Blog

1.

I’m emailing you from the Glasgow Theatreland Holiday Inn at the end of a three day conference on feminist economics. I‘m sitting at the tiny desk attached to a large mirror, watching my face cry, digging out Ted Talks on YouTube about impostor syndrome and weeping in excruciating recognition. You are the first therapist I could find on the internet whose picture didn’t make me feel like they would judge me. You have a kind face. I need kindness badly.

2.

There’s a blog I thought about writing at the beginning of my PhD, though I never did. It was a blog about impostor syndrome, and how happy I was that this was not something I needed to be concerned about. This blog that I didn’t write had a bemused tone. I was a mid-career professional, and I was confident in my skills and abilities. “Mid-career professional” was a phrase I liked to use for the first year or two of my PhD, before I realised that it didn’t matter to anybody in the academy and therefore wasn’t true. I had fifteen years of work life behind me, I reasoned, and I knew my value. The PhD would just add to that, make me even more capable than I already was.

3.

I am in my supervisor’s office with my two supervisors and our three laptop computers. Since we are all looking at our screens, I don’t need to work too hard to conceal the fact that my face is covered with tears. I am supposed to set the agenda for our meetings, but I’m so lost I don’t even really know what to ask or what to talk about. I do what I have always done: disguise my terror with a show of competence. I present my progress since our last meeting, then discuss it, hoping that the crack in my voice doesn’t draw attention. Deep down, I’m worried that I am doing everything wrong (spoiler: it later turns out that I was doing everything wrong). But as a successful mid-career professional (I am still identifying with this validating phrase that no longer applies to me), I know better than to break down in front of my supervisors.

My lead supervisor tells me gently “our job is to reassure you”, and I feel bleak. The only thing that will reassure me is critical engagement with my project. Nobody ever tells me what is missing, nobody challenges the ideas I present. It’s terrifying: I am pouring myself into a performance of intelligence, alone on a stage before an impervious audience, blinking and nodding. “That will do, yes, ok. Carry on.”  I push on, uncertain, confused, determined not to give up, determined not to fail. I have a hunch that I failed ages ago, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.

4,

In early December, I cycle home from a seminar in the freezing cold. I have spent the day rubbing shoulders with experts and practitioners in my field, in a very elegant building in which the heating is not working and the Georgian sash windows rattle. My methodology paper – the very last of a long day – goes neither well nor badly, and I feel exposed, and deeply envious of the other graduate students who presented better, more valuable, more rigorous papers than I did. My “field” is violence against women, a field crowded with people who are typically described with adjectives like fierce, inspiring, and indomitable. Most of the research I encounter is carried out alongside hardworking self-sacrificing service providers; much of it is carried out by women who are themselves survivors of violence. I am awed by these passionate researchers, practitioners and activists, and I am desperately trying to add to the urgent work that they are doing. At times, it feels that the most valuable thing that I can do is to get the fuck out of the way.

I talk to a colleague from the psychology department of my university: he asks me questions that make me feel stupid and I don’t answer well. I have a cold. I am dressed in my conference clothes, which make me look like an adult, but which are not warm, and after 7 hours in this building I am trembling. As I leave, feeling despondent, it begins to rain, and the cars on the city road seem to gang up on me and my bike, just like the capable people at the conference did. The roads are slippy and visibility is poor. I’m freezing cold and nervous, my judgement is bad, I need my hands to wipe my runny nose. I take right turns in blind terror, unsure if I’ve been seen by cars, knowing the best thing I can do is be fast, scared of skidding. I walk through my front door, collapse into my husband’s chest and weep that evening. I am getting sick, I am physically shaking with the cold, I am terrified of the slick shining roads. I am a hopeless researcher. Everything is awful.

I pick myself up and push on.

5.

