Beautiful Beliefs (2)

I believe that...

We can be our own worst enemies.

Some time ago I wrote this post in relation to a student I was teaching in his first year. His enthusiasm and interest remained throughout his time at university, but he suffered from crippling anxiety when it came to assessments. He was given extensions to different deadlines because his anxiety about it not being good enough was so bad that it prevented him from finishing and submitting his work. He got through to the final year, and could not sit his exams or submit his dissertation. I was not supervising him, but have absolutely no doubt that it would have been an excellent piece of work. He was given the opportunity to defer these assessments. He contacted me after I’d left the University in the City where the Castle is also a Prison to ask if he could come to talk to me about one of the units as the exam came around again. I had to reply to tell him I was no longer in the city, but was sure one of the other early modernists would help him. I heard no more from him.

I have been away from this blog for a long time – half-scribbling posts that never got written – so when I came back I read over some of my older posts to remind me what I used to do, and came across that post about him. I emailed my friend, Very Efficient Undergrad Secretary, to ask how he was doing and if he had managed to submit his dissertation this year. She told me that he had decided to withdraw from university at Easter, before any of the assessments took place.

I was genuinely saddened by this news. He had so much potential as a Lit student, and I know he could have finished with a good 2.1 degree, if not a first class one. He was certainly intellectually capable of it. But his lack of self-belief meant that he left the university with no degree at all.

This sort of anxiety – that we are not good enough – is something that most of us suffer from at some point. I have talked about it before in relation to my teaching and marking and in relation to judging ourselves by others’ progress. I think the reason my PhD thesis was submitted at the last minute (literally – a friend had her car engine running to get me to student registry on time from across campus) was because I was reluctant to let it go, to send it out for examination and judgement because it might not be good enough. I am now struggling to turn that thesis into a monograph, not because it was found wanting at my VIVA (it was not), or just because I struggle to find the time (though I do) but because I am, underneath, anxious that it will not be good enough. A journal rejected a chapter of it as an article; will the peer reviewers of my book reject the whole thing?

I have a book contract with a reputable publisher, so the idea has already been deemed publishable, but I procrastinate and delay and try to hunt out any other text I could possibly look at to make sure there is nothing obviously missing from my work.

I will just have to get it done and send it off to them very soon, or I will miss the REF deadline and my new employer, who took a chance on my potential to publish and gave me a job, will not be pleased. But this anxiety I feel at letting them down, although I feel it, is not as strong as the anxiety I feel about sending my work out into the realms of academic criticism. So I delay, and the deadline gets closer and I know I will have to send off work I am not entirely happy with when I run out of time. I tell myself I work better under pressure, but really this is because I can no longer put it off.

I thought that if he had had the right kind of support and encouragement, that anxious student might have got all of his work submitted. I don’t know what sort of support he received beyond the deferral, but I am starting to think that whatever it was it wouldn’t have been enough. I think he’d rather withdraw than risk not meeting expectations (though whose expectations, I am not sure).

It’s tempting, isn’t it, to avoid putting our work ‘out there’. I could do that with this book, but it would be such a waste of my time, effort and energy to prevent myself from going forward because of this anxiety.

There can be many obstacles to overcome in the ‘world outside’. Let’s try hard not to be our own worst enemies.



This is post is connected to Amy Palko's Beautiful Beliefs writing circle.