I intended for this blog to be a semi-professional venue for my work in both academia and heathenry, putting out essays on various topics once a month. I missed January and I'm about to miss February, for similar reasons, so I thought I would try something new. Something is better than nothing and, as I'm finding on social media, honesty about the process is scary but important.
Two very important things happened at the end of January and beginning of February. The later one was that I gave a forty-minute presentation to my department that was received very well. It was my treatment of one source in the manner in which my entire thesis is structured, and my success is valuable affirmation that my work is comprehensible. I won't publish anything from that here yet because I hope to present pieces of it at ICM in Cork in June and the ICCS in Bangor in July.
The other important thing was that the kindred I helped to found, Kindred of Mann, has reached its tenth anniversary! It is hard to believe that something which my now-husband and I sort of threw together when I was twenty-one years old is now in its second decade. I meant to write about this in January (the official anniversary is the 24th). But as often happens, I felt blocked about being boastful in public, as if stating the fact that our kindred is ten years old is arrogance. Who cares? Who am I? What kind of accomplishment is one that I can achieve?
Concurrently, over the past few weeks I've been chewing on the concept of imposter syndrome ('IS'). I had something of IS during my masters programme at the University of Connecticut and then a much worse version of it during my first PhD programme in art history at Temple University. In both cases I felt like I had to always be 'on' and perform impeccably, which was very hard to navigate as someone whose parents never went to university, let alone graduate school.
I operated on the edge of being 'discovered' because, frankly, I was trial-and-erroring my academic career. I didn't even know what a salary was until I was in a Masters programme (you can get paid for just...having a position? Your work matters, not the hours put in? What sorcery is this!?). So forget about understanding what postdocs are, how tenure works, what conferences are for, or how to publish an article in a peer-reviewed journal.
This third round in the graduate sphere has intentionally been low-performance, high-production. I don't wear nice clothing or makeup unless I'm presenting, and I don't hide tattoos or piercings any more. Instead, I put in the hours writing, applying for things, and politely but forwardly networking at lectures and academic events. I don't pretend I'm the next great scholar or will ever be a full professor. I'm just a mature student here for a PhD and enough jobs to string together into a career. I'm not faking anything, so there's nothing to be exposed. I can't have IS, or so I thought.
IS, I have found, is also a chronic under-evaluation of the self and one's achievements. It's a Tetris board in my head: mistakes pile up, while successes disappear. I struggle to fit my qualifications into a one- or two-page CV, but when I look at them laid out like that, it seems like another person's work. How did I ever get all that done? Who did I trick into winning that award or giving that paid lecture? Yet I still acutely feel failures from previous graduate work... undergraduate... even high school rattling around in my chest as the 'true' me.
My goalposts are perpetually shifting so that I am never satisfied. If I keep up what I've been doing, then I'm stagnating. If I accomplish something new, then it immediately becomes the new normal because I did it. I better keep up with it or else I'm failing. The baseline is perpetually just below where I operate. I set ambitious but concrete goals and check them off impassively, happy in the moment but deeply unmoved. If I can do it, then it's not that difficult; if I can achieve it, then it's not that great.
And so my academic career goes, as well as my path in heathenry. I thought these were separate but over the past few weeks I see how entwined these two core aspects of my identity are.
When I went to my first blót in 2006, internet heathenry was Yahoo groups, LiveJournal, and a couple of Geocities sites. Few people had undergraduate degrees in heathen topics, let alone postgraduate courses or qualifications. I was already keen on medieval history; I had been studying Latin for five years at this point. Seeing the value of scholarship for and by heathens, however, pushed me firmly into my field of the 9th-13th century North Atlantic.
In some ways I am happy with what my work has done. My research led directly into the making of Kindred of Mann and many of our traditions, along with lots of Icelandic research from our skald Kevin. I've also formalised and refined scholarship at East Coast Thing as the chair of the Workshops Committee for the past four years. I've served as a resource for dozens of heathens with questions big and small about Norse society, language, and literature. It's not nothing.
But in many ways I feel like internet heathenry has moved past what I can offer. The information is certainly out there for people to teach themselves Old Norse and read editions of the textual sources in the original language, read archaeological reports, examine high-quality images of artefacts, and read open-access journal articles on up-to-the-minute theory. But it's buried in insurmountable piles of repetitive, derivative, misleading junk that's out of date, sexist, and racist.
Keyboard Vikings chest-thump to Bro-halla in self-important echo chambers and what feels right wins out over what is best supported by current understanding of the sources. Pop culture is treated as lore and asking for documentation is gatekeeping. The authorities are the ones who are loudest and online most often. Funny how I can't spend much time arguing with strangers about heathen history because I'm writing my doctoral thesis in history and raising my heathen family.
I have the credentials, but flashing them is classist/ableist/arrogant. I have the ability to teach and guide heathens who are genuinely interested in the sources, but I don't have the time to do so, or patience to distinguish the curious from those seeking an argument. Just as with my secular scholarship, doing what I've been doing feels like stagnation because everything else is moving too fast. And trying to achieve anything new seems futile, because who do I think I am to have novel ideas?
Ten years ago, a Norse-Gaelic synthetic kindred in the East Coast heathen community was damn near heretical. Germanics and Celts had nothing to do with each other! (Yes, I'm being facetious.) Nowadays Kindred of Mann is one of the oldest groups in the region. It took a lot of planning, hesitation, action, and standing our ground to be here, and it all started from academic curiosity and rigorous scholarship.
We still have loads to do: public holidays have taken a hit since I moved to Dublin (although honestly they've gone down ever since our son was born) and we've had a prototype website kicking around offline for years. But there's a camaraderie there I am slightly more willing to acknowledge, a group pride rather than individual. At the very least, my husband deserves the accolades as the glue and backbone of the kindred from the very start. Thanks, sweetheart!
So whence from here? I have to acknowledge that IS and this goalpost-shifting achieves nothing but personal anxiety and minimisation. I'm in the very real danger of actually finishing this damn PhD (in a couple years) and feeling nothing after the viva, continuing my trend of cheapening accolades that I attain. That's a lot of work and sacrifice for a pretty shit reward. And the kindred has pushed our ten-year anniversary celebrations forward, to either Midsummer or maybe even a late Boaldyn depending on my flight home. I will feel accomplished, damn it!
Most importantly, however, I see how receptive my son is to my actions and consequentially my thought patterns. This way of existence sucks and I do not want IS to be his inheritance. Nor do I want him affected by my dolorous dismissal of my goals. I give him unalloyed praise for the things he works for, his improvements, and his genuine attempts despite their outcome (not his traits, an important distinction!). Time to turn that around and try to give myself that witness to my work.