This story doesn’t change. I doggedly keep on keeping on. Every decision I take for my PhD I take on my own, some of those are good decisions, some are bad ones. I lose confidence in all of them. I become ashamed of them, afraid of sharing them with others. I become ashamed of my confusion and failures. I retreat more and more to my desk, where I can once again feel confident because writing makes me feel competent and confident. Increasingly, I have little to write about because I’m afraid of talking to other people. At some point my bad decision-making converges with Theresa May’s, and I notice that my determination to see this shitshow through regardless of how ill-conceived it may be is remarkably resonant of another, more public shitshow playing out on the news I follow constantly. I feel ashamed of that, as much as I’m ashamed of everything else.

6.

At another seminar I meet a senior lecturer from DCU who has always been kind to me. We chat amiably. Then she fixes me in her sights, and asks, with real concern, “and how are you, Carol?”
I am startled by her sincerity. I try to gather myself, give the usual positive, upbeat account, but I am disarmed by her and when I speak I dissolve, tears flowing down my face even as I assure her (and myself) that I’m doing fine. She keeps talking and I long for her to stop, because I’m holding a coffee cup and a plastic packet of shortbread and apart from the silent weeping I am looking mostly like a grown up.

“Carol” she tells me earnestly, “My PhD undid me.

“I had to question everything I knew and it left me completely lost.”

I feel seen. I have to ask her to stop talking because her sincerity is tearing me apart. I run to a bathroom and wipe my face as the talks start up again.

7.

I attend the annual conference of the International Association for Feminist Economics with my supervisor and another department colleague. They are brilliant and give brilliant papers which excite me and plenty of other people. I give another rather leaden paper – nobody responds, positively or negatively. In my previous life, I was accustomed to being a good speaker: engaging, fascinating even. Now I am none of these things. I am a weak academic who embarrasses others slightly with my stretched analyses and confusing conceptualisations. My supervisor tells me that my paper was fine. I want to talk about how to improve it, where to go with it – but that feels self-indulgent. It would be better to talk about my supervisor’s work, which is better developed and more important than mine. I’m comfortable talking about her work. I’m ashamed of mine.

8.

Myself and my brilliant colleague are in a Victorian museum of many things in Glasgow, killing time after the conference, before our flights. Earlier today this colleague presented a sparkling paper entitled “the stabilising zigzag of inequality”. It was the sort of paper I love: high concept, strikingly original, yet intuitively accurate. As well as being a sparklingly gifted theorist, my colleague is one of the most generous academics I know, both with her time and ideas, so all this time together is an opportunity, and a treat. We stroll through a hall of stuffed animals: a woolly mammoth, a pangolin, a capybara. She is very good at naming obscure creatures that I don’t recognise. We follow on through a room of furniture and objects from the arts and crafts movement, then into an room devoted to the Scottish bronze age, past a small exhibit of miniature paintings by holocaust survivors and a large one of mediocre early twentieth century impressionists. We talk about museum curation, narrative topography, art appreciation: we are both polymaths but neither of us is having fun. We are sounding each other out, circling each other carefully. When we go for coffee she talks about academic overwork and I think about how I used to be overworked and now I’m not because I have no collaborators and no team. I can’t say any of these things because of course they are all my fault and they are evidence of my many failures. She doesn’t mention my terrible paper or my terrible work, and I am embarrassed to bring it up. We take the bus back to our hotels and she talks excitedly about her new PhD student, a woman I know peripherally who is very much the sort of person I would like to be.

My colleague and I get off the bus outside her hotel and take our leave of each other. We are both unsure what to do with our arms and our faces. We shuffle awkwardly and wish each other the best. 2 blocks later I am back at the desk in my Holiday Inn, sobbing pathetically and watching Ted Talks about impostor syndrome. That is where I am now, emailing you, pleading for kindness because I can’t find it in me to be kind to myself.

9.

This is just one of the many narratives of my PhD. I can tell it other ways, ways that include publications and successful talks, or ones that centre new relationships and growing clarity about the world I live in. Most of the time, this is not the narrative I reach for when I think about the story of my PhD. But when things go badly, then all of these moments are instantly and simultaneously present. I am nothing but failing and impostoring.

Every time I read this sequence, it makes me cry. And it has brought me into this therapy room, to shake myself free of it. I worry that the only way I can do that is to walk away from these daunting, intimidating spaces where I am not good enough. I am here instead to banish my shame and find courage.