In this series of essays about professional burnout, a veteran teacher seeks a way to continue her work and enthusiasm in it, for the sake of both her and her students. To that end, she explores her relationships with her father and mother, and how the practices of teaching and learning she brought from home have affected her present classroom experiences. A complicating factor is the presence of chronic illness and its demands both primary and secondary: her father's Alzheimer's, her mother's bi-polar disorder, and the demands of eldercare for her mother. She also explores her own habitual practice of being a student, in a reflective inquiry into the mind and situation of students from inside her own experiences. Interleaved vignettes of student interaction illustrate the kinds of difficulty that the speaker has with her teaching. They appear chronologically to suggest a developmental movement.

This exegesis interrogates the mental illness Pure Erotomania, the rare delusional disorder which presents with the sufferer having the delusional (and therefore unshakeable) belief that the person they objectify is in love with them. My play Yellow Roses in Fortitude Valley is about one woman's emotional journey as she is relentlessly stalked by a Pure Erotomanic male. It is a fascinating mental illness, which includes all the 'box office type' features, which make it an exciting and frightening subject to write a dramatic work about. It is confusing, illusory, surreal and frightening, but best of all for the writer and audience it is a real human condition. Yellow Roses in Fortitude Valley is written in a style that truthfully represents and portrays the journey and struggle for both the victim and the sufferer. The research undertaken for both the play and exegesis was a hybrid of many overlapping disciplines involved in the current discourse. As a recently diagnosed and recognized disorder, it is still new territory for professionals in the field and for audience members. I believe this makes it an opportune time for an academically researched creative project to enter into current discourse. Previous creative works on this topic, some of which I have interrogated, have approached the issue of stalking as a predator/victim scenario, an unrequited love or a domestic violence situation. I wished to portray the stalking as a mental illness in the form of the psychiatric disorder Erotomania, my approach undertaking to explain victim impact and the prolonged and chronic course of Erotomanic stalking. I also wished to illustrate the underlying themes which I uncovered during my research, being; female victims of sex crimes; dominant patriarchal ideology; and the current interventions in stalking by the legal and mental health systems.