled at me when I shook her hand, and there were lots of familiar and friendly faces on the stage and in the audience. Emerita Professor Jocelyn Harris, who counselled me on how to write with a baby, received an honorary degree and delivered a kick-arse address. I gave myself blisters with a new pair of shoes and walked barefoot through town after the ceremony. My kids were freaking gorgeous, and my partner and sister were there ALL THE WAY. There were lots of mini celebrations with meals and photos and so many hugs. I had to accept that the double chin is real, and I keep seeing my mum in my face. I guess I was writing about memory and belonging, so it’s right that this milestone was wrapped up with both those things.

Life turns its funny old circles, beginning to ending to beginning again.

Sample for the curious

At the bottom of the sanctuary, they reached a gate. They opened it with the key, which they left tucked into the crook of a sentinel tī kouka as requested. A track led them through the wetlands, past stands of raupō and harakeke. Waterbirds stalked the channels and floated through the reeds. Frogs croaked, unseen.

Partway along the track, they found a bench and sat down. Jim had done them proud, and the assorted wraps and fruit cakes felt like a feast. Hop was quiet, and Moni wondered if he was too hot. She passed him the water bottle.

“I miss our cave, a little bit,” he said. “I want to keep going, find Mum and Dad and Hester, but it was nice up there.”

A pair of pūtakitaki, shelducks, nosed through the water, the surface rippling in their wake. Moni turned side-on around and lifted her ankle onto the bench. It hurt more than she wanted to admit.

“I miss it too,” she said. “How about you come to the island with me one day and I’ll take you camping?”

Suddenly, she desperately wanted to show this boy all the old places, the tightly curving bays, the narrow beaches, the furled and knotted bush. She would find tiny orchids for him, pale green hoods among the ferns and moss. They would sit on the jetty as a little blue penguin swam beneath them, diving after fish.

The offer surprised her as much as it did Hop. She felt like the birds of the sanctuary, as if the gates had unexpectedly opened and they had found no threat there after all.

* Probably I will, but it will be SMALL. Updated to add: it was medium sized and very happy.

** I did not pose. I stood on the feet markings and looked around vaguely for a while and then the ID guy said “we’re done” and somehow he got a passable shot out of that, I do not know how. My expression was basically the same as it is on every ID card I have.