{"id":3940,"date":"2017-05-03T21:45:21","date_gmt":"2017-05-03T20:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/?p=3940"},"modified":"2017-05-03T21:45:21","modified_gmt":"2017-05-03T20:45:21","slug":"in-which-we-ride-the-imposter-rollercoaster-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2017\/05\/03\/in-which-we-ride-the-imposter-rollercoaster-again\/","title":{"rendered":"In which we ride the imposter rollercoaster &#8211; again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We often think of our personalities and tendencies as being immutable, fixed, typical. But the older I get, the better I know myself. <\/p>\n<p>And what I know is that I\u2019m often no more in control of my perceptions of self than that beetle in my three-year-old\u2019s Pyrex specimen jar, being shaken and examined with a wide blue eye.<\/p>\n<p><a data-flickr-embed=\"true\"  href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/lablit\/33624439483\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" title=\"bugs\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/c1.staticflickr.com\/3\/2879\/33624439483_90ae413c31.jpg\" width=\"375\" height=\"500\" alt=\"bugs\"><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>\n<em>Gratuitous picture of Joshua with his scientific specimen<\/em><\/p>\n<p>What I\u2019ve especially noticed in recent years is how quickly my feelings of worth can change. One minute I\u2019m riding the high of a great experimental result, revealed to me slyly by one of my talented team, or I\u2019m emerging from a leadership workshop still tingling with the after-effects of eight solid hours of pep-talk. Or I\u2019m opening an email to find that an application has been accepted, or that I\u2019ve scored another source of funding. The next I\u2019m laid low by a difficult conversation with a superior, or by a scientific set-back, or just generally overwhelmed and demoralized by how many academic responsibilities I have and how little time there is to devote to each. <\/p>\n<p>When I get to this point, I start waking in the middle of the night sick with anxiety and a galloping ectopic heartbeat, wondering what might happen to my family and my mortgage if politics shift and my tenuous position is suddenly no longer supported. (As a matter of biological interest, since being put on beta blockers for cardiac arrhythmia, these episodes at least are not nearly as distressing as they used to be. But that\u2019s fodder for another blog post altogether.)<\/p>\n<p>A sleepless night feeds the blues. But then, of course, something good happens, and it starts all over again.<\/p>\n<p>Today I&#8217;m still mired in a low ebb. I have decided that I\u2019m an imposter, and that I have no right to attempt something positive \u2013 yet  scary \u2013 that I\u2019d finally psyched myself up to do. The aftermath was a queasy mix of relief and shame. Mostly relief, because I didn\u2019t even remotely have time to do it anyway, with a full docket of teaching nibbling, as always, into all corners of my working hours. This is how you always feel when you are nearly a full-time equivalent on teaching duty yet you are judged almost solely on your research output. <\/p>\n<p>You can, actually, never win.<\/p>\n<p>Tomorrow is another day. I\u2019ll probably have a chat with my post-doc or one of my students first thing, and get energized by a ravishing image or rock-solid graph. I\u2019ll be more clear-headed. I will manage to plough through more of the nearly 500 essay questions that I still need to grade, enough to ease the growing sense of panic. I\u2019ll finish preparing that talk for the Retreat, and that other talk for the Board meeting of the company that\u2019s funding my nanocapsule therapy project, and writing the job applications for the two new postdoc positions I\u2019ll be advertising soon. (There are another 25 items on my list, equally urgent, that I won\u2019t bore you with.)<\/p>\n<p>Soon I\u2019ll be headed for the top once again.<\/p>\n<p>But for now, I&#8217;m thinking of the quiet of the house, of my son asleep with flushed cheeks in his bed, of my husband upstairs tapping at his computer. And I&#8217;m wishing that everything else would just go away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We often think of our personalities and tendencies as being immutable, fixed, typical. But the older I get, the better I know myself. And what I know is that I\u2019m often no more in control of my perceptions of self &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2017\/05\/03\/in-which-we-ride-the-imposter-rollercoaster-again\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,49,11,45,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-careers-2","category-research","category-staring-into-the-abyss-2","category-teaching","category-the-profession-of-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}