This narrative recounts the disruption of my graduate research project by persistent, self-reflexive questioning of the process of doing independent research for the first time, and draws its texts from the resulting master's thesis. In this story, the ethnographic method I chose initially to study the experience of women returning to school to earn degrees became less methodologically convincing as critical questions about the method emerged through self-reflective writing in my research journal. As I followed the disruptions generated through writing, and attended to the equally compelling disruptions due to disabling chronic illness, these experiences prompted a methodological shift in the research, with unforeseen textual consequences. Slowly, it became apparent to me that research journal writings that reflected my observations and concerns about power, representation and authority in the research I was conducting, and within the academy itself, constituted the ground of a viable narrative inquiry into what I had been experiencing as a beginning researcher. The thesis I had set out to create was definitely not the one I wrote.