Approaching the Anniversary

 My lily plant is flowering again. 

It was flowering when the pandemic started and it produced 6 blooms last March. That's the most it's ever had and they reached their full glory in early May. Mid-February feels early for it to produce flowers but time doesn't really mean anything anymore. 

Out of all the ways to measure the passage of time, this one feels oddly poignant to me. The plant only flowers once a year so the buds remind me of last spring. It's gone through an entire life cycle. The beginning of the pandemic feels like both yesterday and eons ago. Staying indoors all day everyday used to seem novel - it was like we were on pause just waiting for things to happen. The pandemic was all-consuming and no one could talk about anything else. Now it's just background noise. 

The unity we once shared in making sourdough and feeling bored at home have all given way to business as usual. I don't make my daily sticky notes or write languidly in my diary anymore because I'm back to writing papers and proposal and lesson plans. There's no more sympathy for playing Animal Crossing all day and I've even stopped resisting the pressure to be productive. I get up at 8am everyday, have a coffee and tool around on the computer, shower at 10am and then get to work. I know that sounds leisurely (and it is) but I used to wake up at 10 and not consume anything until I was on the brink of a depressive episode. 

It's been nearly a year (we're just under a month away from March 13th) and I'm not sure if I've changed completely or not at all. This time last year I had no sleep schedule, never remembered to set the timer on the coffee pot, cleaned sporadically, and could barely cook. Now I do all these things consistently and automatically. I write to do lists and actually get them done. I do some modest meal prepping a few times a week. Will I keep these habits once the lockdown lifts or will the added dynamic of leaving the apartment destroy my careful routines? Am I only good at domestic life when I'm literally trapped at home?

Will all this diligent self-discipline crumble when I realize that I've actually just traded social skills for home care skills? When I go to a restaurant for the first time and feel the weight of my inability to cope with a social situation. When a stranger asks me a question and I don't know what to do next? Will I be nervous and reclusive after all this or will I become belligerently social? Will I want to make up for lost time in an endless drunken party?

I have no idea how I'll carry myself once I have to face the world in person. I already have bizarre personal aesthetics in here. Most of the week I wear the same three sweaters and pairs of sweat pants. Some times I can't even muster up the strength to put on leggings - they just feel too restrictive. But then on Fridays (my teaching days) I have An Outfit. I'll put on real tights and a dress. I'll pick out earrings the night before and wear eyeshadow with nice mascara. I make sure my nails are painted and do my full skincare routine. All for students who probably tune in from bed. When this is all over, will I revel in dressing up or stay in the listless rut of shapeless sweaters and elastic waistbands? I have no idea. 

I know that a lot of this is meaningless introspection - whether I go back to wearing control-top nylons or not does not matter. But it does speak to how small my world has become and how little I can control. So much just happens to me - it's beyond the bounds of what I can even conceptualize as possible. At least earrings and eyeshadow are under my sway. Sometimes. 

The plant will flower and seed and the virus will ebb and flow. I'll be in here trying to get by without much insight into what comes next. 

I Think I'm Over Imposter Syndrome

I mean not personally - I intend to hate myself until the day I die - but I'm ready to stop talking about imposter syndrome on a professional level. 

I'm a grad student (hence the endless melancholy) and I hear about imposter syndrome a lot from my department, my peers, and even my supervisor. Imposter syndrome is the lurking feeling that you aren't actually as smart and capable as you've been led to believe and soon someone will come and expose you as a fraud. Graduate students, especially minoritized and first-generation students, feel this all the time since we're often the first of our kind in a given space and there is immense pressure to not fuck it up lest we prove that people like us really are less capable. People with impostor syndrome feel that their success is not earned, their capabilities overstated, and their spectacular failure inevitable. It can be a paralyzing issue where people become so afraid of being "found out" that they cannot make another move. 

Imposter syndrome comes up everywhere from memes to serious orientation seminars and it's increasingly hard for me to see the term meaning anything. In fact, one of the grad student meme accounts I follow just posted about meta-imposter syndrome where you feel like an imposter because all the capable people around you keep feeling like imposters so clearly you and your inadequacy must be the real imposter. 

Over the past few years this idea has been expanding to the point where every negative feeling felt in graduate school is a matter of imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is so prevalent that I'm often left to wonder if I have anywhere else to store my bad feelings. What if I'm actually just a fuck up sometimes and I should feel bad? What exactly does a student without imposter syndrome look like? Are they well-fed, well-rested, and comfortably shitting out papers? Or are they supposed to take on a kind of Moby Dick aesthetic where they are driven to their own destruction by their singular area of research? If I'm not supposed to feel like an imposter then what should I feel like? 

In many ways, I get it. It's reassuring to know that other smart people feel doubt and insecurity. There is a lot of comfort in knowing that other people have ridiculous spirals where they think that a rough class or a rejected paper will somehow lead to destitution. It's also nice when a university can acknowledge that graduate students have feelings and that we aren't just expendable little labour bots. 

But if everyone has imposter syndrome then it clearly isn't a matter of personal deficiency or disorder - it's systemic. And we already knew that it was systemic because the term was coined to describe the ways that gender and racial minorities often feel like they'll be found out as the "affirmative action hire" or perhaps the "token" woman or trans person. First-generation grad students are also made to feel inadequate and out of place because they aren't as familiar with all the clandestine etiquette of academia. But I struggle to see this as a solely internal struggle. For a lot of students, there is in fact someone who wants to "expose" them because their racism, sexism, or classism has led them to believe that some people really are just token entries to fill diversity quotas. Graduate school is an increasingly competitive space where limited spots lead to even more limited jobs. The fear and anxiety aren't just maladjusted reactions to this reality. It's not always all in my head. 

And this is all intentional. An exclusionary system is making people feel excluded and it is, therefore, right to feel excluded and out of place - this is not an anxious overreaction. "Gaslighting" is an incredibly overused term and while I think it means "the process by which someone convinces you that you've lost your grip on reality" I'm not quite sure anymore. But what I am sure of is that it's incredibly convenient for an institution like a university to look out on disabled and BIPOC students and say "Of course we want you here, you feel out of place because of imposter syndrome. You put those ideas in your own head, We haven't been trying to push you out - you made that up all on your own."

By talking about imposter syndrome over and over we are not actually helping anyone - we're telling them to get their feelings in order. A syndrome is a personal trouble and not a public issue so it is left up to individual solutions. We feel bad because we're meant to feel bad. If we felt good we might start asking for pesky things like unions and enough money to eat. 

Of course, some of it is a lot pettier than that. If anything, all this talk of impostor syndrome is just a slightly classier way to have a pissing contest. If everyone is talking on and on about how they have all these accomplishments and work 26 hours a day and still feel like they aren't enough then they're really just humble bragging - they're taking on an air of self-deprecation in order to enumerate all the brilliant things they've done without looking like an ass. Similarly, if your department sits you down on the first day of classes and tells you that imposter syndrome and overwork are common problems then what they're really saying is that everyone is working harder than you. If people feel empty and insecure about their big publications and major grants then you should feel like actual shit for what little you've managed to achieve. 

The university wants us to be happy enough to not kill ourselves (that's bad press after all) but they still want productivity to increase. We are made to feel that we should be research machines and when we can't live up to this impossible ideal we are the problem. We need time management strategies and workshops and counselling and Xanax. The onus is always on the shaken student and never the shaking institution.