In and out of time: Practising self-care when leaving and Re-entering higher education

Prompted by an innocuous question during a job interview of how I practised self-care, this chapter explores how my choice to leave a secure, well-paid lecturing role for a series of part-time jobs re-engineered my sense of identity and relationships with wellbeing and work. Only after leaving academia was I able to reflect on previous distorted working practices. These were especially evident when related to my research specialism of working with people in prison and under court ordered community orders, exploring if and how creative activities might support changes in behaviour. Conversations between sites and experiences of doing, serving, spending, wasting, and biding time inside institutions are explored in this chapter. It explains how and why I was able to make a positive decision in middle-age to return to academia, in a different disciplinary setting with a changed hierarchical status, while maintaining boundaries developed in the meantime.