OUT OF HIBERNATION
Journal

Where the ice used to be, there is finally a shape. Not a perfect map and not a neatly paved trail, but real, visible ground—enough to see where the next few years are headed.

 

The great thaw of retirement, reinvention, and “what now?” has already happened. This chapter is about what’s standing here, in the open, no longer frozen over: a PhD in motion, a dissertation coming into focus, and a decades-long theory finally stepping into the light as a formal study.​

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On my desktop sits a simple Word icon that represents a huge hinge: my topic proposal form. It’s ready to go the moment an Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval lands in my inbox, allowing me to move forward with my dissertation study. Once that happens, I cross the line into candidacy and step into an 18‑month stretch that is anything but vague. It looks like spreadsheets and transcripts, survey links and reminder emails, stacks of media artifacts waiting to be coded. It seems like early mornings with coffee and late nights with highlighters, all in service of one central question: can AC–SE—the framework that’s been quietly steering my communication decisions for years—hold up as a tested, validated model?​

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For more than two decades, AC–SE has lived in the background of my professional life as a kind of internal compass: Audience-Centered, Context-Aware, Simplicity-Driven, Engagement-Focused, all working together, all necessary. Now, instead of being a hunch I carry into meetings or a lens I use to review a press release, it’s becoming the subject of a formal mixed‑methods study.

 

That means gathering real media artifacts from real organizations, coding them for how well they balance the four pillars, and pairing that with survey responses from the people who create, review, and sign off on those messages. It means looking for themes and tensions: Where does the Audience get sacrificed? When does Simplicity win or lose? What happens when Engagement is high but Context is off?​

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From the outside, the next year and a half might look like “just more school,” but from where I’m standing, it feels more like finally getting lab time with my own life’s work. This is the stretch where practice and scholarship meet—where federal disaster operation deployments, newsroom sprints, boardroom briefings, and years of federal communication collide with peer‑reviewed theories and a mountain of data. It’s where I get to ask, with some methodological rigor: was I right about this? And if so, how can AC–SE help other communicators move from guesswork to something more grounded?​

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There’s a calm that comes with this kind of clarity. I don’t know every plot twist ahead—there will be messy datasets, rejected drafts, committee comments, and days when the words refuse to cooperate. But I do know the direction of travel. The ground in front of me is marked: IRB, topic proposal, candidacy, data collection, analysis, writing. Where the ice used to be uncertainty and overwhelm, there is now a path I chose on purpose.​

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And woven through all of it are the moments beyond the screen and the spreadsheet—those trips to see Winona, first in Seattle and soon in Chicago, where time compresses into sticky fingers, playground laughs, and the kind of perspective only a granddaughter can bring. The dissertation will move forward, the AC–SE study will unfold, and the artifacts will pile up. But at the end of the day, the reason this new landscape matters is simple: it’s a life where the work is meaningful, the learning is ongoing, and the people I love are still at the center of the story.

 

That’s what’s clear now, standing where the ice used to be.