Having settled into my new life in Istanbul, I have returned from the (mental) vacation that was preparing to move, leaving the city and friends that I love so dearly, traveling, arriving, and getting my bearings in a new and exciting place. My re-entry into having a routine has been less than smooth, but I think I’ve managed to get the rock tumbler turning again. I had been filling it with ideas all along, but I badly needed to find a metaphorical outlet converter and a dedicated space to let it spin.
Recently, but especially today, I have been thinking about unfinished projects. I have so many of them—my Dropbox and my Chrome bookmarks are graveyards of ideas and sources. My process with learning to make art was similar. I collected so many materials, and with such enthusiasm, only to find that a few sustained my interest. Out of all the supplies I purchased and found, in the end, I only ended up using two media consistently. This by itself isn’t terrible. I still made something! And I had fun! But before long both the used and unused supplies began to calcify into a carapace of unrealized visions that weighs me down.
I struggle with this emotionally in my professional life as much as in my personal life, if not more so. “If only I could do something interesting with everything I’ve accumulated,” I whine to myself. “Why did I choose to sink so much time and effort into this thing only to abandon it and pick up some other thing that I will drop just as quickly?” This is perhaps my most commonly recurring and destructive pattern of negative self-talk.
Perhaps it was returning to my work agenda this morning after months away that did it. Perhaps it was spending too much time on Twitter the past few weeks. Perhaps it was the nagging and unshakeable sensation that my aspirations for an academic career have (long since) been tanked by this tendency.
I feel fortunate that today I didn’t spiral the way I might have a year ago. The same frustrations are still there, however. I don’t feel like I have much to say about my dissertation other than it taught me what kind of scholar I do not want to be and what topics I am no longer interested in writing about. That’s a tough sell on the market, unfortunately, which does not tend to reward such maneuvers at this stage in one’s career.
I admire those who speak authoritatively on subjects about which they have deep knowledge or an instinctive nous. I admire those with passions and convictions. Those who can comment off the cuff. Those who have an audience and make a real living with their writing and their art. I want to be like them, and on my bad days, I fear I never can or will be. I moved from topic to topic so frequently as a graduate student that I don’t have command over a coherent canon. Breadth has its advantages, don’t get me wrong—and if anything, it will probably be my saving grace in the end!
But ultimately, I want to arrive at some kind of peace with myself over this concern. My creative and spiritual guides would probably advise me to accept my rapid-fire, improvisational, wide-ranging and experimental style of proto-typing as a potential strength rather than a terminal weakness. Yet, the lack of finished, polished work to show for my professional efforts continues to irk me. That I bounce from hobby to hobby without really getting into anything enough to have made anything substantial out of it haunts me. I have passing knowledge of and competence in a million different things, but no expertise that I would be willing to stake my reputation on.
I suppose playing the Feelings Collector with this blog has been one way of working through this. To remind myself that the work—whether scholarship or art—is about the doing more than the having done. To remind myself that the broader project is rarely clear from the outset, or even in the middle. To remind myself that scholarly and artistic projects often only have any degree of coherence in hindsight. I’m going to try to remember these things when I see other people’s work and get all up in my feelings about my own.
Either way, it may be time for another Twitter break!