The Burden of Self-Doubt
scrappybadger January 31st, 2008
If there were an award for lack of confidence or for the ability to see the worst in one’s self, I’m sure I would win it. At least once. I am plagued by unflagging self-doubt. I don’t trust my instincts. Sometimes I feel like I don’t even have any instincts though I know this isn’t the case.
This nagging diffidence pervades every part of my life, but today it is staring my teaching abilities square in the eye. I feel absolutely unprepared for the work I’m doing. My composition classes are going okay. After three years of teaching the first two semesters of composition I have something of a grip on it, but this first semester with American Literature is leaving me feeling bruised and battered. I guess it doesn’t help that I have a cold right now which cuts down on the time and energy I have for preparation. And I had little to no time to prepare in advance with such a short break between fall and spring classes. Regardless, I feel like a failure and a fraud.
I am a product of the public school system, and most days I’m okay with that. I got the basics. I think I’m a relatively intelligent person capable of interpreting, analyzing, and understanding the world around me to one degree or another. I’m fairly well read compared to lots of people I know, and I have a passion for literature and language that can only help in the classroom environment. I don’t, however, have a very good memory for history. I wasn’t trained well in classic literature and am too unsure of myself to ever broach the subject with anyone who seems to know even a little about it. My parents didn’t read to me; they didn’t do much reading at all in fact. It was rare as a kid to be around an adult who liked books. My mom read a little, but the books I remember seeing her with were ones like Flowers in the Attic and If There Be Thorns – sordid thrillers about violence and incest. As for my dad, I’m not sure he has ever read a book. He read magazines about car repair (he’s a mechanic), but even that happened infrequently.
I, on the other hand, loved books. My middle sister and I devoured them, and I still remember how much I loved the elementary school library. I’d visit, over and over again, the shelf to the left of a rarely used door near the back of the one room library. At eye level on that shelf was Misty of Chincoteague, a hardback book with frayed edges about the wild ponies of Assateague Island in Virginia. I must have checked that book out a dozen times or more until it felt like I was loaning it to the library rather than the other way around. I wish now that I’d stolen it, just never returned it to the library one of those times, but as a kid I wasn’t brave enough for such a thing.
I’m getting sidetracked here. I guess my point is that I’ve always loved to read. My sister and I would do it every moment we had the chance. I still remember Pa, my paternal grandfather, telling us that we were going to go blind once after he’d watched us hold up our books and read by the light of his headlights. We were all headed to a little steakhouse for dinner, and he was driving behind our parents.
Despite all this reading, I feel drastically under-read in the stuff that counts. I’m especially worried about what this means when I start to do my PhD work. I’m afraid I’ll be surrounded by graduate students who can quote Baudelaire, Socrates, and Thomas Hardy at will. It bothers me now, too, as an adjunct professor. I’m always waiting for someone to stump me with a question that I can’t answer. I know that a lot of it is first semester jitters. After all, I had them when I first started teaching composition, but knowing and feeling aren’t always the same thing for me.
I am not sure what to do with all of this academic self-doubt. I came back to my office this morning resolved to work out a reading chart. I thought I’d make a list of all the books I think I should have read already, put them on the chart, and figure out how to become well read within the next six months. Luckily, it only took me half an hour or so to see the ridiculousness of that idea. It isn’t possible. I’m teaching 5 classes, working as copy/style editor for the university and freelancing on the side, and trying to figure out how to start applying to PhD programs and study for GREs. Oh yeah, and I am also obsessing about foreign language requirements for most PhD programs, so I would also need to add “pick up a second language” to that list.
What is wrong with me? It isn’t normal to think you can do that much at one time. Either I am seriously delusional about my ability to work nonstop or I think I’m SuperBadger, possessor of extraordinary strength and willpower, able to leap giant stacks of books in a single bound. Or maybe I like to set impossible goals for myself in order to pat myself on the back later and say, “I knew you couldn’t do it. Good job.”
