The collection of a history student

Aaaand it happened again: This thing called live – I literally finally enjoyed my time as short-term expat and it started with a trip to Copenhagen and Stockholm after Easter. Copenhagen was cute, but Stockholm got me hooked! Even though my first day there was very cold and rainy I still felt so content (the next days had been blessed by sunshine). After the winter in Norway and the long dark I felt as if I was eventually able to breath again.

I love Norway’s nature, the language, the cute colorful houses everywhere and even Oslo in winter, with the warm and cozy fairy lights has grown on me. But even without covid there is this common social distance and additionally this pressure of conformity that made me really hate my stay here.

As I returned from Stockholm to Oslo though, something had clicked, and the sun did it’s work as well: It was as if the city had woken up from a slumber.

In Stockholm I visited, among other places, Stockholm stadsbibliotek and Kungliga biblioteket, two of the most stunning libraries I’ve seen so far! And although it was a holiday trip, working on my thesis to spend more time in those places was worth the deal!

- After returning to Norway and soaking up spring and early summer here like the most dried out sponge ever, I didn’t work as much on my thesis as I wish I had. And there it is again: The pressure, the imposter thoughts, the guilt….

So currently my days here are like the weirdest rollercoaster that ever was built – they contain anxiousness and not being able to breath but also feeling free and happy; they contain guilt for not having achieved what I had planned to as well as being proud to have overcome the hard winter. They consist of going out, being social enjoying the nature and ignoring everything on my to-do-list, but also staying in and not being able to focus on my tasks because come on, the sun is shining! :D

Anyway – I’m in the process of letting myself enjoy the last couple of weeks here as much as possible and not think about it too much. There will be time to focus on the thesis soon enough.

ok, bye :)

About apparent steps backwards that are actually new starts

After a very, very long time – we really should start normalizing and establishing times of ‘thinking’ as work! We ARE productive even though we don’t produce pages full of text. Planning, reading, getting a hold on one’s research topic are all part of the process! – anyway, after months of feeling extremely bad for "doing nothing", I finally finally got a hold on my research topic.

After a long chat with a friend and fellow history student, I sat down, took a step back, and started analysing my thoughts and research process of the past few months: What was my initial plan? What have I achieved so far? What are my primary sources; what can they tell me, and what cannot they tell me? Which methods had I planned to use, and to what extent are these methods suitable at all? I wrote down all my questions, discussed every "knot" I had in my mind on paper. I ended up having a document full of loose trains of thought on the one hand and an empty mind on the other. And I really needed it! So so much!

This process/method made me realise again what I originally wanted to write about and, above all, which aspects and approaches are the most important for me.

With an empty mind, I was able to start over, not bothered by all the things stuck in my head: I read some random master's theses of others and analysed their structures. That helped me come up with my own structure. I created a detailed outline of my thesis. With this, I was also able to organize the literature that I had found so far, and even better, I have found two research papers that are particularly helpful for my ideas about my methodological approach.

The progress I have made over the last two weeks has been huge, and this text here is basically a little reminder for my future frustrated self! ;)

In short, I’m going to write about women traveling in the past and I want to tackle the (in my opinion outdated) narrative of the immobile and non-traveling woman.