Kimberly Hirsh

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Betsy Greer shared some pages from Carol Dweck’s book Mindset on Twitter this morning. I was reading along, thinking, “YEAH!” and being proud of myself for moving from the fixed mindset of my youth to the mostly growth mindset of my adulthood, when I bumped up against the end of the second quote she had highlighted:

[In a growth mindset, failure] means you’re not fulfilling your potential.

Not. Fulfilling. Your. Potential.

This set of words and its variant, “not living up to your potential,” make me grouchy. It’s not right to say they’re triggering, but they are an echo of educators from my past who made me feel I had a responsibility to live up to their assessment of my potential.

I don’t.

My potential is mine to fulfill or to waste.

This might not seem like a big deal to many people. But for a person with anxiety, this phraseology feels like a confirmation of all the unkind things I say to myself.

I have a PhD. That’s something only 1.2% of the US population can accurately say about themselves.

But I also was not very productive in the academic sense: my publications are all in either revision or preparation even after I graduated, I didn’t get any awards or grants on my own, etc etc. So it’s easy to scold myself for not having been productive enough during my PhD. For not having lived up to my potential.

I have to remind myself that the PhD was instrumental: I wanted time to read and write and understand qualitative methodology better, and I got all of those things. I didn’t go in caring about publications so why should I start now?

My potential is mine to fulfill or to waste.

The list of things I haven’t done is long. The list of things I have done is also long. I tend to be guided by my intuition and while my big life decisions may be based on logic and in consultation with important people in my life, my day-to-day is generally led by what feels possible and what feels good. (Hat-tip to Katy Peplin for “what feels possible.”) There are more things I will do. There are many things I won’t do. All of that is okay.

I have no obligation to live up to someone else’s perception of my potential. And neither do you.

Your potential is yours to fulfill or to waste.

Putting Gardens and Streams II on my calendar. I’m only a maybe because, as always, parenting.

🔖Read Ravynn K. Stringfield’s essay, Bullet Journaling to Save a Life. Beautiful.

🔖Read

The Public Writing Life: How to Lose an Editor in Five Days katieroseguestpryal.com

🔖📝 The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer ‹ Literary Hub

if you’ve read a book penned by a woman with young children recently, there’s a significant chance it was written while hiding, losing sleep, or using inventive distractions. (Or even all three.)

“She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 📚💬

I had a client meeting this morning where we made plans for me to do some blogging and podcasting for the client. But it’s also about research. Don’t let anybody tell you your side projects aren’t valuable.

Sleep Deprivation, Sugar Crash, or Both? The Kimberly Hirsh Story

Beginning my third read of Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s THE FREELANCE ACADEMIC. 📚

“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them…” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray 📚💬

Welcome to September, or as I like to call it, October Part 1. The world is full of terrors. Today I’m going to deal with my to-do list and then think about how I can contribute to making the world better.

I just published another free/pay-what-you-can Notion template. This time it’s a permissions tracker to help you keep track of copyrighted material you need to reuse and its permissions status.

Gonna create a literary subgenre/internet aesthetic and call it “snark academia.”

If you have access to it, watch The Simpsons, Season 1, episode 3, “Homer’s Odyssey.” This bit happens at around 12:50: Depressed due to losing his job, Homer decides to throw himself off a bridge. He ties a rope around a huge boulder, then ties the other end of the rope to his waist. When he goes to open the gate in the fence around the yard, struggling to carry the boulder, he finds the hinges squeak. He then interrupts his suicide attempt to get a can of oil and oil the gate’s hinges. This cracks me up because in the middle of a devastating act that he is carrying out in a ridiculous way, he stops to take care of this mundane problem.

Is he doing it because he doesn’t want to wake his family with the squeaking? Could be. The rationale is irrelevant. It’s the juxtaposition of the extreme and absurd with the quotidian that makes this moment work for me.

Did not realize I was on the Motherscholar Project website so that’s cool!

I am making a few notes here now that I hope to turn into a longer post later. As I scrolled Twitter and read there what some colleagues have been working on, I started to feel my current post-PhD existential crisis take a new and unexpected shape: the shape of wishing I knew a way to stay in academia.

Here are the things that have kept me from pursuing an academic career after graduation:

• watching tenure-track colleagues be miserable
• lack of mobility (it would be very challenging to find a position, even tenure-track, that would be worth uprooting my family for, and I refuse to live apart from my family)
• being a mother (I also refuse to prioritize career over family)
• being chronically ill/variably disabled (I also refuse to prioritize career over health)

Here are the things that today appeal to me about academia:

• pursuing a research agenda that I design

That’s actually about it, and as a freelance academic/independent researcher, I can probably work out a way to do that but today it feels like it’s in conflict with everything else I’ve got going on.

Which is why I’m going to dive into the #motherscholar literature.

More on that later.

Just recorded a conference session. I’m really happy about the accessibility remote conferences provide but everything feels so formal. It’s like I can’t rely on charisma and humor to carry 90% of the presentation.

🔖💬 Parents Are Not Okay:

Through these grinding 18 months, we’ve managed our kids’ lives as best we could while abandoning our own.

Watched @patrickrhone’s Micro Camp talk Want to write a book? You probably already have this am & it shifted a lot for me in terms of my own self-conception as a writer. Look out for a lot of small essay books coming from me in the near future.

Shout-out to Kelly J. Baker for naming archivists and librarians first in the acknowledgements of her book, Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930. (If you order through this link, I may receive a commission.)

Want to read: How to Write Qualitative Research by Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower 📚

🔖📚 Sara Fredman’s How Motherhood Helped Me Reject the ‘Father Tongue’ of Academia is both about writing the kind of thing I want to write and is itself the kind of thing I want to write.

there is no separation between mother and writer, nor can I tease apart the time I spend tending to my child from the time I spend thinking about my writing, or actually doing it.

Finding Literary Spaces Amid the Intensity of New Motherhood 🔖📚💬

Finished reading: Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan 📚

Want to read: Thinking Inside the Box Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them by Adrienne Raphel 📚