Back on the horse

Yeah, I'm going in today and trying to do some rewriting on the rejected paper. I have the name of another journal I could submit it to, and a number of people have counseled me to "rewrite and resubmit until there aren't any journals left to submit to."

Meh. I really wanted to take a day and relax. But I figured that since I walked around for a couple days under the Fog of Suckiness and also had some of those horrible, heart-pounding "what now? what if I never think of a research project to do again? What if I have nothing to try submitting to a journal this year?" moments (I try to at least submit one paper every year even if they're not accepted; I hope that at least trying gets me some credit).

The thing that frustrates me - and ironically, the Sunday School lesson I should be prepping right now touches on - is that a lot of the things important to me, a lot of the things that I value and would point to as evidence that I'm doing things the "right way," are not things that "count" on those annual-development-plan things.

The fact that I do volunteer work, for instance. Unless it's directly campus-related, like recruiting students, it doesn't count.

Some of the intangible things about teaching, for instance - I had another student tell me yesterday afternoon how interesting the research project was for her, how it was something she'd never had the opportunity to try before. There's no way to quantify that, short of asking the student to write it down and give me a record of it (and somehow, I don't feel right doing that). Helping people and hearing them thank me.

But it comes down to numbers on a print out (teaching evaluation scores, which don't always reflect those moments of the dedicated students thanking you - if you get a small core of malcontents, your averages can get dragged down fast). And it comes down to number of successful publications. And it comes down to things that have some kind of official record on paper. I finally learned that the reason campus offices send official thank-you letters out after you did something for them, is that you are supposed to save those and submit them with your packet of stuff.

I'm really not good at self-promotion. I suppose it was because I was raised with the whole mentality of "if you do good work, people will notice. You don't need to talk about it." And I'm not really sure that's true any more.

A lot of the other things that are important to me, that make me who I am, are things that count for absolutely zero in the "world." Working with the Youth Group (whatever good I may do there; some weeks it feels like not much). Helping clean up the local Youth Camp. Doing the prep for, and teaching, Sunday School - that can take an hour or more every week I do it. Even my knitting and quilting - they help keep me sane and give me a feeling that there's at least one thing I'm competent at.

But some days, when I'm really down on myself about research or "not doing more" with teaching, I wonder if maybe I should push them aside, either give away my supplies and not do them any more, or lock all the stuff up in a metaphorical box labeled "Retirement" and not do them again until then. Because I almost feel some days that every moment I spend relaxing is a moment I COULD be perfecting a research paper, and that's what "the world" values, and sometimes, you know? You kind of have to go along to get along a little, if you want to keep your job and stuff.

(It's probably really not that bad, but I'm really scared about what this new college president may institute. I don't THINK he'd abolish tenure and make us all "interview for our jobs" (or whatever the line in Office Space was) every couple years, but then one never knows).

So I don't know. It's one of the more frustrating conflicts in my life - on the one hand, having been told all my growing up years, "You are brilliant, you will do great things" which can almost translate to "You owe it to the world to do things that help" and seeing journal articles rejected, having a hard time actually DOING research because of the heavy teaching load and because we don't have much in the way of facilities/equipment/support. And also my personal desire to do things that AREN'T part of the rat-race, of doing things that are sort of quiet and interior and that aren't judged by anyone but me.

(I think the judging is part of it. Both the big areas of my life that contribute to my job are judged by "outside" forces - how I "look" to the higher ups is not entirely under my control. For teaching, what "counts" are the evaluations, and while good teaching generally leads to good evaluations, once in a while you get a student who either has a personality conflict with you, or who has some kind of a vendetta against the class (I once had a student who did nothing but gripe that he was required to take a class that met at 8 am). And with grant proposals and journal articles, it's the reviewers. And they may not always be fair.

One of the things I fight against is my need for approval - I am very much a people-pleaser, I don't know if that's just some kind of funky neurotransmitter thing or if it was established by my childhood of being rejected by my peers and unpopular - I really do want people to like me and approve of me. And so I tend to give far too much credence to other people's opinions and judgment of me. If someone judges me harshly on something *I* thought was pretty good, my immediate default is, "Wow, I really can't judge things well." I've had journal articles I thought were pretty good rejected, and so I immediately think, "Not only am I a bad writer, I'm a bad judge of my own writing." The other person never can be wrong.

And I have known people who were just the opposite - no matter what they did, it was RIGHT and GOOD and PERFECT and those other people didn't know anything. Even if the thing the person had done wasn't that great, in my opinion. Still, the person would continue to insist on the quality of their work or whatever.

And I wonder...how do you learn to be a little bit like that? I mean, I'd never want to be one of those super-confident incompetents who do something totally wrong and insist that they're right. But I'd like to get a little better at looking at the manuscript I worked on for months, had rejected from a journal, and NOT go, "This project was no good. I should just give up on it." Apparently common practice is NOT to trash-can a paper just because it's rejected, but that's my immediate reaction. )

I don't know. Some days I wonder if there was maybe an easier path in life I could have taken, one where I didn't spend so much time questioning if anything I do is any good.