Major Imposter Part 1

The last few weeks I have been suffering from imposter syndrome. I have mentioned this before, the little gremlin, the I'm Not Smart Enough Blob, (Blob for short), the limits of my knowledge, etc. Most of this semester I have been struggling with feeling motivated, feeling excited, or even just finishing my reading. As a rational mind, I have tried to trace back why I have been feeling this way, and of course the two obvious reasons are 1) I finished my core coursework and now this means I'm all alone and on my own and 2) comps was a major pain and it took a few weeks to get over how horrible and terrible the experience was. Passing comps was a fleeing moment of happiness, and then quickly became anti-climactic as I had to get back to my studies.

Another less obvious reason for my malaise is the challenge in moving into new realms of knowledge formation where I feel completely uncomfortable. It is easy to lose myself when I take new classes because I get excited about learning new things, and then kind of lose focus on what I already know and don't tap into that. I throw myself into completely unknown territory (which isn't all bad) yet what happens is a crisis of knowledge. I begin to have doubts about what I know, what I need to know, how much I know. Then questions about how much I have learned, why can't I retain anything, why does it take me so long to learn something, and why does it seem to come so easily to others begins to drown out what little confidence I had at the beginning of the course.

This semester the course I was most excited for has become the source of my imposter syndrome. It is a course on organizational stratification and organizational change (sounds really cool, right?!?) and for the life of me, I cannot get my brain around this. I am unable to move my thinking process into the upper echelon of scholarly thinking and then connect it to what I have learned and what I have questions about. I am paralyzed.

So I'm working through the imposter syndrome this week, partly because if I remain paralyzed I will not write, which means I will not do any work, which means I don't turn anything in. Not turning in papers is bad business for a PhD student. I'm working on it.