Anxiety Sucks

Anxiety sucks. That’s all.

My Bad Titles

A snappy title makes all the difference. When you submit a paper, or when you show up on a conference program, or even when you send someone an email, a good title will draw an audience. Imagine if, rather than Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare had named his play Random Stuff. Or if The Quiet American had been called My Story About Vietnam. A title doesn’t have to be elaborate or extraordinary to be good. Think about Women in Love… that’s a great one, well-suited to the novel itself, both mundane and ironic, memorable and catchy.

Considering how much I read and write, you’d think I’d be better at coming up with creative titles for my work. Unfortunately I just don’t have that talent. Or maybe I have it but I am subconsciously afraid to use it and risk putting out an even worse one. After all, there are such published titles as Love Over Scotland — a book I enjoyed, but with a title so lame I would have never read it had I not read the first two installments in the series already.

So I stick with the safe ones, like “My Bad Titles.” Or I send emails without a subject header — something for which I’ve caught a lot of flack. Or, worse yet, I propose a conference paper with the worst title ever because it’s a quote from a book (and a lame quote at that) and the proposal is accepted. So now I’m on the program for one of the biggest conferences in Canada with the worst title ever and a potentially even worse paper to go with it. I shouldn’t use the word “worse”; that’s not quite what I mean. I know my paper will be good. What troubles me is that I think the material, along with the uncreative title, is boring. It may not be boring to everyone who listens to it (if anyone actually comes to listen), but it is boring to me, and thus is likely to be boring for at least one real smarty pants in the room. That is one of the reasons I have procrastinated so badly on this paper. The other reason(s)? That’s probably a different post.

The Imposter

Having recently come to the close of my first year of Ph.D. studies, I realized that my feelings of inadequacy still hadn’t gone away. Despite getting straight A’s in my classes, being complemented repeatedly by my professors for my work, and having been involved in quite a few successful projects through the year, I was still feeling unsure about my place in the department. Still convinced that I was the least impressive student in my year, and quite possibly in my whole program, it seemed that my Imposter Syndrome was not just a Syndrome but a reality. I was sure by now that they really had found me out, but now that I’m in it’s too late for them to get rid of me.

But in the past week, for some strange reason, I am feeling the tiniest bit more confident. Maybe it’s because I’m getting a lot of work done and talking to more people about it. Or maybe it’s because I’m done my course work and thus feel like I am not so much in direct competition with other students in my day-to-day. Or maybe because it’s finally summer and everything feels better when it’s sunny outside. Whatever the reason, it’s nice to be feeling like I am in the right place, and nice to know that I am actually quite capable of doing the work in front of me.

But there are still two things about it that trouble me. First, how do I build confidence in my own work without shooting down other people’s work as a necessary part of the process? Second, what is it about Grad School, or the structure of my particular program even, that positions us as competitors, and how do we fix it? I didn’t feel this competitiveness in my Master’s class — or at least, if there was competition it was healthy rather than destructive — so there must be something about this particular situation that is making us all feel this way. Whatever it is, I am determined to figure it out.

Back When I Was In Boot Camp

Just kidding, I was never in boot camp. But I damn well should be — there seems to be no other solution to my lack of motivation. I would never make it though. I randomly bumped into an old friend from Junior High a few months ago and she said the last she’d heard I had dropped out of high school and joined the army. It’s true that I dropped out of high school, but I certainly didn’t join the army. When I told my sisters that story they laughed so hard it was almost embarrassing. They said if I were in the army I’d spend the whole time crying. And they are absolutely right, I just may be the biggest wimp I know. And I lack discipline.

This is the problem, I lack discipline. I have a paper due in one week and it is the last paper I have to do this semester. Once I’m done with it, I will be done with coursework forever, except perhaps if I am teaching the course. The end couldn’t be much more highly anticipated, but for some reason I still can’t write the paper. A week is plenty of time but I keep thinking, if only I could just do it, like, right now, I would be completely finished, maybe even early, and relief would be mine. Nope, still can’t do it.

Instead, today, I went to the library, returned some books (early), got some new books (unnecessarily), went to Chapters, bought another book, planned to read the whole thing (ha!), read 50 pages of it, did a sudoku puzzle, made some friends on facebook (nerd), then watched the first episode of The Tudors. And now, here I am, writing something that is not my paper.

Maybe I could start up my own little boot camp for me and all of my unmotivated friends. We could meet early every morning for a run, then for coffee, then force each other to work for the rest of the day, punctuating our duties with 6 small low-fat meals with no simple carbs, and closing the day with an hour of yoga. Anybody interested? That’s okay, I don’t blame you, it sounds like hard work.

Actually, come to think of it, it sounds a little bit like my past life. The one that ended when school started. And it wasn’t that bad at all. In fact, I was rather happy then. Maybe it’s not that impossible. Maybe I’m really a motivated person trapped in the daily habits of an unmotivated person. Maybe this is the beginning of a new phase in my life. Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll go back to watching The Tudors and salivating over Jonathan Rhys Meyers.