Don't Be Paranoid.
I need to have this tattooed on the back of my right hand so I can see it while I type. I do fine in the classroom. But back in my office, typing away at yet another revision, the creeping anvil of doom hovers overhead. On these days I hate everything I write. I open up books or journals with my pieces in them and don't recognize my own stuff because it is better than I remembered. On these days everything is about how much I suck. I become sure that the Shadow Committee, my nightmare secret academic cabal comprised of scholars who can see right through me and who snicker at my earnest but doomed efforts, will notice that I was somehow awarded a Ph.D. in error and will have it revoked, thereby leaving me unemployable at anywhere but Starbuck's.
I had one of these days the other day. I didn't realize it at first, but I found that I was checking the online call for papers for a narrative conference over and over, to see if maybe the information had changed in the span of an afternoon. The original submission deadline had been extended. As I submitted very early, I read this as: "the abstracts we received thus far are of such poor quality that our only recourse is to extend the deadline by a month and pray God that some real scholars show up." I clicked on all the links on this site to try to glean some hint of what happened, and whether it has anything to do with me or my chances. I read the conference mission statement with the focus of a Talmudic scholar. It was sick. Then I came home and ate peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
The nice thing about a hammock in the Virgin Islands is that one need not fear the anvil of doom there. Excellent first posts.
Thanks much! This could be fun. Or at least a good way to blow off steam...
I feel this way all the time. The other week I received a review back saying that, "The ideas in this paper are good, but obviously its author must be a non-native speaker because the style is attrocious." I was born in Friggin Philadelphia to 4th generation Italian-American parents! And so I sigh and correct all those silly passive voice errors and such, feeling like a complete loser. Someday, O, they are going to find me out for the fraud I am. That I secretly don't know the formula for a t test off the top of my head, but am teaching statistics. Or that I have never read anything by Durkheim because I cheated on my comps. That kind of shit.
AP, too true, too true! The sad thing is, I can remember each slight so very well. I remember the review I got back that said I had a shaky understanding of Mead and that my writing was "breathless," but did not explain either and so I could not "fix" my theoretical panting. Whatcha gonna do? That's the review I remember, of course. For the same paper someone else recommended print without revisions. Can I remember even the smallest thing in that review? Noooo-ooooooo-o.
Came here through a search for "impostor syndrome" and "tenure." As a Québécois and Suisse-Romand who has been spending too much time in U.S. academia, I've had to cope with my impostor syndrome, recently.
You know what? It wasn't so hard.
But I'm not yet on the path to tenure.
Post a Comment