This chapter is my story about navigating an unconventional doctoral journey, bringing into focus the myriad of complex challenges I have faced, before, during and after the event. Using a personal narrative approach, I draw out themes including the search for a ‘home’, the long-held sense of never quite belonging that is underpinned by self-doubt, chronic illness, problems of commitment, alienation and processes of becoming. Wilfulness and determination that are destabilised by the incessant need to justify choices, to compromise and find ways to ‘fit’ into existing contexts alongside a sporadic relationship with critical feminist theory. This is a messy (re)telling of my past through personal narrative and theoretically derived methodological justifications. I consider the doctorate as a part of a journey that I am still on, a determination to persist in questioning the ways of the world, a commitment to better understanding diverse ways of being and doing, and a desire for a purposeful life. I claim that all of these elements that are relevant to my own embarkation and navigation on an unconventional but authentic doctoral journey, provide an alternative story shared for better or for worse, but offered with a sense of deep honesty and camaraderie that is too often hidden in the shadows of the more commonly told stories of success and achievement in academia.