Letter to my former self: a third space imaginal practice

Here, we propose an imaginal practice for third-space professionals and interested others that acknowledges the need for boundaries in practising self and student care, but also our need for a type of deep perfection. We outline a speculative practice for an imaginal academic developer using the device of a letter to one's former self. As a theoretical frame, we draw on Brown and Elliott’s (Citation2016) Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) that helps individuals recover from trauma through imaginal practices. What we contribute is not a tested intervention but a form of thought experiment, via a speculative design, that invokes third space as a form of ‘not-yetness’, as a territory that is fertile precisely because it is neither one thing nor another of a particular traditional binary or expectation set. Using this idea, we speculate on what it means to be a perfect educational developer – one with unbounded capacities for creation, connection, growth, and acceptance of ourselves and others.