the inevitable... 2nd day and no longer impressed with myself. Progress stalled, interview tomorrow...

(As a side note, I feel the need to make these titles really long because nothing I put in the body gets on twitter. End of side note.)

Well, I'm blogging and searching goodreads.com for something (anything, please Lord, anything but another article about the ethics of oral history and online publishing! Pleeease!) to read. What I am not doing is finishing up my comp question so that I can then tidy it up, turn it in, and move on to the proposal.

I think lingering in the distance is this fear of the proposal - that I'll be exposed as a fraud, that I have no idea what I'm doing, that I'll put forth all this effort and fail, that I'll never be able to make it as an academic (and a wife, and eventually, God willing, a mother). The other night I had a dream where I witnessed 3 plane crashes in a row, all at the same time, and then had to board a plane at the same gate where there was also lying inexplicably the wreck of one of the Continental planes that had crashed. The dream sort of veered off from there and somehow I ended up at National Stadium for a baseball game, but THAT IS BESIDE THE POINT. I am AFRAID OF CRASHING AND BURNING, people. I know rationally that my fear of being a fraud is merely impostor syndrome and that I have much quantitative and qualitative evidence to refute said notion. It doesn't mean that I don't have it, though, and I've had it all my life (always thought that school success was just "luck" and that one day it would run out, and then I got to grad school and felt it had when I got my first incomplete).

The best anecdote to imposter syndrome (see? I can't even spell impostor so how could I be one?) is to put your head down and just work through it. If I put together some proposal out of left field, then my committee will say, "That's out of left field. Do it again." And I will, and I will have learned, and it will be better. Failure just means you took a risk, and if you're not failing then you're not taking enough risks (thanks to JB for that one!).

Now I am going to suck it up and write about how one can use blogs, wikis, and real-time, push-button publishing and collaboration to make a successful oral history project. Yeah! Go team (of me myself and I)!