30 Days by the Sea: A Scholarly Personal Narrative on Alonetude [Poster]

This poster reports a Scholarly Personal Narrative inquiry conducted over thirty consecutive days in Loreto, Baja California Sur, in January 2026. The study treats the author's own lived experience as primary data, held in continuous dialogue with theory, to theorize aloneness — the intentional, embodied practice of turning structurally imposed aloneness into chosen, generative presence — as a third state held apart from loneliness and from solitude. After nineteen years of contingent academic labour in Canadian higher education, the author travelled to the Sea of Cortez carrying a single question: what allows a person worn thin by precarious labour to find a way back to themselves? The poster gathers the answers to the thirty days offered, theorized at once as healing, as a method, and as a rights claim. The inquiry draws on five conversations: solitude studies; trauma and somatic theory; critical higher education; Scholarly Personal Narrative and arts-based inquiry; and the human rights tradition. Method: an integrative, multimodal Scholarly Personal Narrative (Nash, 2004), auto-ethnographic in design, with the VPAS framework (Vulnerability, Perspective, Action, Scholarly engagement) carrying each entry from felt experience toward analysis. Polyvagal theory (Porges, 2011) reads the somatic record. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (United Nations, 1966) recognized rest, health, and just working conditions as human rights. Data: over one hundred blog posts published in real time at thirdshore.trubox.ca, photography and arts-based artifacts with artist statements, structured daily somatic check-ins, and bilingual English and Spanish entries. Findings: a measurable trajectory from chronic sympathetic activation toward sustained ventral vagal safety across the thirty days; a shift from escape-oriented behaviour toward presence; peaks in physiological stress markers aligned with contract renewal periods across the employment history; Spanish surfacing in forty-three of the posts, with code-switching rising through the period of deepest somatic change; and the emergence of a three-phase taxonomy (imposed aloneness, transitional solitude, alonetude proper). Original concepts contributed: alonetude; the three-phase taxonomy; multimodal Scholarly Personal Narrative; counter-archive; structural inversion; and somatic labour. The poster closes with a seven-line research programme extending the inquiry into intersectional, collective, longitudinal, methodological, and rights-and-policy registers. Aquí estoy. (Here I am.) Companion blog and primary data set: https://thirdshore.trubox.ca Note: This poster summarises a Master of Human Rights and Social Justice creative thesis in progress at Thompson Rivers University, on Secwépemc Territory, Kamloops, British Columbia. All visual work is original to the author. The accompanying literature review and gaps-and-future-research documents are available as a working-paper trio on the same Zenodo record or as separate linked deposits.