Scholar

Several weeks (months?) ago, Brandy Schillace asked me to contribute to her Rogue Scholar Salon. I haven’t yet. I started but then got stuck. Where? At the word “scholar.”

Brandy herself, a former tenure-track professor, is very much continuing as a medical humanities scholar despite going rogue—quitting her academic job! But me? Well, I never considered myself to be a scholar. And now that I’m actively working in a new area, the word seems even less fitting.

Here are things I tend to tell people when I explain my lack of academic career ambitions: “I never published,” “I presented but didn’t otherwise participate much in conferences,” “I never taught my own course.” My academic story is about how I wasn’t a good academic. But here’s another story: My master’s thesis was praised by an expert in the field as being nearly worthy of a doctorate! I presented my research at several international academic conferences, mostly on panels made up of tenured professors. As a graduate student, I took on many high-level service responsibilities within my departments and the larger university communities. I helped organize a two-day conference and put together a lecture series. I won a Canada Graduate Scholarship for my doctoral work, a prestigious award that provided me with more than $100,000 in funding. Before that, I held an Ontario Graduate Scholarship for three years running (and would have had it for a fourth if not for the CGS). My dissertation is a fine piece of scholarship that significantly advances knowledge and makes an important contribution to more than one field of research.

And yet, I hesitate to call myself a scholar.

As I type this I’m shaking my head and marvelling at this insight: I never realized I’d created this “I’m not a scholar” story! Could this be why I worked for a while on revising my manuscript but haven’t touched it in months? Could this be what’s getting in the way of me finalizing and sending off my book proposal? I’m pretty sure the answer to both those questions is “yes.”

Amazing.

In the coaching world we use words like “gremlin” and “saboteur” to explain resistance, including writer’s block. Just the other day I was reading about writing saboteurs and thinking to myself, “Yeah, I don’t have that problem. Blogging comes so naturally to me.” Meanwhile, my manuscript is sitting less than 6 feet away from me, covered in dust and cat hair.

This now seems so obvious to me. lol *shakes head*

What do your gremlins tell you? (Hopefully it won’t take you years and years to discover what they are!)